In Twenty 20-Fav, we’re spending 2025 examining the work of actor/director Jon Favreau. This week, we review Leatherheads, an old-timey football comedy directed by and starring George Clooney, and specifically not Jon Favreau.
This week’s entry is admittedly a bit of a detour. Released in April of 2008, Leatherheads had at one time been written by Jon Favreau. But, as often happens in Hollywood, the script sat around for years and got rewritten a couple times before finally seeing the light of day. When it finally did get released, Favreau was no longer credited as a screenwriter. Despite such a tenuous connection, Leatherheads is worth examining as a case study in how a script can survive two decades of revisions and drafts from multiple writers and still result in an absolute turd. But before we can talk about the film as it exists, I think it’s worth taking a look at how it came to be.
DEVELOPMENT
Leatherheads began as the brainchild of Duncan Brantley, a one-time writer for Sports Illustrated. In 1986 he started compiling notes on the life of Johnny “Blood” McNally, who played in the NFL from 1925 to 1941. Brantley thought McNally’s life, along with the early days of pro football, would make a great movie, and began working on a screenplay with fellow SI journalist Rick Reilly. Brantley originally envisioned Leatherheads as a comedy about the fly-by-night lifestyle of those early football teams and the players forced to pack themselves into train cars like sardines and pound each other into the mud over and over again. (Sounds kinda like last week’s feature, if you ask me.)
Brantley and Reilly began work on the script in earnest in 1991. By 1993 they had a full treatment ready to shop around Hollywood, where it came to the attention of Steven Soderbergh. At the time, Soderbergh was riding high off the success of his indie hit sex, lies & videotape, and was able to sell the script to Universal Studios head honcho Casey Silver1. Silver also saw potential in the concept, and set about tweaking and reworking the script to get it just right. This, presumably, is where Jon Favreau comes in, as he was hired to do a rewrite based on the strength of Swingers sometime in 1996. Favreau refashioned Leatherheads into more of a dramatic biopic à la Rudy, with Jonathan Mostow attached to direct. Details on what happened to that draft are sparse, so one can only conclude that this version quietly fizzled while everyone moved on to other projects. It happens.
Steven Soderbergh, fresh off a critical hit with Out of Sight, returned to the project after bringing it to the attention of his Out of Sight star, George Clooney. Soderbergh once again saw the potential of the script, and the two began reworking it away from the dramatic turn of Favreau’s draft and more into the screwball comedy it would eventually become. Clooney and Soderbergh would soon become two of the hottest commodities in Hollywood thanks to Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels, meaning their little football comedy would have to wait. After doing a handful of heavier, issue-driven films back to back (Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana, The Good German, and Michael Clayton all landed a couple years apart), Clooney was ready to pivot and do something lighter. Leatherheads was ready and waiting.
(It’s also worth mentioning that all of this is of particular interest to me, because not only was Leatherheads produced in and around my hometown, but the original writer, Duncan Brantley, is a local boy as well2. The character of Carter Rutherford is named after the town of Rutherfordton, NC, where Brantley grew up, and incidentally also where I lived for a time as a toddler. I genuinely did not know any of this when I decided to cover Leatherheads in this column; it’s just a neat little coincidence!)
SO ANYWAY, LET’S REVIEW LEATHERHEADS
This film is as inessential as inessential fluff gets. Whatever intention they may have had to tell the story of the birth of the pro football or the life of Johnny Blood or whatever instantly went down the toilet when George Clooney said “I want to do a romantic comedy, but not like all those other romantic comedies.”3 Leatherheads is a 1930s-style screwball romantic comedy with the veneer of an old-timey sports movie stretched across it like an ill-fitting football jersey. It does neither of these things particularly well.
Clooney plays Dodge Connelly, the captain of the Duluth, Minnesota Bulldogs. The team, and the league as a whole, are falling on hard times, and along with his publicist (Stephen Root) and coach (Wayne Duvall4), Connelly hatches a scheme to get fans in the stands: Recruit college football phenom and war hero Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski) to play for the Bulldogs. The hope is that they’ll attract the kinds of crowds that turn out in droves for the college circuit. Rutherford’s World War I story of single-handedly forcing an entire regiment of German soldiers to surrender has made him a national hero, which attracts the attention of Chicago Tribune reporter Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellweger). She decides to tag along with the team across the season, intent on sussing out whether or not Rutherford’s is a case of stolen valor. And, of course, along the way, a love triangle blossoms between Connelly, Littleton and Rutherford.
