I have a foot – Weekend

Air: The Big Jump is Ben Affleck’s fifth film as a director and the second after Argo, based on a true story, on Amazon Prime Video. the failing shoe giant Nike, it turned out to be a very dense movie – a production myth of the new time, which came when no one expected.

Text: Alexey Filippov

— I was looking for a phrase that hooked me. And you know what? The entire second part of the speech differed from what was in the manuscript. What was the phrase? – “I have a dream”.

1984 Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), a Nike basketball consultant, chats in a bar with U.S. Olympic team assistant coach George Raveling (Marlon Wayans), who was among Martin Luther King’s bodyguards in August 1963. The young athletic African American was twice at the right time in the right place: first, when he and his friends were called to keep order, then, when the legendary politician and human rights activist decided to respond to the words of admiration with a grand gesture. Raveling kept a draft of the speech for many years, over which King improvised the entire second “act” and the phrase about the dream that went down in history. He did not even sell the manuscript for $3 million (he ended up leasing it to Villanova University in 2021). As for Sonny Vaccaro, he also had something in the bar back then. Dream.

1984 is not the best year for Nike. Revenues are falling, eternal competitors Converse and Adidas are winning in the sneaker market: the former have contracts with all the stars of the NBA and the national team, the latter have the sympathy of young people who fervently incline the name of the German company. In a discussion of who to sign from the basketball league rookies, the first two positions are already occupied by competitors – you have to choose from those who remain (spoiler: there are future stars Charles Barkley and John Stockton, but the first one swears too much, the second played for Gonzaga College – everyone asks question, where is it at all). Sonny offers a knight’s move: let’s intercept Michael Jordan from Adidas? Everyone looks at him like he’s crazy, and Vaccaro is filled with confidence every hour that this guy from the University of North Carolina, who is not even two meters tall, will change basketball, and possibly the world.

After 40 years, it seems fantastic not the intuition of a tired man from Nike, but the fact that everyone around is showing common sense and is afraid to bet on a young man who has not yet played in the NBA for a minute. The issue price is $250,000, which the company wanted to spend on three neophytes. To us, who know how in 2002, 18-year-old LeBron James received $90 million from Nike for a seven-year contract before signing a “life” contract, the dilemma seems doubly surprising. And by the standards of 1984, a quarter of a million is not prohibitive money, and in the pocket of the non-stop meditating Phil Knight (Ben Affleck), the co-founder of Nike, there is definitely a larger amount: just look at his “grape” Porsche 911 Turbo. Sonny Vaccaro also guesses this – a man whose functionality at Nike no one fully understands: why is someone in business who understands sports? And no, Sonny doesn’t need a story to shake hands with Mike and Nike, the Air Jordan brand was born, Spike Lee made a witty sneaker commercial, and Ben Affleck decades later a film about how a legend, or even a whole scattering of legends, was born.

“Air: The Big Jump” is a production drama in which the result of the work of different shops is not just a contract, but a new social contract. Whatever the stars of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, who shone in Converse advertising, Michael Jordan became a symbol of a new era in basketball and sports in general, a milestone in the mythology of individualism and the American dream. A man who broke records and fought for every victory. It is not surprising that, having barely found himself in the field of attraction of brands and show business, he began to change the rules for himself. And Sonny Vaccaro is the man from the corporation who put the individual ahead of the brand. And he won: again, in a time when almost anyone can become a brand – in any case, the popularity of all social networks and new media is built on this mistake of a survivor – the step from glorious facelessness to individual greatness seems obvious.

Affleck and his longtime editor William Goldenberg, who has worked with Michael Mann (Fight, The Insider) and Tony Scott (Domino), masterfully create the atmosphere of the coming epochal paradigm shift. The frame is electrified by the labels of the titans of the era, from a song about MTV to selling shots of a Porsche, from an Apple commercial filmed by Ridley Scott with references to 1984, to snippets from Ghostbusters, Knight Rider and The A-Team. , from 7-Eleven cups and a Kodak sign to portable set-top boxes that flicker in between. The gods of consumerism, which, of course, includes Nika, after whom Nike was named, met a hero who will make them make room on Olympus. And the humble Sonny Vaccaro, who works for a running shoe company and always jokes that he, like most people around him, a 40-year-old white man in not the most athletic form, acts almost like a Prometheus. This isn’t the first or the last time he’s stolen a splinter of super-profits from a corporation to share with people who work hard on the sports field, but it’s definitely the brightest.

And already on top of this fundamental change there are all witty dialogues and bright small roles. Surely the biting text of the debutant screenwriter Alex Convery, in some places not inferior to the “plays” of Aaron Sorkin, would have sounded good without the dream team of Affleck’s friends. Jason Bateman, Viola Davis in the important role of Jordan’s mother, and the charming Chris Tucker, and Matthew Meher, who played sneaker-turned designer Pete Moore, and Damian Young’s brilliant appearance as the silent silhouette of His Airiness. However, talking about human brands with stars is always better – especially when it comes to a script written out of desperation. The fact is that Convery took on The Big Jump after the failure of the biopic about Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and milestone changes at Marvel publishing: that script went on the shelf, almost making it to launch due to copyright problems. And initially he planned to write fiction, something not related to real people and franchises, but the documentary series about Jordan “The Last Dance” came to hand – and Convery could not resist. The second time around, the puzzle came together: myths and legends, people and brands, Affleck and Damon. Is this not a dream?

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