He gives actors a sporting chance
Mark Ellis is one of the few 44-year-olds whose office consists of a worldwide network of basketball courts, hockey rinks, baseball diamonds and football fields. As the owner of the Sports Studio and the technical advisor for films including “Jerry Maguire,” “Any Given Sunday” and “Miracle,” Ellis has found an enviable niche as coach to the stars.
Born into a family of athletes, Ellis spent his childhood being shuttled from one sports practice to the next. When he was shooting hoops on North Carolina’s high school state championship teams, he dreamed of playing basketball at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but ended up on the football team at Appalachian State University instead. Ellis was working on his coaching master’s degree at the University of South Carolina in 1993 when the producers and directors of “The Program” recruited him as a sports coordinator.
Ellis often tells actors that “you don’t believe the tears in the locker room unless you believe the catch in the end zone,” and he has a proven knack for raising people’s games. Recently, he helped Will Ferrell, Woody Harrelson and Andre Benjamin realize their hoop dreams in the 1970s-era basketball comedy “Semi-Pro,” due in theaters Friday.
Training days: As is the case on any court, practice made perfect for the players and actors in “Semi-Pro.” “We brought in a bunch of great basketball players and cast some ex-pros and some ex-NBA guys and some guys that played in Europe,” says Ellis. “We would practice two to four hours every day for five weeks. A lot of the comedy happens on the court, and guys are running up and down, and they’re saying their lines. And in the meantime, we’ve got a basketball bouncing around all over the place. It wasn’t easy. We had to work out the blocking, work out the choreography, work out the dialogue and work out where we were going to put the camera. There were 13 different games and 130 plays we had to learn.”
Disco ball: One of the trademarks of the American Basketball Assn. -- the 1960s and ‘70s league that inspired “Semi-Pro” -- was its small, red, white and blue basketballs. “I’ll never forget the first day [the props guy] said, ‘The basketballs are in!’ ” Ellis says. “Everybody just couldn’t wait to get their hands on those basketballs. I mean, those are signature parts of the ABA, and it was definitely the rogue league where you could throw all the rules out the window.”
Court appearance: Ellis watched footage of the ABA to get a sense of the ways that basketball has changed over the last 30-plus years. “The way the game was played back then and the way the game is played now is completely different,” he says. “They really spread out the court on offense. Guys played more straight up and down; they were not crouched over as much. I mean, the way the guys were built in 1975 -- they were a lot leaner and skinnier. Their handoffs were different. But the ABA, one way they tried to separate themselves from the NBA was the flash. Guys had their own signature dunks. And then, of course, everybody’s going to really enjoy the big Afros and the short shorts and the high tube socks. It seems like every day Will walked in with that hair and those short shorts, I laughed.”
Will power: Ellis had the unusual task of coaching Ferrell to be worse at basketball. “Will Ferrell’s a good athlete, really good,” says Ellis. “Part of his character was a guy that probably wanted to overcompensate for his lack of skills. The hardest thing for us to do with his character was to take it down a couple of notches. You know, it’s very difficult to miss a shot on purpose. It’s very difficult to lose the handle on the basketball and to make it look real, to have it go off your leg and out of bounds. And when Will is as good an athlete as he is, it becomes a challenge!”