TMCnet News

Marina Hyde: Eyes down for Deadline Day: The Movie
[April 17, 2014]

Marina Hyde: Eyes down for Deadline Day: The Movie


(Guardian (UK) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Do you think the Premier League has a movie development executive yet? It certainly wouldn't be the most troubling such post to have existed in an organisation that should really have no business with anything of the sort. During the Iraq war, after all, the Foreign Office had a member of staff whose official title was head of story development. (It truly was - I once asked at the switchboard and was put straight through.) Either way, the question arises following reports from the US, where the NFL has finally taken the plunge and cooperated wholeheartedly - and hilariously controllingly - with a new movie. The work in question is Draft Day, a Kevin-Costner-vehicle-cum-NFL-infomercial, in which the doyen of late 20th century sports movies is cast as the Cleveland Browns' general manager trading for the No1 draft pick.



But it is the NFL's iron grip on the film that is perhaps its most intriguing aspect. "We believe this movie elevates the brand, it elevates the [draft] time period and it opens us up to new fans," Tracy Perlman, the league's vice-president of entertainment marketing and promotions told the LA Times. She clamped down on the swearing. She vetoed aspects that would be unacceptable to sponsors. She has yet to share her thoughts on why the movie is already being branded a flop.

I won't say that it's all very well for such a movie to make no reference to serious controversies - concussions under the NFL's aegis, to imagine one example. But we can at least understand why the league's legal advisers would recommend steering clear of such perilous territory. Less comprehensible is the ludicrous refusal to countenance screen time for what might be regarded as the less reverential reaction to its product. At one point in the script, Costner's character was meant to look out of a window and see one of those everyday sights of modern fandom - himself being burnt in effigy. The moment was intended to be comic, but, as Perlman explains: "We just couldn't have that in the movie", so out it went.


With the exception of totalitarian states and Kanye West, very little these days takes itself quite as desperately seriously as big-time sports and, as a result, very little causes quite as much impudent mirth among the serfs it regards as consumers. It seems significant that of all the potential movies for the NFL to take the plunge on, it plumped for one centred on draft day, once what the LA Times calls "an inside-the-Beltway affair", but latterly - rather like our own transfer-deadline day or the various tournament draws - elevated to a massively overproduced set-piece cultural event (and ideally suited to the narcotising rhythms of 24-hour news).

Then again, we live in an era when sports being commercially bigger than ever before has not led to the universal verdict that they are better.

More football, in the way that the Premier League and its TV partners have showcased it, has not made people love football more. There is a cynicism in many fans about a game with which they once had a less complicated relationship. Meanwhile, possibly because the Premier League action itself is insufficiently elegant to warrant the overblown coverage it now routinely gets, the past few years have seen the self-styled Greatest League in the World assisted by the unstoppable rise of concepts such as "mind games", and increasing talk of "storylines" and "plotlines".

Surely a ruthlessly controlled move into licensed fictional entertainment is the next logical step? I'm picturing three acts set amid one of the holiest set pieces of the modern-day football experience - the striking of a new TV rights deal, say, in which a lovable Premier League chief executive, maybe played by Colin Firth, awards impenetrable parachute payments to temporarily exiled clubs and is justifiably feted for his largesse. As blue-skies-thinking Premier League boss Richard Scudamore himself recently said: "I think we give away enough that we should get more recognition and more credit for what we do." What better way than this, then? If the latter movie scenario feels too recherche for Richard's first foray, then the nearest obvious analogy to Draft Day would presumably be the aforementioned Transfer Deadline Day.

That biannual circus's primary characteristic is its radioactive self-belief that it contains more raw drama than 1,000 westerns. "It's a day that starts like any other and ends like no other," hyperbolised Sky Sports linchpin Jim White before the most recent one - as that unforgettable final scene in which the clock chimes midnight and you realise John Heitinga really is going to Fulham on a free surely attests.

In fact, if White's latter verdict doesn't sound like the tagline to the inevitable Premier League movie, then heaven knows what does. Asked recently to provide a sample electrifying moment from his years in the chair, Jim obliged: "I remember Harry called me regarding Robbie Keane going up to Celtic on loan . . . " Like I say, this really is a story that has it all. Of course, in the most skilful hands, even the driest raw material can become engrossing. Perhaps Aaron Sorkin, that Zen master of the talking shop, could be persuaded to script the utterances of a lovably roguish manager given to declaiming from the window of his 4x4. Quite what a West Wingified Jim White would sound like is anyone's guess, but I hope I am not alone in secretly wanting to know.

Captions: What Kevin Costner does for NFL general managers in Draft Day, Colin Firth could do for Richard Scudamore Allstar/Lionsgate (c) 2014 Guardian Newspapers Limited.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]