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.
Sure, but you can’t help but think.
Owen: You’re 100 percent correct, and that’s why I wanted it to be as grounded as possible and be as accurate as possible. The prison scene, I got the idea for that talking to a friend of mine who’s a coach. I was telling him about the script, and I said, “In the movie, the kid’s dad is in prison.” He said, “Well, if I were recruiting him, I’m going to prison to talk to the dad. People are going to go talk to the dad in prison.”
The part about him being offered a chance to get out, I made up. But it seems plausible [laughs]. You know, they could have an alum on the parole board. I mean that they would promise it, not that they could necessarily do it. You just hear the stories of the lengths that these guys will go to to sign kids. So I included that in there something that is maybe a little broader, but the prison visit is actually very, very accurate. And obviously the promises now, of cars, and Lamborghinis and Ferraris — that’s well documented and happens now, for sure.
Champ Bailey executive produced this song. I’m curious about how that connection came about. On the other side of that, there are a lot of football players, and announcers, in this film. Could you talk about how that brings a little more authenticity to this story? I particularly loved seeing Marshawn Lynch.
Owen: One of our executive producers introduced us to Champ, and we really hit it off with him. He liked the script. He was looking to be involved in some media projects, and he really responded to the script. We clicked right away, and he’s been an amazing partner throughout this journey. He really helped us meet with investors, raise the early funding, and also help recruit talent. Without Champ, I’m not sure that we get Marshawn Lynch. Without Champ, we don’t get Richard Sherman and Charles Woodson. He definitely played a big part in helping to recruit other professional athletes to be a part of this, and also weigh in on the accuracy of the recruiting process. He was very highly recruited, and he could relate to a lot of these stories, and he felt like this was a good representation of the pressure that athletes feel when all this attention is placed on them.
And their families, too. I wanted to also talk about the casting on the flip side of that. I thought everyone was good, but someone who really stood out to me — and I think it’s because I haven’t seen her in much in a while — is Mira Sorvino. Could you talk a little bit about bringing these people together and finding the right actors to play these roles?
Owen: Michael Mosley, I’ve been following him for years, and had wanted to work with him after seeing him on the Netflix limited iseries “Seven Seconds.” I thought he was brilliant. I thought he could capture the right tone for the coach. I needed someone that had comedic chops, but it’s not a comedic role. Somebody that was grounded enough and relatable enough that you care about their journey. He was a wonderful get for us. Rob Morgan is another person who I really admire from seeing him in “Just Mercy.” His role in “Bull” was incredible. Everything he’s in, he really elevates it and brings you unique dimension, too.
I’ve always been a fan of Mira, and her manager found out about the script and showed it to her. They let us know that she really liked it and was interested in it. We were thrilled to find that out. Obviously, she’s an Oscar-winning actress, phenomenally talented — is amazing with accents? I mean, she had never played a character from the deep south before, but she asked me to record someone that had the exact accent that I was looking for, and she lived with that for a few weeks. We had that person read some of the lines so she could hear it, and then she came on set and it was really incredible. I grew up in the south, so I was very particular about wanting to get that accent right. She really nailed it.
She also is a really hilarious ad libber. Like the scene in the kitchen [where she tries to seduce Michael Mosley’s character], that was probably 75 percent her ad-lib. She came up with that on the spot. It was really, really funny. So, just a brilliant, brilliant actor. She brought so much to it, from the broader, wackier moments to the more grounded heartfelt moments, where you learn just how damaged and hurt she is and what she’s really going through. To just have that kind of range was phenomenal, and we were so lucky to have her be part of it.
It’s kind of a tricky role in a lot of ways, and I thought she managed to bring a lot of depth to it.
Owen: I mean, we’re walking that tightrope between some comedic levity and some heartfelt moments. Like real life. You have to have the right touch and actors who can pull that off. You’re right, it’s not easy. We were very blessed to have a super talented ensemble cast.
You mentioned that you worked on this for over a decade. How much did the script change from that initial first draft to the first day of the shoot?
Owen: We had interest from a studio in L.A., and I had some producers attached to it over the years, and we got close to getting it made a few times. [We] then just decided to bring it back to Georgia to raise the money on our own and really go the true indie route. Throughout that process, it definitely continued to evolve. I would get notes, and I continued to work on it and try to crack it and make it better and better. Over the years, I never just put it aside. It was constantly being worked on. Then when NIL began to emerge, I needed to add an NIL subplot to the story. That’s when I added the NIL component to the coach’s journey and to the player’s journey.
I think the timing of it is actually lucky in a way, because when I was trying to get it made 10 years ago, recruiting was a big story, but not like it is today. It wasn’t in the news as much as it is now. The NIL has become more and more part of the everyday conversation in these recruiting journeys. It’s brought a lot more attention. I think that’ll help us. I think now, there’s a lot more awareness and interest in college football recruiting in general.
Going from possibly having a studio lined up and being in that mindset, what is it like then shifting to, okay — we’re going to go indie. We’re going to raise the money on our own. What are the challenges associated with that?
Owen: It’s very challenging raising money. We didn’t have any cast attached. We had nothing. We had a dream to share with people, but that was about it. We would go meet with different potential investors, and slowly but surely, people started coming in with money for the project. It took a while. It took a couple of years, but I felt like we were taking things into our own hands and really taking control of it as opposed to waiting. That’s what I’ve done a lot of before — waiting for this to happen, or for that to happen, and then momentum would die down, and I had wasted a few years waiting around for a studio or for a producer in L.A. to get the project set up. It was a lot of hard work, but very gratifying, especially once we started making progress and we could see that we had a chance to get this thing made.
Obviously production everywhere is kind of down, and a lot of this film takes place in Alabama, but it’s nice to see Georgia representing the south, not New York, or L.A., or whenever it may be.
Owen: I know, right? I mean, all the producers are from Georgia. I grew up in Cartersville, I live in Atlanta. I’m from Georgia. All the investors are Georgia-based. It was shot in the Covington/Rutledge area, primarily. So this truly is Georgia through and through, and it’s super gratifying to be a part of that.