In addition to its colorful anecdotes about the outsize film honchos he worked with,' 'Hit & Run, says Gooding, "made me realize that you might get well known through big studio movies, but then you have to go find the independent films and filmmakers who tell interesting stories with interesting voices."

Subtitled The Lost History of the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes, 1895–1925, this is the little-known story of the first professional black ice hockey players.

As Schnabel writes in his introduction to this book of his work, "When I'm painting I start off doing one thing and...then something else crosses my path...and I end up doing something that I never expected to do."

A teleplay before it became a hit 1957 movie starring Henry Fonda, this story appealed to Gooding because of its themes of justice, prejudice, and the importance of not following the crowd.