From "Varsity Blues" to "Friday Night Lights," the director's script never changes.
It moves and shifts, but never strays too far from its roots, its central theme: football.
For football to be good on the silver screen or your TV set, the action has to be compelling. Some unimaginable action. Long, dizzying TD runs. Crunching tackles -- the kind that send a ball carrier spinning 360 degrees in the air. Moans and groans and the occasional clipboard toss.
But for a football show or movie to be a classic ...
Well, you need character buildup and suspense and raw emotion that ordinary folks -- the non-football types -- will get.
And latch onto.
A winning script captures football away from football. A winning script might read like this for our movie, "When Nobody Else is Looking":
Scene One
A rainy Friday night in November 2008:
The roar has gone home for the evening, for the fall, for the next 10 months.
The lights have been turned off in the stadium. The bleachers swept. The parking lot empty. The season over.
The finality of it all has hit those inside the home locker room, this musky football sanctuary.
A pair of seniors, lifelong friends and rough hombres between the painted lines, fall into each other's arms and sob like little girls.
Mostly, though, players sit in their stalls stunned, pads still clipped on, eye black streaking down their cheeks.
Wads of tape gather in a pile on the carpet. The room smells like a lawnmower bag.
No one says a word.
They don't have to.
Their silence says it all, like the darkest form of poetry. A football eulogy.
All too fast the season came and went. Ten games, 11 weeks -- whoosh -- gone. So sudden and so absolute, in fact, that the coaching staff failed to draw up an exit strategy. No one saw the end coming. No one dared to dream a final chapter quite like this.
Instead, four grown men improvise damage control, picking a corner, working clockwise around the room.
Handshake here. Hug there. Somber "How ya doings?" and "Hang in theres" all along the way.
But for a select few -- the juniors and sophomores in the room -- a different emotion begins to take hold. Excitement.
Scene Two
Back at it:
The alarm sounds.
A heavy head peels away from the pillow. Through tired eyes, he glares at the clock flashing cruel red numbers back at him.
5:30 a.m.
5:30 a.m.
5:30 a.m.
Spring has sprung, and for a couple hundred teenagers across Merced County, the football season is officially underway.
And it starts here: in gym shorts, surrounded by iron and steel, coated in sweat before the morning sun has shown itself through the windows.
Fall heroes are born during the spring and summer months -- off the field, away from a football and tackling dummy.
They lift weights, run bleachers, shuffle through cones, study history, English, math and the intricacies of the Spread offense and 3-4 defense.
The next day, they'll repeat the cycle. The process continues for weeks and months, until one day they look in the mirror and realize ...
They're varsity football players, carefully sculpted and toned.
Their bodies have been conditioned to handle the shock and awe of Friday nights. They've been drilled so hard that, in most cases, they've been rendered emotion-less.
Never too high.
Never too low.
Scene Three
Turning over fall's first leaf:
Coach throws a bag full of footballs and tees over his shoulder, slams the door to his pickup truck and fumbles with a ring full of keys.
A line of early birds waits anxiously in the parking lot as he swings open the door to the locker room.
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