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It was a love
to be tested for more than two decades, as the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill graduate's retelling of Blood's
tales—written with former Sports Illustrated columnist Rick
Reilly—attracted one leading man after another. Alec Baldwin,
Michael Keaton, Ray Liotta, and Mel Gibson all took a look after
Universal bought the script in 1991. None would commit.
``We had
this beautiful relationship and we made this great baby,'' Reilly
said. ``And right away, the baby was adopted. And for 16 years, we
had no idea what happened to this baby. ... We figured many, many
times the baby was dead.
``So we go
years without hearing anything about it, only to hear not only the
baby is alive, but it's running toward you with a big, fat check.
And the baby looks just like George Clooney.''
The baby's
name: ``Leatherheads.'' Johnny Blood, whose real name was John
McNally, became Dodge Connolly. He plays for the Duluth Bulldogs,
instead of the Duluth Eskimos. Set in Minnesota, it was filmed in
North Carolina and South Carolina. A film with high expectations,
it opened last Friday to mixed reviews and a disappointing $13.5
million in ticket sales.
But it
opened.
``He never
stopped believing in it,'' Reilly said. ``I stopped believing in
it two years after I wrote it.''
Brantley
met Reilly in the 1980s when working as a researcher at Sports
Illustrated, where Reilly wrote the back page column before
leaving recently for ESPN. Brantley stumbled on Blood's story
while at the magazine and convinced Reilly they could write a
screenplay, even though neither had done it before.
``I just
fell in love with this guy,'' Brantley, a native of Rutherfordton,
said of Blood. ``I thought, 'Wow, this would be a fun movie.'''
Brantley
left SI before the script was done, taking a job as a caretaker at
Steven Spielberg's home in East Hampton, N.Y. When he and Reilly
finished ``Leatherheads,'' Reilly wanted Brantley to leave the
script where Spielberg would happen across it _ on a desk, near a
toilet, by the fridge. Much to Reilly's frustration, Brantley
refused.
``He would
not give the damned picture to Steven Spielberg,'' Reilly said.
``If he had, we'd probably be multibillionaires.''
Eventually,
another connection got the script to Hollywood. The pair sold
``Leatherheads'' to Universal through director Steven Soderbergh,
who was then married to Brantley's sister. Soderburgh was going to
direct it and Gibson was set to star. But he lost interest, and
other actors and directors came and went.
In writing
the story, set in the 1920s, Reilly and Brantley said they studied
the fast-talking movies from the 30s and 40s, including ``The Thin
Man'' series and ``His Girl Friday.'' Brantley took another stab
at freshening the script about three years ago before Clooney got
a hold of ``Leatherheads'' and added his own touch.
That's led
to a dispute over who should get the credit. The Writers Guild of
America decided only Brantley and Reilly would get it on screen,
which Variety reported last week led Clooney to downgrade his
membership in the union. Clooney directed the film and told The
New Yorker he significantly rewrote the script to make it more of
a screwball comedy.
When asked,
Brantley coyly said he couldn't tell where one writer's work
blended into another's.
``It's such
an impossible question to answer because what you're trying do is
divvy up a totally subjective document,'' Brantley said. ``It's
just an impossible thing to do.''
Reilly said
while Clooney added a plot device and changed some of the
dialogue, ``most of it was still what we wrote.'' Still, he
recalled sitting in an audience with Brantley at the premiere,
wondering who wrote which joke.
``That's
pretty funny. Did we write that? I don't think we did,'' he said,
describing their conversation. ``It's been so long, we don't even
recognize the baby.''
But 16
years after giving birth, Reilly said, that's OK: ``If somebody
raised your baby, fed it, clothed it and made it rich, you're not
going to complain about the underwear.''
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