Heading into his rookie year with the Chicago Bulls, the NCAA All-American First Team recruit and National Player of the Year was intent on endorsing Adidas, then the 800-pound gorilla and all-around coolest company in the sports-shoe world. Most of it is just the right people reading the right script at the right time.”īefore the Jordan brand became a multibillion-dollar cash cow for Nike, before Jordan exploded the business model for pro-model profit participation by becoming the first athlete to earn a cut on the sale of every shoe bearing his name and Jumpman likeness, it’s easy to forget that his signing with the granola-crunchy, Oregon-based shoe manufacturer was hardly a no-brainer. And why this one instead of the other ones? I don’t know. Since graduating film school, it’s been nine years of grinding away, chipping away, trying to write The One. “I have a graveyard of unproduced screenplays too. Congratulations!’” he tells Vulture via video link. “It’s been funny to hear, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is your first screenplay. And though Convery, now 30, conceived Air while a less-than-gainfully-employed 20-something with zero movie or TV credits during the dull days of pandemic lockdown, he shrugs at the Hollywood narrative around his “written by” allocation on the film: after years of false starts, a drawerful of unmade scripts, and years of low-level showbiz drudge work, that he could somehow be viewed as an “overnight” success. Convery wrote the script “out of desperation” without really expecting to ever see it translated to the big screen - he attributes its adaptation by director and co-star Ben Affleck (with lead actor Matt Damon also producing) to luck more than his own writing excellence. Although Air is nominally a sports movie plotted around Nike’s least-likely-to-succeed 1984 endorsement-deal signing of Michael Jordan, its watchability is predicated on “people in rooms talking” there is but one scene of actual basketball in the whole thing. Īs the Air Jordan creation-myth biopic Air makes its way to the multiplex Wednesday, the movie’s screenwriter, Alex Convery, can’t avoid observing certain ironies. We are recirculating it now that Air is available to stream on Prime Video. This story was originally published in April.
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