Double Dribble

In the script by Scot Armstrong (Old School, Road Trip),
the Flint Tropics, Michigan’s on-the-skids hoops franchise, is about to
be among the ABA teams that will be dissolved during the 1976 merger
with the NBA. Only four teams with the strongest media market shares
are being considered for melding with the NBA, and the Tropics—with
home-game attendance numbering in the 90s and cheesy promotional
gimmicks such as Free Corndog Night—seem like a sure goner. 

Nothing but net-wits: Will Ferrell (with teammates Woody Harrelson and Andre Benjamin) in Semi-Pro.

But there’s no quit in Jackie Moon
(Ferrell), who bought the team with his earnings from the early
rhythm’n’blues-meets-disco hit “Love Me Sexy” (which Ferrell croons
several times on the soundtrack, replete with Barry White-styled groovy
grunts). As owner, coach, power forward and promotions guru, Moon
fights for the Tropics’ chance to be recognized by the NBA, but he
needs more than his star player Clarence “Downtown” (later “Coffee
Black”) Withers (Outkast’s Andre Benjamin, wearing a ’fro for the
occasion) to reach that goal. So Moon trades the team’s washing machine
to get Monix (Woody Harrelson, a veteran of sports comedies like Kingpin, Play It to the Bone and White Men Can’t Jump),
currently an ABA washout, although he once rode the bench with the
Boston Celtics and earned an NBA championship ring in the process.

Ferrell might view Semi-Pro as a companion piece to his 2004 comedy Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, since both are awash with period flourishes from the 1970s. Semi-Pro
has its share of cultural touchstones, with everything from wide lapels
and leisure suits to fondue pots, pong video and Swedish porn, along
with an anything-goes sense of hedonism (“We’re about to enter the
nation of gyration!” Jackie yells from a club’s deejay booth) that
naturally extended to motion pictures. As Jackie cruises past a theater
marquee, viewers will realize that only in the 1970s would Hollywood
have ever released a movie titled Mother, Jugs and Speed. 

Semi-Pro occasionally strives for the go-for-the-gusto profanity of the neo-classic hockey comedy Slap Shot
(1977), yet more often it adheres to the now-standard template of most
Ferrell flicks, wherein the goofball falls from grace and somehow
manages a redemptive return—and first-time director Kent Alterman isn’t
going to spoil that dependable character arc. Plenty of laughs are also
generated by a select group of second bananas that have either played
on Ferrell’s team in the past or are outstanding comic riffers in their
own right: Andy Richter as the team’s manager, Will Arnett and Andrew
Daly as play-by-play commentators, David Koechner as the ABA
commissioner and Rob Corddry as Monix’s biggest fan. 

Alterman can’t do much with the sideline romance between Monix and his former flame Lynn (ER’s
Maura Tierney), an obligatory time-killer that not even a randy detour
can perk up. But he’s pretty good at allowing individual comic
sequences to flourish, such as Jackie experiencing a meltdown (he even
bites himself!) when he first learns about the ABA merger, and a
memorable card game in which Tim Meadows hurls the no-no epithet, “jive
turkey,” to cue a nutty combination of Joe Pesci’s “Do you think I’m
funny?” rant from GoodFellas with The Deer Hunter’s Russian roulette interlude.

While Semi-Pro lacks the comic consistency of Anchorman or Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,
the movie’s foul-mouthed yet good-natured silliness does make its
now-prescient points. When Jackie, garbed in a tropical sun costume,
instructs his team to run around in sea monkey garb, he declares,
“Entertainment is the future of basketball!” It’s all played for
laughs—until you realize that gorillas, train conductors, oranges and
other mascots are currently scampering amid stadium aisles. And look
how long it took for pro basketball to wise up regarding that 3-point
shot. It’s sure not the widest audience demographic, yet Semi-Pro is the cinematic salute that ABA aficionados have been waiting three decades to embrace.

New Line Home Entertainment has a
single-disc DVD available, but Ferrell fans will surely want all the
bells and whistles that come with the double-disc edition. The first
disc features two viewing options, both in the letterboxed (2.35:1
ratio) format: the 91-minute theatrical feature and an unrated,
98-minute “let’s get sweaty” cut that adds more naughty stuff that
probably should have been integrated into the multiplex version. Most
of the bonus footage is included in the film’s first half, including a
longer bus ride sequence with some topless cheesecake added and an
alternate scene featuring Jackie Moon’s harlot housewife providing some
locker-room encouragement. 

The second disc’s extras include a
seven-minute history of the ABA, with fleeting vintage TV clips of
players in action (few ABA games were actually televised) and comments
from ABA veterans Jonas Silas, George Gervin and Artis Gilmore; a
six-minute glimpse at Flint’s location work; three minutes with Bill
Walton, who came on the set for an ESPN piece, ended up wearing an
old-school wig created by movie hairstylist Bridget Cook, then listened
to Alterman’s funny recollection of his teenhood as an obnoxious
“baseline bum” for the San Antonio Spurs; 13 minutes devoted to the
film’s meticulous recreation of the ABA era, which included a four-week
training camp conducted by basketball coordinator Mark Ellis (Harrelson
can be seen making shots sans hairpiece); and a 24-minute
behind-the-scenes overview with director Alterman and his crew.

But wait, there’s more: a six-minute
vignette on the creation of the “Love Me Sexy” song, which started as a
Ferrell riff during a table read and wound up as a retro-flavored
lampoon produced by Chic maestro Nile Rodgers (a two-minute music video
is also included); five minutes of trailers; promotional clips from the
movie’s Web site, with faux interviews between Andrew Daly’s
Pepperfield and Ferrell’s Moon (note the horizontal video dropouts and
blanched color scheme used in these replications); and 15 minutes of
cutting-room segments, which run the gamut from a discarded postscript
narrated by Bob Costas to a scene featuring Harrelson’s hoops career
slide with sideline heckling from a drunk (an uncredited Amy Sedaris)
to Ferrell’s endless riffing when his Jackie Moon endures a makeup
crisis and writhes on the hardwood floor (“That’ll teach me to buy
eyeliner on the street!”).