A complicated question about entertainment properties, particularly ones which include a bunch of famous people set in what is otherwise reality, is whether other entertainment properties including its stars exist. It is weird, for instance, that The Office’s Michael Scott was not one of those obnoxious dolts who constantly quoted Anchorman as a substitute for an actual sense of humor, but it also would have been way weirder if the guy who played Brick Tamland started quoting Brick Tamland lines. Does Anchorman exist in the Office Cinematic Universe? Maybe, but it’s just way less distracting to side-step the issue.
Ultimately, my perception of this is that Anchorman
and Steve Carell (and also guest actors like Will Ferrell and David Koechner)
do exist in the Office universe and that Michael Scott and Deangelo
Vickers and Todd Packer also exist and that bearing a resemblance to these
actors simply isn’t that big of a life event. I’ve known people in my
everyday life who looked like a famous person, but that does not dictate their
entire lives. I make a rare exception to this rule for Draft Day.
I enjoy the movie Draft Day for what it is—a star
vehicle sports movie with moderate amounts of humor and drama and a plot so incoherent
and idiotic that, to enjoy it, you have to either ignore it or embrace it. For
those unfamiliar with its plot, Kevin Costner, the greatest sports movie star
of all-time, stars as the general manager of the Cleveland Browns who, over the
course of the single-day-set film, functionally gains a top-ten first-round
draft pick and a punt returner good enough to merit interest but not good
enough to not be considered a throw-in in exchange for three second-round
picks. The plot strikes a balance that confused football fans and novices with
equal fervor but it does lead to Kevin Costner getting a bunch of latter-day
Jimmy Stewart mini-monologues, which is the whole point of this stupid movie.
Draft Day works hard in many ways to be
hyper-realistic—real-life draft analysts such as Rich Eisen, Chris Berman, and
Mel Kiper Jr. portray themselves, as does NFL commissioner Roger Goodell—despite
the fact that the motivations of the teams depicted are largely nonsensical—while
the sheer actuarial results show the trades as mostly believable, the
notion that the Cleveland Browns making a surprise selection at #1 would compel
other (albeit, largely bad) NFL teams to become scared of drafting the falling
star is ridiculous. But most of the team casting works—the Jacksonville
Jaguars, for instance, have a panicky doofus calling the shots. The St. Louis
Rams, drafting #2 overall, eschew a quarterback for an SEC offensive tackle (a
thing which actually happened, to fairly disastrous results, in the actual 2014
NFL Draft).
But there is one fairly distracting exception to this—in the
Draft Day universe, the #1 overall pick, presumed to have been earned
rather than acquired, belongs at the beginning of the day to the Seattle Seahawks.
In real life, the Seahawks did not have the #1 overall pick of the 2014 Draft—they
were Super Bowl champions. They very much did not need fictional University of
Wisconsin Heisman winner Bo Callahan to be their franchise quarterback, as a
different Badgers alum, Russell Wilson, had just led them to their first title.
It would be unfair to critique Draft Day for casting the single worst
team they could to have the #1 overall pick—they didn’t know Seattle
would win the Super Bowl two months before the movie came out. But in 2012, the
season before the movie started filming, Seattle went 11-5 and won a playoff game
with a rookie quarterback, again, out of the same school as the film’s Golden
Boy quarterback. Surely, the movie could have found a more convincing
patsy. More on patsies later.
One of the major plot points in Draft Day centers
around Costner (calling characters by their names seems deeply unproductive
when basically every major character is played by a famous person) feeling
uneasy about drafting Bo Callahan (who I will call by name because I figure
most people reading this won’t remember the name of the guy who got replaced by
a CGI Armie Hammer as the other Winklevoss twin in The Social Network)
and continuing to fixate on a The Ohio State linebacker played by Chadwick
Boseman, despite obvious red flags such as his being projected as a mid-first
round pick at best, his tweeting out disparaging remarks about him earlier that
day, and clearly being played by a 37 year-old man. Costner has a
conversation with Jennifer Garner, the team’s salary cap analyst/his pregnant
girlfriend (the fact that he should be incredibly fired for sleeping with his
employee never comes up), in which he references, basically with no further
purpose, Joe Montana’s drive to win the Super Bowl in 1989. The best I can
guess is that Callahan comes across as an off-putting creep that nobody seems
to like and that Costner enjoys that Montana, in a high-pressure situation,
pointed out to his teammates that John Candy was in the stands as a way of
relaxing them.
John Candy, pointedly referred to by Costner as “the actor
John Candy”, was primarily known as a comedian from SCTV and
low-to-middlebrow comedies in the 1980s and early 1990s before his premature
death in 1994 at the age of 43. But he did make one very rare appearance in a
dramatic film in 1991’s critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated courtroom epic JFK,
portraying extremely New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews Jr. In his lone scene, the
heavily accented Candy meets with the film’s star, Kevin Costner. In a vacuum,
I don’t mind that Kevin Costner, as a character, referenced a real-life person
that we know the actor knows—if anything, it allows me to reminisce about a
movie that I think is a lot better than Draft Day. But what I would like
to suggest is that, although it is never explicitly stated, Draft Day
takes place in a world in which the film JFK was never made.
