The Envelope: Writer-director Peter Landesman finds a love story within ‘Concussion’
“Football players were always dropping out of sight, many to suicide; we just weren’t paying attention,” writes “Concussion” screenwriter Peter Landesman.
On the one hand, I wrote my way into this movie on a dream. On the other, a nightmare.
The dream: Immigrant doctor discovers inconvenient truth about America’s most popular and lucrative pastime while trying to become an American citizen. The nightmare: Hall of Fame football hero, a living legend, withers in the back of a pickup truck, a stranger to himself, electrocuting himself to sleep because his brain is filled with sludge after playing America’s Game for 25-plus years.
SIGN UP for the free Gold Standard newsletter >>
Either was a good, vivid place to start writing this film. All with the multibillion-dollar industrial entertainment factory that is the National Football League waiting to scrutinize — I imagined — every word. Looking — I also imagined — for any way to keep this movie from happening. Big themes. Big stakes. And yet, to me, “Concussion” was really just a simple love story. Love of discovery and truth. And love between two outsiders — the doctor and the fellow immigrant who would become his wife. Can love (a.k.a. integrity, discipline, camaraderie) conquer all (a.k.a. cynicism, deceit, prejudice)? Can love save us?
But for me as a writer, for a savior to be activated I have to know first who needs saving. So, for the very first words of the screenplay, I went with these:
IRON MIKE WEBSTER, 50 years old but looks 70. Unwashed. Hair stringy. Granular thickness everywhere, forehead barnacled with scars. Fingers mangled in a permanent curl, as if gripping a ball. Surrounded by soiled clothes and Ding-Dong wrappers. Crucifix dangles from the mirror.
What the hell happened here? How did the strongest man in professional football turn into this creature? That’s what the audience was going to want to know.
Enter Bennet Omalu, pathologist of Nigerian descent; never watched so much as a freeze frame of football. The most imperfect — and thus perfect — guy to solve the mystery. Bypass concern about sports industrial Big Brother. Bypass concerns about the long arm of a multibillion-dollar corporation, or identification with and enjoyment of America’s Game. Oh, wait, that’s me. (I played football into my sophomore year of college and was, for a hot second, moderately concerned for my own brain health.)
What happened, it turned out, was that Iron Mike played football, and playing football gave him this awful disease called CTE, and that CTE was really a quiet but insidious epidemic; football players were always dropping out of sight, many to suicide; we just weren’t paying attention. And the NFL wasn’t talking about it. “NFL Is Family,” goes the league’s Rockwellian log-line this year. But the shadow of disease doesn’t mix well with the Cowboys and Lions on Thanksgiving Day, or Super Bowl Day cookouts.
Bennet was in trouble. How the hell was he going to tell this story? How was I?
It turns out I usually find myself writing about these guys. Lone wolves, Davids up against their Goliaths. I nurse this pet theory that writers really have one story to tell, that we dress up characters in different clothes and put them in different geographies and time periods but that the narrative, and the dynamic between the characters we create, repeats itself over and over again in everything we write. The way guys marry emotional replicas of their mothers, or women date essentially the same guy three times in a row. We’re stuck, as writers and as humans, in recirculating holes. The irony is that breaking free of one thing or another is usually the plot of the stories we tell, and the movies we make. That’s the dream.
Which brings me back to how I started writing this movie. I don’t know if I chose whistle-blowers as my narrative or some circumstance in my life chose them for me. After a couple novels, countless pieces of investigative journalism and a few movies now, I am telling myself that Bennet Omalu is my last David. Probably because, as far as unlikely heroes go, I don’t think I can ever care about a character again as much as I do him. The guy, how good he is at his job, how right he was about this very uncomfortable but important thing, how he never took his eye off the ball.
The ball not being a football but, well, love. After all, in the end, this is really just a love story.
From the Oscars to the Emmys.
Get the Envelope newsletter for exclusive awards season coverage, behind-the-scenes stories from the Envelope podcast and columnist Glenn Whipp’s must-read analysis.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
