Preview
CHICKS WITH STICKS
Starring Jessalyn Gilsig, Margot Kidder and Jason Priestley
Directed by Kari Scogland
Monday, September 27
Globe Cinema
Chicks with Sticks is a hockey film that is chock full of local flavour. It opens with the audio of Calgary radio icon Peter Maher calling the play-by-play of a Flames game. The majority of the movie’s hockey scenes were shot in our city’s Sarcee Seven Chiefs Sportsplex. And the movie is set in nearby Okotoks, with much footage shot in that town and the neighbouring communities of Black Diamond and Turner Valley.
For Chicks With Sticks screenwriter Don Truckey, it was gratifying to see the placement of the film come full circle. "When you put together a movie like this you’ve got to find both a physical location and a psychic location," says Truckey, who was born and raised in a small community north of Edmonton called Westlock. "Psychically for me it was always a smallish place in Alberta, near a much larger city."
But when it came to putting words on paper, Truckey, now a Toronto resident, had to renvision the locale. "Because I was thinking I would have to get it produced out of Ontario, I initially set it in Sarnia," he says. "It’s a pretty rough working-class town close to Michigan. In fact, at one point I even jumped the story over the bridge and it was set in Port Huron, Michigan."
The screenplay, originally written back in 1998 under the title Paula’s Power Play, was shopped around for quite some time. It instantly became a hot commodity when the Canadian women’s hockey team won the Olympic Gold Medal in the winter of 2002. Shortly after that, the film got the go ahead for production and the process of selecting a location was set in motion.
"One of the realities of making this kind of project is that the broadcasters and the source of the money tend to dictate the location," says Truckey. "I was delighted it was coming back to Alberta because that’s where it originally came from in my head."
It seems that, whenever someone is putting together a sports movie, the story that gets told is that of an underdog rising up from humble surroundings to capture glory. Chicks With Sticks is no exception. The story is built around Paula Taymor, a single mom with a seven-year-old son, who narrowly missed out on a past chance to play hockey in the Olympics. Paula has financial troubles and an uneasy relationship with her unseen ex-husband. In response to taunting from male recreation-league players, Paula uses the challenge to put together a women’s squad that can beat the local men’s hockey team.
While preparing for the game Paula must deal with an unruly bunch of mismatched players, illegal roster tampering by her male opponents and her son’s growing feelings of abandonment. The drama is capably linked together by director Kari Skogland wirh strong performances by Jessalyn Gilsig as Paula, Margot Kidder as her straight talking mother, Juliette Marquis as a hard edged ex-con goaltender and Jason Priestey as our heroine’s blue collar love interest.
Screenwriter Don Truckey knows how to handle a sports movie, having cut his teeth as a co-writer on the critically acclaimed 1996 TV hockey flick Net Worth. He also co-wrote, with Graeme Manson, the Canadian ski team bio film Crazy Canucks, which is also part of this year’s Calgary International Film Festival.
While predictably the screenplay for Chicks with Sticks was tweaked and changed many times from its long ago inception up to the beginning of the shoot, Truckey is grateful that the heart of the story comes out intact. "These things always get out of your hands at a certain point," he says, "but it was always a story of a woman who almost made it. She didn’t get there (to the Olympics) and has never been able to live it down. Then when a challenge comes along from a bunch of men, she can’t resist. That’s key to the story and that was always there." |
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