Lees and Patterson Save the Sports Movie
by Noah Farberman
The elevator door closed on Todd Lees before he could step inside. The defeated and tired screenwriter waited a few seconds before he pushed the mocking down arrow. After an hour-long thirty seconds, the silver doors opened once more. With his chin against his chest, Lees slouched into the corner opposite the already resident suit, his mind oblivious to the chance that they weren’t both headed to the lobby.
“Lees, right?” The suit had blessed him with attention. Lees looked up and recognized the high-level producer. A real top floor type man. “Loved your work on Flagship.”
“Thank you, Mr. Patterson.” Todd Lees used his rehearsed elevator tone. “Thank you for making our weird little show.”
“Call me Adam. Little producer secret, some of us still actually like to watch TV.”
“I genuinely would have never guessed.”
Adam Patterson, the producer, laughed. A comedy writer’s dream.
“Tell me, Lees, what are you working on? What can I get excited about?”
A comedy writer’s nightmare.
Todd Lees always had a few answers to this question. Arrows in his quiver, an old writing professor called it, parroting himself weekly. Always have your bow ready to fire. The prof was crazy and also taught them how to cook Sloppy Joes with nothing but ground beef and a hotel lamp. But he was right as much as he was racist, and Lees made a note to thank the old nutcase before he passed on after thirty years of slowly dying.
There was the action movie, the sitcom, and the family drama pilot his agent suggested he pump out in a time of writer’s crisis. The plethora of eager stories jumped to his frontal lobe, all equally begging to be told. He likes Flagship. Lees made the note to siphon out only the ideas that felt tonally similar. We’re looking for smart comedies that mash nostalgia with satire. He instructed the tiny librarian in his bustling head. But the librarian was on break, of course, it’s noon. He knew he was paying them too much, but mental pay cuts would have to wait.
“It’s about a—” The words escape him without control. Through the fog and blood and cartoon violence a single-story burst past the mental barrier and out of his mouth. A script he’d worked on in college that pushed him ahead of his lazy classmates. One he fantasized about in high school during nights when he’d miss a night of weed and speed-running Half-Life 2 because of an early swim meet the next morning. A film he’d dreamed about making alongside his former favourite crews with wide-eyed visions about changing the genre of the world. Nothing special to anyone but him, but Todd Lees knows better than most how strong a story can be when at least one person cares.
Out of his mouth came an elevator pitch that Todd Lees had not rehearsed in years. “It’s about a very popular high-school athlete forced to play a horribly unpopular sport. I call it: Greaseboy.”
For a moment Lees couldn’t breathe. He had just exposed a deep and embarrassing part of himself to a man he hoped very much to work for again. And then Adam Patterson smiled and looked up at the floor number on the elevator wall. The glance said: There’s still a good twenty floors, kid, keep talking.
“The sports movie is not dead, only knocked down with a hemorrhage in its head. And we can shock life back into the greatest genre of all time.”
Patterson had given him full attention; he held a sly smile that could be interpreted as patronizing when not paired with the full body turn.
“When his full-ride scholarship is put at risk, high-school jock Jeffrey-Harrison “Jeff-Harris” Anderson is forced to form a very motley team of breakfast weirdos and win a championship in the only sport that will still take him this late into the school season: Greaseboy. Can Jeff-Harris win back his scholarship? Personally, I cannot wait to find out.”
“Greaseboy is the sport?”
He asked a question! He was listening! “Greaseboy is the sport.” Calm. Cool. Winning.
“What is it? Does it exist?”
He has fallen directly into the spidery web of a successful pitch.
And then the elevator shook to a stop. And the light turned out. And they waited a fearful second, Lees fearful that his first so-far successful elevator pitch would end in death, Patterson probably fearful that his choice to fund M. Night Shyamalan’s 2010 flop Devil was coming back to literally haunt him.
“I knew I should have pitched my movie about people stuck in a broken elevator. Universal knows how much you like those flicks.”
“You’re quick, Lees.” Patterson’s laugh relieved some of their fear. “Can you see the help button, kid?”
Todd Lees whipped out his cheap and cracked iPhone and scanned the Christmas tree of buttons. Near the bottom he spotted a little fire signal next to a phone signal. He quickly chose the phone signal, hoping the choice appeared a lot more fluid than it had felt.
Several rings before a muffled god answered them through the panels. “I see you, Mr. Patterson, no reason to fret, just a minor power outage. We’ll have this thing back online very shortly. I have some calls coming in from the other lifts, do you mind if I put you on hold? You can call back should anything change.” Twenty dollars says those other elevators are a box of donuts. Front desk has no power over this, bunch of half-wrought pages.
