“Your idea seems truly bizarre,” read the opening line of an email response I received to the central question that has been bothering me during Super Bowl week. The message came from the only person who could help me, perhaps the only person who could help any of us.
Slowly, at first, and then somehow, wholly, we as a football viewing community have allowed ourselves to entertain the idea that the NFL was scripted. Even Tom Brady addressed it, noting that if the league really was conjured up in a room full of writers, it would have been weird to have him lose twice to Peyton Manning’s little brother in the Super Bowl. The idea became enough of a part of the football zeitgeist that commissioner Roger Goodell addressed it twice—during his opening news conference Monday. Taylor Swift, the referees, Brock Purdy … everyone is in on it. We’re the marks. Don’t you get it?
Personally, the problem is not whether the idea of a scripted NFL is actually true. The problem isn’t that the deep recesses of your cousin’s Instagram feed have now warranted legitimate discussion at actual news conferences.
My question was one of quality.
Basically: If the NFL really is scripted … is it any good?
And, so, yes, I emailed Angelo Pizzo, one of the greatest screenwriters and producers in modern cinema. Pizzo wrote two of the most memorable sports movie scripts of all time: (1993), the story of a runty kid from Indiana who always dreamed of playing for Notre Dame and finally made his way to the field for one beautiful moment, and (1986), which told a fictionalized version of the Milan High School state basketball championship run. Alcoholism. Self doubt. Life’s purpose. The movie is heavy and beautiful.
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Pizzo is now 76. He lives in Bloomington, Ind., and he agreed to call me on his afternoon walk. I asked if I could pitch him three of the central story lines from Super Bowl LVIII and he would tell me if any would interest him as a screenwriter. He cautioned that he is mostly a college basketball fan now. The NFL sits at a semi-distant third on his sports viewing list—“I side-eye it,” he says—though he will watch the game mostly to console a nervous friend who is a San Francisco 49ers fan.
Pizzo also warns me that he is tough to convince.
“I really don’t like watching movies about true sports events,” Pizzo says, laughing. “I would have been a terrible candidate to go watch if someone else made it. Average kid who dreams of playing at Notre Dame and runs out on the field and plays 20 seconds? I mean, that sounds like one of the world’s most boring movies. I don’t think you could have gotten me to watch that film.”
Although that is part of Pizzo's magic. He added that a refrain he heard commonly from other people who had seen the film but enjoyed it was: “I don’t like sports, I don’t like football, and I hate Notre Dame.”
With that in mind, I began with a classic American fairytale.
PITCH 1: Kid from Westlake, Ohio, who has big NFL dreams gets kicked off his college football team for partying and is rescued by his older brother, only to find massive success as a professional and begins a budding relationship with the biggest pop star in the U.S.
Pizzo: “Does it appeal to me? Not really. I think the problem with the Travis Kelce story is that you’re not going to get a majority of the audience to care for, or develop a strong rooting interest in a 6'4", good-looking stud. That’s not them. And Taylor Swift is on another planet now. It all feels so out of anyone’s personal experience. You’d have to do it like, create a behind-the-scenes effect, and you could bend the fictional characters close to the real people and put them in moments where we could imagine what they would say to one another. That might appeal to some people. Not me.
“The world of a pop music superstar, like, I’ve seen all four versions of , and the one that worked the best was the one with Judy Garland and James Mason. But I thought the least interesting one was the most recent one. I just didn’t care about those people.
“When I saw Travis Kelce on , I was blown away with how impressive he was. He was the best athlete [host] other than Peyton Manning. He has this weird lack of vanity that allows him to get into other characters. And he’s smart. When he and Taylor got together, it didn’t surprise me at all. Now, Taylor Swift and Rob Gronkowski? That would shock me. That’s definitely a movie I’d never go see.
“That would be a total shit show.”
Fair enough. Feeling for Kelce is a bit like feeling for the kid who zip-tied your locker shut in high school. So, next, we’re going to try something a little more familiar to audiences. A kind of twist on the modern underdog story that Pizzo has turned into an art form.
