“Stand & Deliver,” August 19

Wednesday, August 19, 7 p.m.

The Last Picture House, 325 East Second Street, Davenport IA

Presented as a special event in the Quad Cities Latino Cinema Series, the Oscar-nominated inspirational-teacher drama Stand & Deliver enjoys an August 19 screening at Davenport venue The Last Picture House, writer/director Ramón Menéndez's 1988 film the winner of the Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature, and a work selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Its star Edward James Olmos Oscar-nominated for his unforgettable portrayal, Stand & Deliver is a biographical drama about high school teacher Jaime Escalante, whose specific approach to teaching inspired students and colleagues alike. After giving up a job as an engineer to take a position at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, Escalante discovers that the school is on the verge of being decertified due to poor academic results. Escalante's philosophy, however, is that students will respond to expectations, and those at the school are so low that they consequently perform poorly. After several years of classroom success, Escalante decides he wants to teach his charges calculus, driving his students as hard as he can. He also drives himself into having a mild heart attack. But in working with the students and also their parents, many of whom think schooling is a waste of time, 18 of the high schoolers eventually pass the Advanced Placement calculus exam, giving them college credit. A further crisis occurs, however, after the Educational Testing Service finds a number of anomalies in the scores, and suspects the students of having cheated.

In 1984, Ramón Menéndez, a recent UCLA film school graduate, discovered Jaime Escalante's story through a Los Angeles Times article about the controversial re-testing of his calculus students. Menéndez collaborated with fellow UCLA alumnus Tom Musca to co-write the screenplay. Securing the film rights required six months of persuasion, culminating in Escalante agreeing to the project for a nominal fee of one dollar. Initial attempts to secure funding from independent studios were unsuccessful, as the subject matter was deemed commercially unviable. However, the project gained traction through a $12,000 grant from PBS' American Playhouse anthology series. Additional financial support was provided by the National Science Foundation, the Atlantic Richfield Company, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The film opened in Los Angeles on March 11, 1988, on thirty screens, grossing $411,884 and earning a per-screen average of $13,729. It expanded to New York on March 18 and widened to 750 screens nationally by April 15, 1988. Stand and Deliver ultimately grossed nearly $14 million – a substantial figure for a low-budget Latino film at the time, and notably more than many comparable releases even decades later. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the movie holds a score of 89-percent “freshness” from 63 reviews. The website's consensus reads: "Stand and Deliver pulls off the unlikely feat of making math class the stuff of underdog drama – and pays rousing tribute to a real-life inspirational figure in the bargain."

With the feature co-presented by the Quad Cities Latino Cinema Series, Stand & Deliver will be presented in Davenport on August 19 at 7:30 p.m., and more information on the night and tickets are available by visiting LastPictureHouse.com.