A grieving small town tries to recover from tragedy

WITH “We Are Marshall,” director McG makes a striking departure from music videos and the eye candy that filled his pair of “Charlie’s Angels” action-comedies. “Marshall” is a heart-wrenching but ultimately uplifting drama that chronicles how the residents of small-town Huntington, W.Va., dealt with a 1970 plane crash that killed 75 of their neighbors, including the majority of the Marshall University football team and its coaches, several boosters, the majority of the town’s doctors and even the play-by-play radio announcer.

“I wanted to tell a dramatic true story,” says McG. “I wanted the benefit of getting away from people saying, ‘Oh, that’s just Hollywood kicking in and putting its Hollywood glitz on a story.’ The deeper I dug into the story, the more unbelievable it became. When 75 people die in a blink of an eye, you can’t believe it.”

McG believes audiences will be surprised by Matthew McConaughey’s performance as Jack Lengyle, the football coach who was hired to create a new team at Marshall and helped bring the town together. “I think he’s reinventing himself to a place we haven’t seen,” says McG. “He’s created a real character. He’s absolutely, positively not doing Matthew McConaughey.” Also starring in the drama are Matthew Fox from “Lost,” David Strathairn, Ian McShane and Anthony Mackie. With “We Are Marshall,” which opens Dec. 22, McG says, “I wanted to show restraint and respect human emotion. I wanted to really make a patient film with very few edits and shot in an architectural style that recalls the films of the late 1960s and early ‘70s like ‘The Graduate’ and ‘The Godfather.’ ”

Before production began, McG spent a lot of time in Huntington talking to surviving family members of crash victims as well as Lengyle and Dawson. “The town of Huntington wasn’t looking forward to Hollywood telling their story,” he says. “So we really had to earn their trust and respect.”

People approached McG on the streets of Huntington asking him, “Are you going to tell an honorable version of what happened to my parents?” That’s when, he says, “you realize you are not in your garden-variety director’s gig.”

-- Susan King