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While Glen Owen did play basketball at the University of Georgia, he didn’t experience the intense recruitment process that we all hear madcap stories about today. But, his friends on the football team did, and years later, that inspired the Cartersville native to write “Signing Tony Raymond.”
The film follows Walt McFadden (Michael Mosley), a talented but down-on-his-luck assistant coach looking to prove himself by signing the number one prospect in the country, Tony Raymond (Jackie Kay). The problem is, Tony has all but disappeared, hiding from recruiters promising grand NIL deals and more in his tiny, rural Alabama hometown. Walt — along with every other college coach in the country — descends upon the town to find him.
The film also stars Mira Sorvino, Rob Morgan, Charles Esten, and several real football players such as Marshawn Lynch and Brian Bosworth. In addition to being written and directed by a Georgia native, “Signing Tony Raymond” was made in Georgia and features a homegrown producing team, including John Thomas and Kristy Clabaugh of Southern Isles Pictures, and Owen and Don Mandrik of State Line Films. The film is executive produced by Champ Bailey, a former Georgia Bulldog and NFL Hall of Famer.
Ahead of the film’s release this weekend, Rough Draft Atlanta spoke with Owen about the making of the film. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I’d love to hear a little bit about your background, both yourself and also in film. I know you’ve got a sports background, so I assume you’re drawn to sports stories.
Glen Owen: I played basketball in college. I finished up playing at the University of Georgia, where I didn’t play a lot [laughs]I was a walk-on there, but still made a lot of friends. We were on a really good team, so it was a really fun experience for me. After college, I started working in the sports promotion department at TNT. I was associate creative director there for sports promotion and wrote NBA campaigns, NFL campaigns. I came up with the tagline “Win. Or Go Home” for the NBA Playoffs. That was a really great experience. I was able to write and direct and oversee the edit on a number of projects. I did that for a few years, and then embarked on a career directing TV commercials and branded content for brands across the country.
Fifteen years ago, I began writing screenplays. At night, I would work on scripts and try and realize my dream of directing movies. That began back then, and I wrote the first draft of [what was then called]“Signing Day” about 15, 16 years ago. It’s been a long journey to get it made, but that’s been the path. I’ve also directed a couple of documentaries. I’m working on one now for Warner Sports. It’ll air during March Madness. My wife and I wrote a feature together a few years ago during COVID and sold it to BET, and I was able to direct that. That was the first feature that I got to direct, that she and I wrote together, and “Signing Tony Raymond” would be the second narrative feature.
Where did this idea come from? Coming up, playing basketball at UGA, were you ever on the opposite side of something like this. Because the flip side of that is, recruiting has changed quite a bit in the past 15 years.
Owen: Great, great point. It has, and it hasn’t in some ways. I mean, there’s always been a lot of money being thrown around and enticement for recruits. It’s just now it’s all in the open, whereas before you had to hide it. I definitely never experienced that. I was very lightly recruited [laughs], so I was not on the receiving end of those types of offers. But at Georgia, I was friends with a lot of the football players, and I would hear their stories about being recruited. I think that planted the seed in my head.
I wanted to start writing a script, and I knew the sports world. I actually read a story about a kid in Florida, a highly recruited defensive tackle, I think, that turned down a scholarship to the University of Florida and other places because he wanted to be a motorcycle mechanic. He was tired of playing football, and I thought that was really interesting to explore kind of the flip side of what the recruiting process does, especially to a player that doesn’t love it as much. To explore that, I came up with the idea of a coach who has to endure all these misadventures to find a kid that’s gone into hiding and is trying to hide from all the pressure. The coach has to do whatever he can to find him to save his career. So they’re both on these parallel journeys of finding their true calling.
Jumping off that into recruiting, the inside baseball of it all — there are a lot of things in this movie where someone offers to get someone’s dad out of prison, or buy someone a Mercedes, whatever it may be. How true to life is that? Is that close to the sort of stories you would hear talking to football players when you were playing basketball?
Owen: That’s a great question, and I’ll just preface it by saying I never intended for this to be an exposé about college football recruiting.
Read in full at RoughDraft Atlanta
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