For the (mostly) men involved in its creation, JFK
didn’t matter that much in terms of their career arcs. The cast is
littered with established stars and its director/writer, Oliver Stone, already
had two Best Director Oscars on his mantle. But, even beyond the Seinfeld
homages and concepts of mysteries wrapped inside enigmas, JFK did have a
tangible real-world impact. Upon release, the film, despite its politics being
largely ahistorical nonsense, invited a new generation of skepticism about the
assassination of John F. Kennedy, even if the focus of the film is on probably
the least credible theory ever put forward. And perhaps more significantly, it
sanctifies John F. Kennedy, despite his being a mostly unseen character in the
film itself (the Zapruder film, shown in detail in JFK, had rarely been
viewed publicly prior to the movie). It turns Kennedy into a one-man army who
could have personally destroyed the military-industrial complex (and thus
spared Stone from serving in Vietnam). It turns Jim Garrison, whose half-baked
assassination theories seem to have been deeply rooted in homophobia, into a
hero. Despite Stone’s politics being considerably further to the left (back and
to the left, as it were) than those of the Democratic Party, his hero
protagonist is a conventional Southern Democrat. While further scrutiny of JFK,
a film I greatly enjoy but whose historical worth is minimal, has exposed its
flaws over the last three decades, Garrison was a paragon for good in the
public eye in 1992, the year in which Bill Clinton was elected president, as a
Southern Democrat with a discernible accent and a penchant for folksy
likability. While the 1992 presidential election is viewed today as a relative
blowout, this was not seen as the case in late 1991, with a re-election of
George Bush perceived as likely.
Does Bush get re-elected if not for JFK, a film
enamored with Southern Democrats and disdainful of the intelligence community,
from which Bush’s political career originated? I mean, probably not still, but
does Draft Day suppose otherwise? It’s not as though the film explicitly
mentions any presidents, nor should a movie about the NFL do so, but it does
give us a glimpse into an alternate universe in which the Seattle Seahawks are
the worst team in the NFL. So something changed.
The stadium now known as Lumen Field is widely perceived as having
one of the strongest home-field advantages in the NFL for the Seahawks, but this
stadium has only existed since 2002, and prior to the construction of the
architecturally unique venue, Seattle was not especially ballyhooed for their
fan support. They were largely an afterthought during their time playing at the
Kingdome, which they shared with the Seattle Mariners. And in the mid-1990s,
the long-term future of both franchises was an open question. The Seahawks
threatened, as did basically every NFL team seeking free money in the 1990s, to
relocate to the then-vacated football market of Los Angeles, and extorted nine
figures in public money for a stadium. And although the lines blurred
considerably in the ensuing decades, George Bush was an old-school lower-case-c
conservative politician who disdained spending almost as much as he disdained
the taxes which paid for it. Public stadium funding during the Reagan years was
minimal (though largely as a function of most teams having relatively new
stadiums), but perhaps a continuation of this austerity mindset with regards to
sports stadiums—to be clear, one of the few areas in which I would
wholeheartedly agree with the traditional conservative mindset—would keep Lumen
Field from being built.
Perhaps this means relocation, as the Mariners threatened and
the Seattle SuperSonics did, though Draft Day suggests otherwise.
Perhaps, it suggests, Seattle was unable to become a semi-dynasty as it did in
the 2010s explicitly because they were still playing in the relatively cavernous
Kingdome. This is certainly the sort of thing the NFL wants its fans to believe—if
you want to be happy in sports, you need to give them hundreds of millions of
dollars. Draft Day never references Seattle’s stadium—the only semi-nod
was a visible “12” flag, but given that the franchise retired the number in
1984, a flag being utilized in their old stadium is hardly a reach. It’s
certainly a cheaper bit of fan service than actually building a first-class
facility for your team yourself.
Little is known about Draft Day’s Bo Callahan aside
from that he won a Heisman Trophy at Wisconsin, but we do know one detail that
goes remarkably unmentioned otherwise via W. Earl Brown, the Browns director of
security who for some reason is also tasked with major scouting tasks in his
best movie in which the two main characters discuss Joe Montana since There’s
Something About Mary—he mentions that Callahan was from Washington (he references
him being the finest thrower in Washington and Wisconsin). At this point,
Seattle has already traded the pick that would be used on Callahan—this is
clearly not a reference to that. In a film where the Cleveland Browns, whose
former iteration’s relocation to Baltimore is reference, are obsessed with
hometown fan favorites, ultimately drafting a linebacker from their state’s
flagship university and a running back whose Hall of Famer father played for
the Browns within the film’s fictionalized universe, Callahan’s Washington
roots are never discussed by the Seahawks. Perhaps they realize this doesn’t
matter in the grand scheme of things, or perhaps this is yet another piece of
evidence that the football culture in the state of Washington has decayed.
In Draft Day, commissioner Roger Goodell is cheered
by fans. This is only possible in a propaganda piece. The NFL wanted to send a
message. And that message is that if your market does not pony up for more
playgrounds for his teams, you will face the consequences.
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