There are three distinct stories going on here, and the movie never seems quite sure which thread to follow. Connelly’s story finds him on the brink of retirement, scrambling to find a way to keep his struggling team financially afloat. This, to me, would seem to be the main dramatic trust of the movie, but we lose sight of it the moment sparks start to fly between Clooney and Zellweger. Lexie Littleton’s story finds her climbing the corporate ladder at her newspaper, determined to expose Rutherford’s boyish charm for the carefully built lie she suspects it is. Meanwhile, Rutherford finds himself the well-meaning rube stuck trying to keep his head above water.
The well-meaning rube/hungry newsgirl angle feels like it could have been the plot of an entirely different movie. And, in fact, it already is. It’s almost beat for beat the exact plot of The Hudsucker Proxy, the Coen brothers’ 1994 screwball relic about another well-meaning rube and the newsgirl determined to expose him. The difference is that Clooney & Co. aren’t nearly as determined—or able, for that matter—to replicate the fast-talking, wisecracking patter that the Coens mastered in Proxy.
The film completely loses its way in the middle act, when we’re busy following Connelly and Littleton running from a bunch of Keystone Cops, and Littleton’s reporting dragging her in front of press conferences and congressional hearings, and… Is any of this important? I was under the impression this was a movie about football. The urge to turn it into a screwball comedy away from the gridiron brings the whole thing to a complete dead stop.
I can appreciate George Clooney wanting to do something light and silly after so many years as Hollywood’s go-to dramatic A-lister. What I have to wonder is whether the whole “chronicling the birth of the NFL” angle was really there to begin with, or if it just made for a convenient elevator pitch. Because we really don’t learn much about the origins of the league itself, only that at some point in 1925 (when the film takes place), the league was forced to appoint a commissioner whose sole job was enforcing rules upon the sport. The teams immediately bristle at the new set of rules, which ban the kind of playbook trickery that the teams had cut their teeth on.
The result is a climactic game that is almost purposefully anticlimactic, leaving Leatherheads feeling like it wasted an hour of our time before suddenly remembering what it was about right before the credits roll. If Clooney’s intention was to suggest that rules and regulations were ruining the sport, maybe that should’ve been the whole point of the movie in the first fucking place. Leave all the nonsense about war heroes and news reporters alone, or just go make a different movie. There’s plenty of potential in a goofy football throwback movie, but Leatherheads sure as hell ain’t it.
What brings this down in the end is knowing what could have been. Starting life as a well-researched period piece, Leatherheads had the potential to be something truly unique: a silly, laser-focused comedy about the muddy, ass-backwards origins of the NFL. Even Jon Favreau’s ill-fated draft—which reportedly pivoted toward the dramatic—could have been compelling. Instead, Leatherheads feels like a vanity project for George Clooney, who seemed more interested in playing 1920s dress-up and doing his best Clark Gable impression. (He’d eventually get to make his dramatic sports biopic in 2023 with The Boys in the Boat. It, too, is merely okay.) As it stands, Leatherheads is a smartly dressed tableau of 1920s football culture, but it completely fumbles as both a comedy and period piece.5
THE FAVREAU DIMENSION
As a finished product, Leatherheads bears none of Favreau’s fingerprints. His involvement dates back to 1996 when, right after Swingers, Favreau was suddenly in-demand and took any job Hollywood threw at him. That included penning a draft of Leatherheads. This LA Times profile on Favreau from October 1996 describes his draft of the script as in-progress. It also mentions that he was looking to direct another screenplay of his titled “The Marshal of Revelation,” which would apparently feature “a Hasidic gunfighter in the Old West”. Unfortunately, we with the gift of hindsight know that this film never happened. But man, oh man, do I hope it does someday.
FINAL RATING
1.5 stars (out of 5). S’not so good.
NEXT TIME: We’re driving with the top down.
- This 2008 Hollywood Reporter interview with Casey Silver goes into more detail.
↩︎ - Here’s two local news articles about Duncan Brantley: The first from the Spartanburg, SC Herald-Journal. The second from the Wilmington, NC Star News.
↩︎ - That’s not explicitly what he said in this interview with IGN, but that’s gist of it.
↩︎ - Root and Duvall both co-starred with Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou?
↩︎ - I’m so sorry, the SEO police would string me up if I didn’t make the obvious sports pun right there. ↩︎
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