Getting the story right - The NBA Returns

“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

– Stephen King

The aforementioned Mr. King has admittedly been one of my favorite authors over the years. After the scaring the piss out of me for the better part of my teens and 20’s, he shifted to some different types of stories, a move I thought would surely be the kiss of death to his career. Instead, he wrote some of his best material, and has now crossed over into a multitude of genres, styles, and even delivery methods. While most other authors are playing literary Bingo with their career arcs, Old Steve seems rather focused on playing Blackout. And more power to him. The man can certainly tell a tale, even when that tale takes a twist you never expected.

Now the folks who take his tales and translate them to the screen? That’s more a mixed bag of outcomes. The Shining? Not a lot like the book, but a killer movie. The Shawshank Redemption? Revelatory. Even better than the novelette it was based upon. Maximum Overdrive? Well, just don’t. If you see it available anywhere ever for viewing, just… don’t. And there’s no one to blame that on but King himself, who primarily steered that effort. But as much a stinker as it is, a movie director named Nikolaj Arcel saw King’s crappy directorial effort and said, “Hold my beer.”

You see, Mr. Arcel found himself the happy recipient of the first part of what amounts to King’s Cinematic Universe, not dissimilar to what Marvel spent the last decade making several billion dollars slowly spooling out. The property in Nikolaj’s possession, both as director and screenwriter, was The Dark Tower, an eight-novel epic that could have easily been broken into 10-15 movies before all was said and done. The casting looked solid, the early photos looked appropriately terrifying. And then I saw an interview with the director in which he said…

“We just ended up taking the parts we thought most important to all the books to try and tell a good and full story.”

I’m sorry, you… what? Took a masterfully woven and intricate tale spread out over more than 4,200 pages, and, uh… Cherrypicked it down to a tight 95 minutes? Huh. I waited for early reports to come out, and when they did, never ended up spending a dime on it. General audience feedback seems to support this move.

But it’s not as if authors and directors have a monopoly on screwing up a good story line. Your favorite teams and leagues find ways to do it more often than you’d think. In 1981, Major League Baseball dropped nearly 40% of that year’s schedule due to a player’s strike. Almost two months of the season melted away before baseball came back and held the All-Star game nearly a month after it had originally been scheduled.

A hasty second-half schedule didn’t help the disjointed nature of the season, and baseball decided to pit the winners of the first half of the season against the winners of the second half of the season in a convoluted playoff format that not only disincentivized some team to fully perform, but also somehow saw the two National League teams with the best records, the Reds and Cardinals, not make the playoffs at all. Yes, you should have won your division. Hope you enjoy that from your couch. Unless you were a Dodgers fan that year, most every other club and fanbase left that season with a less-than-satisfied opinion of the outcome. The story that the league had put together to make the product entertaining was sorely lacking. It wasn’t Maximum Overdrive bad, but…

As the NBA wrestles with the amalgam of containment, content, commitments, and celebration a return to play will bring, they want to make sure that what they’re doing is going to present a compelling story. Something that can get its hooks into you, even if the outcome or story line isn’t exactly what you might expect it to be. Something that will keep you awake a while after you see it, that has some pressure, drama, and excitement to get fans back on board. They want you to walk away happy and satisfied, even if everything is going down very differently than ever anticipated.

Does it matter to you, DNVR Nation? Are you so starved for live sports that you are deep into marble racing these days, or does a return of something, ANYthing scratch that itch enough to make you want to see it? It’s going to be different, but if the NBA has anything to say about it, it won’t be bad. Is that basketball back on the distant horizon, or just a dark tower?