“Thank you. We should be fine here, son.”
“I’m so sure you will be, sir. Have a nice day.” CLICK!
“Sorry about that, Lees.”
“It’s no problem, Sir.”
“You didn’t set this up, did you?”
Is he joking? He better be. “I mean it’s hard to get you alone, but not break an elevator hard.”
“You remind me of my favourite wife––don’t tell my prostitute I said that.”
Todd Lees genuinely laughed.
“Talk me through this movie.” WHAT?!
“You want me to keep going?”
“It’s not often I get trapped in an elevator with a writer I know, let alone like. Don’t let that go to your head.”
“I’m a TV writer, sir, there’s no way my ego can get any bigger.” Hack and easy. Now bring it back around. “Are you serious? You want me to start from the top?”
“Start from the start. This is cutting into my TV time, might as well hear a good story.”
“You’re in for a great one.”
In the dim phone light, Adam Patterson smiled and nodded. His older face still held the eager charm of a defiant thirteen-year-old, the words ‘nothing pleases me’ hidden in a high layer of skin just below the jaw. “Turn that little light off.”
The light was extinguished, and the iPhone was then returned to Lee’s cleanest slacks.
In the haunting darkness of the elevator, Todd Lees took a deep breath. I am Spielberg stealing an office. I am Shyamalan threatening to pull the Sixth Sense script. I am ’92 Mamet and ’76 Stallone. I will do Dowd proud and put Scott Armstrong to shame. I will save the Sports Movie. He would save the Sports Movie. “We open in a bar…”
At ten-thirty that morning a higher-level executive pulled Adam Patterson into his giant top-floor-corner-office and told him not to bother sitting down.
Always a tired combination of media mogul and man of the people, there had never been any company, studio, or filmmaker who did not know or understand that the aging producer always had their best interests at heart.
“The director really didn’t like your last set of notes, Adam.” The executive, Derrick Johnson, was direct, tall, lean, and young. Very young.
“That’s alright, Johnson, I’ll go straighten everything out.”
“He asked that you not be allowed to contact him.”
That was an attack. An accusation. A fatal puncture. There was already nothing Patterson could say. He’d seen the other side of the conversation enough times to know it wasn’t a conversation.
“He wants you off the project.”
“Can I fight this? Should I?” The old man pretended to hold onto a humble tone. Years of being respected stripped him of empathy or understanding for the weak. He still respected those hard workers, of course, he could always see himself in the ones who cared, but there had come a meeting where Patterson finally accepted that he was better. He had earned his place as better. Derrick Johnson was weak. A child actor’s child who took a different name with the claim that he didn’t want to ride coattails and yet still happily took the starter job at his father’s agency. The Director was cocky, rude, riding enough festival wins to get funding from anyone. The Director had Patterson Power on loan. Johnson had daddy power. Patterson had himself. In a fight between who’s hot right now, who’s got the team behind them, and the money man’s subsidiary; things looked broken for Producer Adam Patterson.
Derrick grabbed a stack of papers off his desk and handed them to Patterson. “Read it, take your time, call my secretary if you want to accept. Call my lawyer if you want to negotiate.”
Patterson took the papers with calm hands and shaky nerves while Derrick returned to his desk for a cigarette. “I mean read it somewhere else, Adam.”
Patterson tucked the document under his arm and stumbled to his office two floors below.
Posters of his proudest decisions layered the walls. Half framed, mostly just personal prints presented by persons appreciating him as much as he did them. Years of doing what he can to help the little guy make the big movie or show. To tell the personal story. To feed his desire for entertainment. A shepherd for art. The building owner at the construction crew afterparty. The money man’s subsidiary. And still, everyone loses touch eventually: for Patterson it came with nepotism and over-saturation. It took him thirty-three years to cover those walls. It took him thirty seconds to tear it all down.
The idea that not every idea has to appeal to everyone was lost on the older producer. He started in a decade where you had to work for your place and in this industry that meant entertaining the whole world. It wasn’t hard to see his effect on the world. He helped create a society where everyone can make what they want without the backing of the big guys.
The severance package was very nice. It gave him the feeling of respect that had become a drug over the years. A final ounce of ‘power’ before a long and humble fall into a home.
Adam Patterson picked up the phone and dialed the extension for Derrick Johnson’s office.
Around two in the afternoon Adam Patterson shook limp hands with a man who never respected him. Angry, tired, greedy, Patterson took the package.
Adam Patterson was fired that afternoon.
Tucked behind him, on his final elevator ride from the high floor, hidden and barely visible through his spruce sapling legs, a box that held his career. When some young writer entered the elevator, Mr. Patterson tucked the box further and closed his legs. A final line of powder respect produced through assumption. A real top-floor snort.
