Genre: Biopic
Premise: (from Black List) After being forced into retirement by the Oakland Raiders, fiery former NFL head coach John Madden teams up with a mild-mannered Harvard programmer to rewrite his fading legacy by building the world’s first football video game. Based on a true story.
About: This script finished in the top 10 of last year’s Black List. It’s written by Cambron Clark, who has one previous credit for writing on one of those documentary dinosaur shows back in 2014.
Writer: Cambron Clark
Details: 123 pages
I’ve seen my fair share of concepts that sound like bad movies but none quite like this. Which is why it’s taken me this long to review one of the highest-rated scripts on last year’s Black List.
Here’s an idea for a movie. You know that football coach announcer guy? Well, he once made a video game. Let’s tell a story about that!
Ah, who knows? I would’ve thought Blackberry was a terrible idea and I loved that movie. Wait, no. Blackberry actually was a good idea because it was one of the most famous rises and falls of a company ever. What is this? A making-of-a-football-video-game movie? Have we officially run out of movie ideas? These are the kinds of scripts that make me understand why studios go all in on Marvel.
It’s the 1980s and John Madden, the coach of the Raiders, has just lost the last game of the regular season to Joe Montana and the San Francisco 49ers. The loss means the Raiders won’t make the playoffs so Madden is called in by the team owner and fired.
At just 42 years old, Madden is a retiree. He clearly doesn’t know what to do with himself. At first he tries to coach his 11 year old son, Michael, in Pop Warner football. But Michael doesn’t even like football. So you can tell where that’s heading.
Eventually, Madden runs into a dorky Harvard alum named Trip who just started a video game company called Electronic Arts, which he’s running out of his parents’ garage. Trip has an idea for the first ever football video game and he wants John to be the face of the game.
Madden ignores him at first but comes around, eventually. The two then need to hire programmers to program the game. The problem is, no programmers play sports. Much less football. So whoever they hire have to code a game they don’t understand. Which means Madden will have to teach them.
Madden soon gets word that his nemesis, Joe Montana, is also making a game! So now it’s a race. But Madden is wholly unprepared for just how challenging it’s going to be to teach a bunch of dorks football.
For 45 pages, I hated this script.
This thing is a cornucopia of dad-joke wordplay. Here’s a typical exchange, this one between Madden and his wife, Virginia. MADDEN: “I told you, it’s a temporary workspace. The guy who invented apples started in a garage.” VIRGINIA: “Jobs?” MADDEN: “Honey, for the last time, this is a real job.” VIRGINIA: “No. Steve Jobs.” MADDEN: “What does this Steve guy have to do with my job?”
If you like that humor, godspeed. But I’ve laughed harder at a puppy funeral. And it wasn’t just the dad jokes. It was the try-hard-ness of all the lines. There’s a line early on where Coach Madden tells one of his players, “I want you to hit him so hard Hertz stock drops.” This is supposed to be a clever line but I could read it 20 times over and still not understand what it means. That’s what I mean by “try-hard.”
Then something happened, something that made me understand the script. Or, at least, understand what the writer was going for.
A programmer being interviewed for one of the game-coding positions walked in in a cape. And Madden looked at him like he was an alien.
I realized, “ohhhhhhhh. This is a movie about the big alpha sports guy having to work with a bunch of geeks who have never played a sport in their lives.” I wish that would’ve been in the logline cause then I may have actually been interested in reading this! It just goes to show how much loglines matter. I see so many writers going away from what’s actually interesting about their ideas when writing loglines. Get a logline consultation (carsonreeves1@gmail.com) They’re just $25. Sheesh!
So why is this Madden-Geek matchup so great? Cause there is tons of comedy gold to mine from MISCOMMUNICATION. Put people who don’t speak the same language in a room and have them push towards the same goal… if you do that, you’ll come up with funny dialogue without even trying.
That’s when this script shined the brightest – when Madden was in the room with these dorks, who were all way more interested in Klorgan the Elf than an option shovel pass, trying to find a common language to get this game completed.
Another nice quality of the script was the relationship between John and his son, Michael. Michael, ironically, was way more into video games than football games. So when Madden started working with this video game crew, all of these guys were superstars in Michael’s eyes. So Michael then becomes a part of the crew, which allows Madden to connect with his son.
Unfortunately, whenever Madden strays away from those two zones, the script falls apart. It’s super dialogue heavy despite it’s aggressively unfunny try-hard nature. This is a script that wants to be “Air,” but the dialogue isn’t as sharp, clever, or purposeful. You get the feeling that the writer really loves his dialogue. And that’s not helping.
Because regardless of whether you’re a good dialogue writer or not, if you love writing dialogue, you have a tendency to do so just to show off. But that’s not how good dialogue works. Good dialogue doesn’t shine when a writer is showing off. It shines when it’s in service of the story. The dialogue is about that moment between the characters. Not that moment between the writer and the reader.
A random thing this script reminded me of was how interview scenes are comedy gold. They always work. Just the image alone of a frustrated Madden, who’s already seen twenty potentials, sitting there, tired and hungry, when a guy walks in IN A CAPE. That image alone made me laugh. And all the video game references the geeks bring up in an attempt to understand what Madden means — all of that was great.
Which, by the way, should be a major lesson to everyone here. When you come up with the right situation and dynamic, anyone is capable of writing good dialogue. But if you stray away from the fun dynamics and just try and generate good dialogue all on your own… I’m telling you, you better be one of the 25 funniest dialogue writers in the world if you expect that to work. The majority of us need the right situations to write good dialogue.
I’ll leave you with Madden trying to show the nerds football plays on a white board and all the nerds being utterly confused.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Lean into what works. Stay away from everything else as much as possible. What works here is Madden and the video game nerds. Madden and these kids trying to work together was comedy gold. But a good writer would’ve reazlied that he needed to start exploring that team-up way before page 45.
