The trailer for "Concussion," a Will Smith project due out in December, hypes the clash between forensic pathologist Bennet Omalu, who studied brain injury in football players, and the National Football League, which sought to cover up his research. "Repetitive head trauma chokes the brain," Omalu declares. He is warned about "going to war with a corporation that owns a day of the week."
Sony Pictures' release of the trailer two weeks ago was no doubt a headache for league executives. They want fans focused on the excitement of the season, which swings into high gear this weekend — not on the more than 200 diagnosed concussions NFL players will suffer this year or the neurological damage those players may endure later in life.
But it turns out those league executives may have less to fear than they originally might have. As hacked Sony emails reveal, studio execs and the film's crew discussed ways to alter the movie to avoid incurring the NFL's wrath. Rather than dramatizing the "concerted effort of deception and denial" related to concussions, in the words of the nearly 5,000 former players who sued the NFL in federal court, the script was massaged — allegedly — to spotlight the intrepid doctor who became a whistleblower. "We'll develop messaging with the help of N.F.L. consultant to ensure that we are telling a dramatic story and not kicking the hornet's nest," one Sony executive pledged.
If the studio did indeed soften its approach, that decision represents more than a capitulation to the sacred cow (or bull) that is pro football. It's the latest example of the powerful symbiosis between the dream merchants of Hollywood and the ones who preside over America's most popular and profitable sport. For years, filmmakers have used the violence of football, and the threat of serious brain injuries specifically, as a dramatic hook. A familiar pattern plays out: The audience is teased with the possibility of on-the-field death or paralysis, then magically relieved of that burden.
Consider the arc of "Heaven Can Wait," a critically acclaimed 1978 comedy. Warren Beatty plays a star quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams named Joe Pendleton who is mistakenly transported to the afterlife. To account for this error, an angel must find Joe a new body to occupy. In the film's climactic scene, the Rams are playing in the Super Bowl when tragedy strikes: Joe's backup, Tom Jarrett, is killed on a brutal play.
But rather than forcing audiences to consider the galling prospect of such a calamity, Jarrett's death provides Joe a remarkably convenient opportunity to inhabit a new body. The corpse is thus resurrected. Jarrett rises and jogs onto the field (looking a lot like Warren Beatty), and leads the Rams to victory. The notion that a pro player might die during a game was hardly far-fetched. The summer the movie came out, a wide receiver named Darryl Stingley was paralyzed after being blindsided during a preseason game.
"Jerry Maguire," the 1996 schmaltzfest starring Tom Cruise as a hard-charging sports agent, turns on the same sort of narrative abracadabra. Maguire's lone client, a voluble wide receiver named Rod Tidwell, catches a pivotal touchdown, only to receive a vicious hit. He lies on the turf, unconscious and unmoving, for half a minute. The stadium grows hushed with dread.
Fear not, gentle viewer! Tidwell awakens and, showing no apparent signs of the brain trauma he just suffered, begins to mug and caper for the cameras, eventually climbing into the stands to commune with adoring fans.
One of the most violent football sequences can be found in the 1991 action film "The Last Boy Scout." Helmets crunch and players grunt as they make contact in the opening scene. At one point, we see a fleeting shot of a player being wheeled off the field on a gurney. What happens to him? Never mind. The action shifts to a star running back who, in a drug-induced psychosis, brings a gun onto the field and shoots three defenders, then himself.
That brings us to another common trope of football movies. When players do die, it's never because they play football. Instead, in several movies based on true stories, they are struck down by cruel fate. As famously portrayed by a young Ronald Reagan in the 1940 cornball classic "Knute Rockne, All American," Notre Dame halfback George Gipp is laid low by a fatal illness and exhorts his teammates to "win one for the Gipper." Similarly, Brian Piccolo, hero of the 1971 tearjerker "Brian's Song," dies of cancer. In "We Are Marshall," a 2006 drama, an entire college football squad is killed in a plane crash, and the program is rebuilt by a heroic coach played by Matthew McConaughey.
There are rare exceptions to this pattern. Oliver Stone's "Any Given Sunday" is a drama of exasperating bombast, but it captures the rotten ethics at the heart of pro football: nihilistic owners ready to sacrifice their employees for a championship ring, cynical doctors turned enablers, players addicted to painkillers and eager to chase glory to an early grave.
But for the most part, what Hollywood sells to its moviegoers is exactly what the NFL peddles to its fans every Sunday: magical thinking. The childish notion that giant men can smash into one another hundreds of times — head-first and at full speed — without their bodies and brains suffering profound injury.
Over the past decade, medical researchers have exploded this myth by compiling an incontrovertible body of evidence.
Steve Almond is the author of "Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto."