Cinema gold? A ‘Miracle’ producer decodes the art of the Olympics movie

The Olympics would seem ready-made for Hollywood. As American athletes such as Michael Phelps, Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky have demonstrated from Rio de Janeiro this week, the Games offer numerous moments of compelling and even implausible drama.

But sports cinema, it turns out, is a trickier business than it seems. Script and studio challenges run deep, and what makes for three great minutes on NBC doesn’t necessarily work for two hours at a multiplex.

To navigate this murky world we called on Mark Ciardi, one of Hollywood’s go-to sports-film producers, having made a slew of such movies, including “Invincible,” “Secretariat,” “Million Dollar Arm” and the ultimate Olympics picture, the 1980 USA hockey tale “Miracle.” He also played pro baseball, briefly reaching the majors as a pitcher with the Milwaukee Brewers in 1987.

We asked Ciardi what works, what’s changed and what he’s looking for — and why the biggest champions don’t always make for the best movies.

How do you watch the Olympics? Do you sit at home just channel-surfing and streaming like mad?

I’m actually in Vancouver, on the set of my new movie “Live Like Line.” It’s this incredibly inspirational but also incredibly tragic real-life story about a high school girls volleyball team in Iowa that decides to play the season after one of their teammates dies. But I’m watching a lot of Olympics too, whenever I get a free moment.”

What do you look for? Is it winning, or adversity, or some unquantifiable combination of the two?

I’m looking at all that NBC is showing to see what rises to the top. But I am also looking for a certain kind of underdog. It’s these little stories that pop through. Michael Phelps — yes, I know he’s had some personal challenges. But mostly it’s just working your … off. That isn’t a movie — it’s a documentary. It’s what do you overcome to find great success that makes it a movie.

Does that just mean often going for something off the beaten track — something that may be far from prime time?

With sports movies you definitely want the story people don’t know — like a “Million Dollar Arm” [about baseball pitchers discovered in India] or “Invincible” [about a substitute teacher who winds up playing for the Philadelphia Eagles]. Yes, there was “Miracle.” But that worked because it was so iconic and about the Cold War. Secretariat was a super-horse everyone knew too, but you had Penny [Chenery] almost losing the horse. You have to find the journey. You don’t want to do a story with just a great athlete. Tom Brady. What are his struggles? He hasn’t had any struggles. He’s just had a great career.

I feel like a lot of us at home really only follow the same few people when we’re watching the Olympics — the Phelpses, the Ledeckys, the Biles of the world. How do you go deeper?

I do try to look beyond them. There’s a great story, for example, in a Paralympic athlete named Dartanyon [Crockett, a sight-challenged judo competitor from a poor neighborhood in Cleveland]. There are a lot of those stories. But at the same time you don’t want to go too obscure. I’ve waded through a lot of cycling, a lot of archery. You have to look for gems. But you have to be reasonable. It may be a great rowing story but not a lot of studios want to make a rowing story.

Where does something like the Phelps-Chad Le Clos swimming rivalry, with all the trash-talking from Le Clos over the past few years, fit in? It seems almost right out of a Hollywood script, right down to that wild finish Tuesday night in which Phelps avenged his 200-meter loss in the butterfly in London by winning gold?

I think it’s a great story, but it wouldn’t be enough for a movie. With “Miracle” there was so much leading up to that game that it resulted in a compelling film. This is just too thin for a film and there isn’t anything he’s overcoming. That other swimmer basically [messed] with the wrong guy.

The challenge seems to be that some of these stories today are so well-known, especially in this age of social media, that by the time they get to a movie screen people will long feel like they know everything. What’s a movie going to tell us we don’t already know?

I agree. I think that’s why sometimes the best stories go back a while. I’ve been working on a movie for a long time about Stylianos Kyriakides. He was a Greek marathoner in 1936 at the Berlin Games who had this crazy life, being in Greece [and fighting in the Resistance] during World War II and then coming to America and winning the Boston Marathon. It’s a great story that I don’t think a lot of people know.

It seems like a lot of Olympics movies are now are pretty deep-period: “Unbroken” “Race,” even “Eddie the Eagle” is nearly 30 years old.

Sometimes I think it takes a long time for a story to feel relevant. Sometimes it also just takes a long time for a movie to get made.

That’s because the big studios of course have stopped making a lot of sports dramas. But there’s also a genre issue: A lot of the inspirational stuff can start to feel pretty schematic and cliche in 2016. Do you feel the sports film has to evolve?

You do have to elevate it now. Part of the issue is that sports movie are everywhere. “King’s Speech” is a great movie; “Spotlight” is a great movie. But they’re sports movies in a way, true stories about an underdog who overcomes odds and then inspire us. So you have to find a stranger story or elevate it.

With so many athletes and so many ways they can promote themselves these days, you must take an unbelievable number of meetings. What do you tell an athlete or agent who comes into your office and asks for advice?

A lot of people come in and they ask what to do. And I say if you’re trying to make a quick buck sell an option. But if you’re actually trying to get a movie made, don’t worry about selling the option — give away the option — but just make sure you have a great writer and a great script. Do you want to make $10,000 or do you want to make a movie? A great idea just makes money.

Does everyone feel like they have a great story? You must hear “the next ‘Miracle’ ” 100 times a day.

There’s no sports story I don’t know about or haven’t tried to make in the past. It’s like Stump the Band. “Yes, I know it, I was involved with it, I couldn’t get it made.” I must have heard the story about Pete Maravich and his [demanding] dad 15 times over the years. But the Olympics are teeming with incredible stories. You just have to know where to look.

Twitter: @ZeitchikLAT

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