Today’s writer has come up with a rather clever pitch: “Bizarro World Jerry Maguire.”
Genre: Sports/Drama
Premise: Atticus Archer is college football’s version of a fixer. As he juggles chasing the nation’s top prospect, a mental breakdown from a star quarterback, and his own personal demons, an NCAA agent arrives on campus to threaten everything.
About: Today’s writer comes from my home town, Chicago (“Daaaaaa Bersh.”). He got this script out there, presumably through his manager (Alex, if you’re out there, can you confirm this?), which secured him representation at one of the top agencies in town, UTA. It has since landed on both The Black List and The Hit List. Speaking of Chicago (and because we were talking about LA’s best fries yesterday), here are the 14 best hot dogs in Chicago, ranked.
Writer: Alex Convery
Details: 119 pages
Let me propose a business model for you. You create a product that generates 1.5 billion dollars in revenue a year… yet you don’t have to pay your workers a dime. Welcome to NCAA football, the most clever scam in sports. Unlike professional football, where you’re giving players hundred million dollar contracts, college football players are deemed “amateurs.” Therefore, they can’t be paid. How unfortunate for those poor colleges. It’s not that they WON’T pay them. It’s that they’re NOT ALLOWED to.
Colleges making billions of dollars off athletes is one of the more interesting conversations going in sports today due to the complexity of the issue. There are some people who say, “Well, they’re getting a 100,000 dollar education for free. So they ARE getting paid, just indirectly.” But if a school is making 150 million dollars off their athletics each year, as a college like Texas A&M is, and that money is being made exclusively because of those athletes, isn’t 25 thousand dollars (a year of scholarship money) a joke?
However, if you believe in paying athletes, how in the world do you do it? A big college may have 30 sports programs. So does every athlete get paid evenly? Or is it done on a sliding scale? And if you have a sliding scale, is it a sliding scale based on the sport, or is it a sliding scale within each sport? A third-string right tackle isn’t nearly as important to a team’s success as the star quarterback. So would they get paid the same? If not, who deterines how much each athlete in each sport at each position gets paid? That seems really complicated. And we’re just talking about the big programs. What if you’re a football player on Tarleton State University where 500 people show up for a Saturday game? Do those students get paid the same amount as the players at Texas? Does the state redistribute funds so everyone gets an equal share?
This is why the NCAA has been able to get away with this for so long. Coming up with an alternative is impossible. Which segues perfectly into today’s script, which examines one of the most important cogs in the college athletics machine – the bag man.
Atticus Archer is 55 years old and ready to retire. Atticus is a “bag man” for Auburn University. In order for colleges to land top-rated high school athletes, they have to pay them. But paying athletes to come to your school is illegal. This is where the bag man steps in, an “independent” agent who unofficially goes to athletes’ homes, gets them to commit to their college, then instructs them where to find a bag, which will, of course, be full of money. If the university were to ever be investigated for paying athletes, it’s impossible to convict them because the bag man is working on his own accord.
We meet Atticus as he tries to convince the best high school quarterback in the country, Ricky Patterson, to switch his commitment from Alabama to Auburn. What Ricky and his father don’t know is that before Atticus showed up, he leaked e-mails showing Ricky’s dad ask for money from Alabama. Just like that, Alabama is out. And who’s there to pick up Ricky and dust him off? Auburn, of course.
Atticus heads back to Auburn where he focuses in on one final recruit, a ginormous freakish defensive lineman named Chance Fluker. Once he gets this dude to commit, he’s officially done. But when he heads to Fluker’s home, he learns that his mother won’t be easily swayed. Unlike the typical mega-athlete families that dream of their big payday, Miss Fluker has actual morals. And she’s not giving those up for a bag. This one, Atticus realizes, is going to be tough.
Meanwhile, the strange circumstances surrounding Ricky Patterson’s sudden switch from Alabama to Auburn has the NCAA suspicious. So they send over Thomas Kendrick, a former star athlete turned agent for NCAA’s investigation unit. Kendrick is tasked with going down to Auburn and figuring out what happened. As soon as Atticus meets Kendrick, he knows he’s no joke. But Atticus’s ego ensures that business will continue as usual. It’ll be up to Kendrick, now, to catch him in the act.
I would re-title this Mixed Bag Man.
It’s a solid read but every time it’s about to get good, something pulls it back. Like a talented quarterback with a penchant for throwing interceptions. You march us 70 yards down the field and then it’s wasted on one bad throw.
The cool thing about Bag Man is there isn’t anything else like it on the market right now. I don’t read many scripts about college football. And I’ve definitely never come across a script about a bag man. To top it off, Convery creates this mano-a-mano clash between two alpha dogs, which makes this feel like the sports version of Michael Mann’s “Heat.” That’s a winning formula right there.
Unfortunately, Bag Man feels like a script destined for an 8-3 season, good enough for a bowl game, but not good enough to get to the championship. Take this battle between Atticus and Kendrick. It’s way too one-sided. Atticus gets 4 times as much screen time, and Kendrick never makes enough headway in his investigation to be a true threat. For these movies to work, we have to feel like the hero is genuinely in danger. If the audience doesn’t believe they have a chance of losing, where’s the tension? Where’s the fear?
Speaking of, the stakes are way too low. What happens to Atticus if he gets caught? He’ll be scolded. He’ll lose his job. But he’s retiring at the end of the year anyway. So is losing his job a few months earlier than planned that big of a deal? Compare this to the stakes in Jerry Maguire. Jerry’s got one client, Rod Tidwell. The two are playing through the season, betting he’ll play well enough to land a big contract. If that doesn’t happen, Jerry loses his business. He loses everything. That’s the best version of “high stakes” you can create – if your hero doesn’t succeed, THEY LOSE EVERYTHING. That was far from the case here.
And it was such an easy fix. Insert a scene where a friend tells Atticus that they’re coming after him hard. “They want to make an example of people like you.” So they’re going to put him behind bars for as long as they can legally get away with. Now something’s on the line.
Another issue I had is I was never clear why Atticus was doing this. Another character even points this out to him – when Auburn wins, the players get the glory, the coach does, the school does, even the students do. But nobody knows who Atticus is. No one will ever cite his name when it comes to the school’s success. So why does he do it? That’s an important question and we never get an answer. We needed that answer.
Despite these issues, the script moves along quickly. Atticus is an active character. And for those of you new to screenwriting, that means he’s a character with a strong goal (he wants to sign Chance Fluker). Strong goals require your hero to act, to go after things, and that’s where you find the drama, in the “going after” part. Because there will always be obstacles getting in the way of that goal and the audience will be curious how our hero will overcome those obstacles. Bag Man actually takes it one step further. In addition to going after Chance, Kendrick is closing in on him. So you have him fending off obstacles both in front of and behind him.
I just wish it felt more important. Figure out the stakes, figure out why Atticus is doing this, and you have a winning script.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Have your writing style match your subject matter and hero. At first, I was annoyed by the writing style in Bag Man. It was one of those scripts with a lot of underlining, ellipses, bolding, excess capitalization. But the further I got along, the more I realized our hero (as well as the subject matter) was big, arrogant, and showy. So the writing style ended up fitting. You wouldn’t use this writing style on a script like Roma. But for Bag Man, it was perfect.