“Lees, right?” The suit had blessed him with attention. Lees looked up and recognized the high-level producer. A real top floor type man. “Loved your work on Flagship.”
“Thank you, Mr. Patterson.” Todd Lees used his rehearsed elevator tone. “Thank you for making our weird little show.”
“Call me Adam. Little producer secret, some of us still actually like to watch TV.”
“I genuinely would have never guessed.”
Adam Patterson, the producer, laughed. A comedy writer’s dream.
“Tell me, Lees, what are you working on? What can I get excited about?”
A comedy writer’s nightmare.
Todd Lees always had a few answers to this question. Arrows in his quiver, an old writing professor called it, parroting himself weekly. Always have your bow ready to fire. The prof was crazy and also taught them how to cook Sloppy Joes with nothing but ground beef and a hotel lamp. But he was right as much as he was racist, and Lees made a note to thank the old nutcase before he passed on after thirty years of slowly dying.
There was the action movie, the sitcom, and the family drama pilot his agent suggested he pump out in a time of writer’s crisis. The plethora of eager stories jumped to his frontal lobe, all equally begging to be told. He likes Flagship. Lees made the note to siphon out only the ideas that felt tonally similar. We’re looking for smart comedies that mash nostalgia with satire. He instructed the tiny librarian in his bustling head. But the librarian was on break, of course, it’s noon. He knew he was paying them too much, but mental pay cuts would have to wait.
“It’s about a—” The words escape him without control. Through the fog and blood and cartoon violence a single-story burst past the mental barrier and out of his mouth. A script he’d worked on in college that pushed him ahead of his lazy classmates. One he fantasized about in high school during nights when he’d miss a night of weed and speed-running Half-Life 2 because of an early swim meet the next morning. A film he’d dreamed about making alongside his former favourite crews with wide-eyed visions about changing the genre of the world. Nothing special to anyone but him, but Todd Lees knows better than most how strong a story can be when at least one person cares.
Out of his mouth came an elevator pitch that Todd Lees had not rehearsed in years. “It’s about a very popular high-school athlete forced to play a horribly unpopular sport. I call it: Greaseboy.”
For a moment Lees couldn’t breathe. He had just exposed a deep and embarrassing part of himself to a man he hoped very much to work for again. And then Adam Patterson smiled and looked up at the floor number on the elevator wall. The glance said: There’s still a good twenty floors, kid, keep talking.
“The sports movie is not dead, only knocked down with a hemorrhage in its head. And we can shock life back into the greatest genre of all time.”
Patterson had given him full attention; he held a sly smile that could be interpreted as patronizing when not paired with the full body turn.
“When his full-ride scholarship is put at risk, high-school jock Jeffrey-Harrison “Jeff-Harris” Anderson is forced to form a very motley team of breakfast weirdos and win a championship in the only sport that will still take him this late into the school season: Greaseboy. Can Jeff-Harris win back his scholarship? Personally, I cannot wait to find out.”
“Greaseboy is the sport?”
He asked a question! He was listening! “Greaseboy is the sport.” Calm. Cool. Winning.
“What is it? Does it exist?”
He has fallen directly into the spidery web of a successful pitch.
And then the elevator shook to a stop. And the light turned out. And they waited a fearful second, Lees fearful that his first so-far successful elevator pitch would end in death, Patterson probably fearful that his choice to fund M. Night Shyamalan’s 2010 flop Devil was coming back to literally haunt him.
“I knew I should have pitched my movie about people stuck in a broken elevator. Universal knows how much you like those flicks.”
“You’re quick, Lees.” Patterson’s laugh relieved some of their fear. “Can you see the help button, kid?”
Todd Lees whipped out his cheap and cracked iPhone and scanned the Christmas tree of buttons. Near the bottom he spotted a little fire signal next to a phone signal. He quickly chose the phone signal, hoping the choice appeared a lot more fluid than it had felt.
Several rings before a muffled god answered them through the panels. “I see you, Mr. Patterson, no reason to fret, just a minor power outage. We’ll have this thing back online very shortly. I have some calls coming in from the other lifts, do you mind if I put you on hold? You can call back should anything change.” Twenty dollars says those other elevators are a box of donuts. Front desk has no power over this, bunch of half-wrought pages.
“Thank you. We should be fine here, son.”
“I’m so sure you will be, sir. Have a nice day.” CLICK!
“Sorry about that, Lees.”
“It’s no problem, Sir.”
“You didn’t set this up, did you?”
Is he joking? He better be. “I mean it’s hard to get you alone, but not break an elevator hard.”
