AP Photo / Peter Kramer

Country singer/actor Tim McGraw attends the Warner Bro's premiere of "The Blind Side", in New York, on Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2009.

The Blind Side

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Rated PG-13 for one scene involving brief violence, drug and sexual references

Length: 126 minutes

Released: November 20, 2009 Nationwide

Score: 2.0

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Kathy Bates, Tim McGraw, Ray McKinnon, Quinton Aaron

Director: John Lee Hancock
Producer: Gil Netter, Andrew A. Kosove, Broderick Johnson
Writer: John Lee Hancock, Michael Lewis
Genre: Drama
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures

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HOLLYWOOD -- John Lee Hancock thought he was doing a great job of racing through a day of shooting earlier in 2009 on "The Blind Side," the new film that stars Sandra Bullock as Leigh Anne Tuohy, a no-nonsense Memphis, Tenn., supermom who makes room in her life for Michael Oher, a homeless, 350-pound black teenager who ended up becoming the Baltimore Ravens' first-round pick in this year's NFL draft.

But when the real Leigh Anne Tuohy visited the set, she found her patience flagging after a few hours.

"If I were in charge," she told Hancock, "we'd get things done a lot faster around here."

As it turns out, Hancock, the talented writer-director who made an impressive directorial debut in 2002 with "The Rookie," was moving at the right speed.

Opening last weekend, "The Blind Side" has become a surprise hit, making more than $34 million and, according to CinemaScore, earning a rare A-plus from moviegoers, a signal that the movie will have a long and profitable life.

But "The Blind Side's" success raises the question: What took Hancock so long to get back behind the camera? In other words, why hadn't he made a movie since his second feature, "The Alamo," arrived in 2004?

If you ask people in Hollywood, they would tell you that Hancock was in movie jail. A costly flop, "The Alamo" was an especially painful experience for Hancock.

Born and raised in Texas, he was a natural choice to salvage the film after its original director, Ron Howard, bowed out over budget-related issues. But after dire early screenings, Hancock was forced to make huge cuts in the nearly three-hour film, sacrificing depth and historical texture.

When you have a flop in Hollywood, it hurts, even years later. If you're a superstar filmmaker -- Steven Spielberg or Michael Mann or Michael Bay -- you can have a flop and still get back into the ring. But directors with less invincible reputations feel a different kind of pain. If you ask Hancock, he'll tell you that he has powder burns from "The Alamo" experience.

"I'd love the opportunity to do a director's cut of the film," said Hancock, "because what people saw in the theaters, even though I'm proud of it, wasn't the fully realized version of the movie."

But Hancock insists that he never felt like he was in movie jail.

"After 'The Alamo,' I really wanted to get back to doing regular human being stuff, like being a dad, and the best way to do that was to stay home and write," he told me.

He has a long list of post-"Alamo" projects that he's written or rewritten scripts for or is attached to direct, including an adaptation of a contemporary Irish mob story (based on the book "Dead I Well May Be") as well as a rewrite on "The Goree Girls," a true-life tale about an all-female 1930s Texas prison band.

Still, it wasn't easy getting a green light for "The Blind Side."

The film is based on a book by Michael Lewis that followed the Tuohy family's relationship with Oher as well as the story behind the growing NFL importance of the offensive left tackle. The position had become a crucial in protecting quarterbacks from unseen tacklers from the left side of the line, known in football as "the blind side."

Twentieth Century Fox had bought the book in fall of 2006. There was a serious bidding war, with Variety reporting that Fox paid $200,000 against $1.5 million if the film was made.

Gil Netter, the film's producer who had a deal at Fox, asked Hancock if he was interested in writing a script. Even though he comes from a family of Texas college football players -- his father had a brief career in the NFL -- Hancock thought he had sworn off sports films. But he was a fan of Lewis' writing, so he read the book and was hooked.

"I didn't see it as a sports movie at all, any more than you'd call 'Jerry Maguire' a sports film," he said. "It was two equally involving stories, one about Michael and the Tuohys, the other about the left tackle position, but they both turned around the same question -- how did the stars align so brightly around this one kid from the projects?"

Hancock turned in a completed script, but the studio response was underwhelming.

"I just never heard much from Fox," he says. "I think they always looked at the movie as one of two things, either as a movie for older women or strictly a sports-genre movie, neither of which they wanted to make."

To Fox's credit, when Hancock and his agent, David O'Connor, lobbied to find a new home for the script, the studio didn't stand in their way.

Hancock took the script to Alcon Entertainment, which years before had made "My Dog Skip," a film Hancock had helped produce. Alcon chiefs Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson agreed to bankroll the project -- roughly $32 million -- and Warner Bros. agreed to distribute.

It was up to Hancock to find a top actress to star in the film, which led him to Sandra Bullock. Hancock thought Bullock had a lot in common with Leigh Anne Tuohy, as both women are Southerners.

"I thought that Sandra, as a Southerner, would know that Leigh Anne wasn't a cartoon, so she wouldn't go for the stereotype of the character," says Hancock.

Leigh Anne's relationship with Oher was more problematic. Moviegoers find the film inspiring for its message -- that one born in poverty could blossom if given love and nourishment. It helped that Bullock's Leigh Anne is a popular movie heroine -- the uncomplicated striver.

But some critics were suspicious of that simplistic can-do energy, bashing the film as a paternalistic portrait of a deprived black youth being nurtured by a wealthy white lady.

Hancock wasn't surprised by the criticism, since similar accusations were leveled against Lewis' book.

"I see it differently," the filmmaker says. "To me, this is a nature versus nurture thing. I look at it as part of the differences between being rich and being poor, not as a white-guilt form of paternalism." For Hancock, there was one simple dramatic underpinning to Leigh Anne's motivation for helping Oher when she saw him walking in the freezing rain.

"From my standpoint, I will only say that on that freezing night in Memphis, Leigh Anne didn't stop the car and put Michael in the back seat because he was black," Hancock says. "She did it because he was cold."

E-mail Goldstein at patrick.Goldstein(at)latimes.com.

Copyright by the Los Angeles Times.