A $26-million Hollywood feature film, based on a book by UMass Lowell adjunct professor and Communications writer Geoffrey Douglas, will debut in theaters nationwide April 22. Also on that day, a special, one-time-only UMass Lowell premiere will be shown in Cumnock Auditorium for the benefit of a limited number of faculty, students and staff.

The movie, whose title, The Game of Their Lives, is the same as that of Douglas’s book (Henry Holt, 1997) is the real-life account of the 11 young, first-generation Americans who made up the 1950 U.S. World Cup soccer team, which defeated England 1-0 in Brazil in June of that year—arguably the greatest single upset victory in the history of World-Cup soccer.

The movie, produced by Bristol Bay Productions and IFC Films, is directed by David Anspaugh, with the screenplay by Angelo Pizzo, the same writer-director team that created the 1986 box-office favorite Hoosiers, nominated for an Oscar and Golden Globe Award.

The cast of The Game is headed by Wes Bentley, who starred in the 1999 Oscar winner American Beauty. Patrick Stewart of Star Trek fame and Gerard Butler, the lead male actor in last year’s Phantom of the Opera, also have major roles, as do several players in the Major League Soccer (MLS) League. The movie, which was filmed in New York, St. Louis and Rio de Janeiro, was completed in the fall of 2003.

The Game of Their Lives is the third of Douglas’s three books. His first two, Class: The Wreckage of an American Family (1992) and Dead Opposite: The Lives and Loss of Two American Boys (1994), were also published by Henry Holt. A paperback edition of The Game, to be published by HarperCollins, is scheduled for release April 12, and is available on Amazon.

A fourth book, tentatively labeled as a “collective memoir” of Douglas’s 1960s high-school class, is under contract with Hyperion Books and scheduled for a summer 2006 release. Douglas, a senior writer in the Publications Office since 1998, is a regular contributor to both The Shuttle and the Alumni Magazine—and a member of the adjunct English faculty for the last three years, is also a frequent contributor to Yankee, and has been published widely by other periodicals. His 2001 Yankee piece, “A Question of Life and Death,” about the medical and ethical crisis faced by the family of an infant born with multiple life-threatening anomalies, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award.

Douglas is a former publisher, editor, columnist and news reporter. Until recently a resident of Lowell, he now lives in southern New Hampshire. His son, Sam, 29, who also worked for two years as a writer in the Publications Office, is now an assistant editor at a publishing house in New York.

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Geoffrey Douglas