“You remind me of my favourite wife––don’t tell my prostitute I said that.”
Todd Lees genuinely laughed.
“Talk me through this movie.” WHAT?!
“You want me to keep going?”
“It’s not often I get trapped in an elevator with a writer I know, let alone like. Don’t let that go to your head.”
“I’m a TV writer, sir, there’s no way my ego can get any bigger.” Hack and easy. Now bring it back around. “Are you serious? You want me to start from the top?”
“Start from the start. This is cutting into my TV time, might as well hear a good story.”
“You’re in for a great one.”
In the dim phone light, Adam Patterson smiled and nodded. His older face still held the eager charm of a defiant thirteen-year-old, the words ‘nothing pleases me’ hidden in a high layer of skin just below the jaw. “Turn that little light off.”
The light was extinguished, and the iPhone was then returned to Lee’s cleanest slacks.
In the haunting darkness of the elevator, Todd Lees took a deep breath. I am Spielberg stealing an office. I am Shyamalan threatening to pull the Sixth Sense script. I am ’92 Mamet and ’76 Stallone. I will do Dowd proud and put Scott Armstrong to shame. I will save the Sports Movie. He would save the Sports Movie. “We open in a bar…”
At ten-thirty that morning a higher-level executive pulled Adam Patterson into his giant top-floor-corner-office and told him not to bother sitting down.
Always a tired combination of media mogul and man of the people, there had never been any company, studio, or filmmaker who did not know or understand that the aging producer always had their best interests at heart.
“The director really didn’t like your last set of notes, Adam.” The executive, Derrick Johnson, was direct, tall, lean, and young. Very young.
“That’s alright, Johnson, I’ll go straighten everything out.”
“He asked that you not be allowed to contact him.”
That was an attack. An accusation. A fatal puncture. There was already nothing Patterson could say. He’d seen the other side of the conversation enough times to know it wasn’t a conversation.
“He wants you off the project.”
“Can I fight this? Should I?” The old man pretended to hold onto a humble tone. Years of being respected stripped him of empathy or understanding for the weak. He still respected those hard workers, of course, he could always see himself in the ones who cared, but there had come a meeting where Patterson finally accepted that he was better. He had earned his place as better. Derrick Johnson was weak. A child actor’s child who took a different name with the claim that he didn’t want to ride coattails and yet still happily took the starter job at his father’s agency. The Director was cocky, rude, riding enough festival wins to get funding from anyone. The Director had Patterson Power on loan. Johnson had daddy power. Patterson had himself. In a fight between who’s hot right now, who’s got the team behind them, and the money man’s subsidiary; things looked broken for Producer Adam Patterson.
Derrick grabbed a stack of papers off his desk and handed them to Patterson. “Read it, take your time, call my secretary if you want to accept. Call my lawyer if you want to negotiate.”
Patterson took the papers with calm hands and shaky nerves while Derrick returned to his desk for a cigarette. “I mean read it somewhere else, Adam.”
Patterson tucked the document under his arm and stumbled to his office two floors below.
Posters of his proudest decisions layered the walls. Half framed, mostly just personal prints presented by persons appreciating him as much as he did them. Years of doing what he can to help the little guy make the big movie or show. To tell the personal story. To feed his desire for entertainment. A shepherd for art. The building owner at the construction crew afterparty. The money man’s subsidiary. And still, everyone loses touch eventually: for Patterson it came with nepotism and over-saturation. It took him thirty-three years to cover those walls. It took him thirty seconds to tear it all down.
The idea that not every idea has to appeal to everyone was lost on the older producer. He started in a decade where you had to work for your place and in this industry that meant entertaining the whole world. It wasn’t hard to see his effect on the world. He helped create a society where everyone can make what they want without the backing of the big guys.
The severance package was very nice. It gave him the feeling of respect that had become a drug over the years. A final ounce of ‘power’ before a long and humble fall into a home.
Adam Patterson picked up the phone and dialed the extension for Derrick Johnson’s office.
Around two in the afternoon Adam Patterson shook limp hands with a man who never respected him. Angry, tired, greedy, Patterson took the package.
Adam Patterson was fired that afternoon.
Tucked behind him, on his final elevator ride from the high floor, hidden and barely visible through his spruce sapling legs, a box that held his career. When some young writer entered the elevator, Mr. Patterson tucked the box further and closed his legs. A final line of powder respect produced through assumption. A real top-floor snort.
Noah Farberman (he/him) is a Toronto writer and comedian. Noah has been published by Storm Cellar, Cypress, Rabid Oak, Daily Drunk, Pink Plastic House, Perhappened, and Long Con. Currently, Noah studies creative writing at the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus.