Today’s script reminds us of the power of the underdog
Genre: Comedy/Drama/Sports
Premise: A forty-three-year-old snowplow driver decides to get his high school hockey team back together to play a state championship game.
About: Today’s writer may be familiar to some. He’s a Chicago kid who wrote the script 8-Bit Christmas a few years. It was a fun little Christmas script and Kevin stays close to his bread-and-butter here: SNOW. Skydance has purchased the script for Gary Ross to rewrite and direct.
Writer: Kevin Jakubowski
Details: 111 pages
Jason Sudekis for Tommy?
This script is currently competing with Carlos Alcaraz’s match on my TV. Has a screenplay ever hit a 130mph serve? Is courier font able to handle a deep backhand? Can character development massage a drop volley over the net? We’re about to find out the answers to all of these questions… right now.
Back in 1997, Tommy Maloney was the goalie for the Fox River High School hockey team that made it to the state championship game, where they were slated to play bougie Jersey hockey mainstay, Hillstone Prep. But there was a giant snowstorm and the game had to be canceled.
Roughly 30 years later, with Tommy now 43 years old and running his father’s old snowplow business, Tommy reads an article in the paper celebrating the three state hockey championships Hillstone won in a row back in the 90s. The only problem is, Hillstone didn’t win that third one. The game was snowed out.
A day later, while reluctantly bringing his daughter, Chloe, to Hillstone for an interview, he runs into the captain of that team, JT Radzack, who he overhears telling some friends that they won 3 titles in a row. Tommy comes in to correct him and JT is unfazed. “Might as well be three,” he says. “We would’ve beaten you anyway.”
Tommy goes home fuming and later ends up at the bar, where he shares the exchange with his old hockey buddies. They get mad and one of them goes on Twitter and challenges JT and his team to a make-up game. A 30 year old make-up game. Twitter loves it and everyone starts retweeting the social media battle that ensues. Tommy wakes up thinking it was all drunken nonsense but then learns that JD has set a date for the game.
Now Tommy and his buddies have to get the band back together. This includes the Chan defensive twins, who fight with each other all the time. The cousins, who sit in their backyard and shoot things all day. And then everyone else who’s not dead already, they put in a call in for. They’re going to be up against a tough opponent since JD and his teammates still play three times a week. JD even played in the NHL for a year. Can our ragtag crew somehow defeat them? Or are they about to learn that hockey games aren’t the best venues for a midlife crisis?
There’s a trick to getting these scripts right.
Because they *are* tricky.
You see, when you’re writing a small-town story that doesn’t have murder in it, the script is going to live or die on its PERSONAL STAKES.
Personal stakes are different from EXTERNAL STAKES. External stakes are things like: end of the world, your daughter gets murdered if you don’t find her in time, if the heist goes bad, you’ll be in prison for the rest of your life.
Scripts like this don’t have that. In order to compete with that, we must feel strongly about the personal stakes. In other words, we must feel strongly about Tommy winning this game. Because if we don’t care about that, the script doesn’t work.
And the writer does a good job of handling that with some basic screenwriting tools. One, he makes the bad guys huge jerks. They’re elitist. They look down on Tommy and his team. They make his, and his family, out to be failures. The more we dislike the bad guys, the more personally invested we become in the story.
The other way the writer does it is by having Tommy face the disappointment of his life. He plows snow for a living. He always thought he was going to be something bigger but somehow ended up in this crappy existence. That’s highlighted, very cleverly, by the fact that his daughter wants to go to Hillstone, the very school that symbolizes who he isn’t. People who go to Hillstone lead successful lives.
It’s important to get that right. Cause when you’re only dealing with personal stakes, you can’t casually commit to your hero’s flaws. You have to fully commit to them. When we’re with our protagonist, we have to *feel* their pain. Cause if you treat their flaw like an Adam Sandler movie would – a passing funny scene in the first act that shows they’re frustrated with life – it’s not going to linger deep inside the reader. And, therefore, your personal stakes-driven story will fail.
I always want to give credit to scripts for the scene that drew me in. You’re reading along. You’re half-interested. You’re not sure if you’re going to like the script. And then a scene comes along that makes you go, “How bout that. I care now.”
What never fails to surprise me is that these scenes are usually basic, as was the case here. Tommy is taking his daughter to Hillstone for her big school interview. While waiting for her in the school’s entrance hall, a group of good-looking well-off dudes his age are taking a picture in front of the trophy case.
It turns out these are the guys from the Hillstone hockey team that Tommy’s team never played. Because Tommy is kind of in the way, one of them says, “Hey, you mind stepping aside for a second? Trying to get a photo of our hall of famers here.” Tommy moves aside. “You mind moving your bucket too.” He points to a janitor’s mop and bucket nearby. “That’s not mine,” Tommy said. “Well, I don’t care if it’s your’s or a coworker’s, just move it.”
That moment, right there, made me hate these guys. And now I wanted Tommy and his team to defeat them at all costs. Isn’t it funny how one simple moment can create such emotion within the reader?
It takes courage to write a script like this because, let’s be honest, these types of scripts aren’t in favor these days. This is the kind of movie that you could imagine getting made in 2001. But they don’t greenlight stuff like this anymore. With that said, I’m constantly telling you guys to write AGAINST the grain, not with it. Because, if you do so, you’re going to stand out from the pack. That’s what Jakubowski did and guess what? Someone bought the script.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The underdog storyline is about as good of an “invested reader” guarantee as you can get, especially in sports scripts. But today’s script taught me that you can supercharge the underdog storyline by making it a “rich vs. poor” battle. The fact that the villains are rich and elitists makes us want Tommy and crew to beat them so much worse!
What I learned 2: You need set pieces before the final game! In a script like this, you can’t wait until the final act to give the reader fun hockey play. And no, montages of them practicing don’t count. You need at least one fun hockey set piece because that’s why we’re here. We’re here to watch these guys play hockey. So Jakubowski wisely includes a fun scene in the latter part of the second act where they play a scrimmage against a local top-tier 16 year old girls hockey team. It’s a really funny sequence.
