Don Truckey Scores Again

Don Truckey reveals his jock side in the MOWs Chicks With Sticks and The Crazy Canucks.

By Marc Glassman

He hasn't played competitive hockey since high school, but Don Truckey strides into the room looking very much like an athlete. Talk to him for a while though, and the picture of Truckey as jock is shattered. He is a natural storyteller, with an attention to detail and a relish for anecdote.

With one MOW posting this spring and another being shot, Truckey can look to 2004 as a banner year. The two projects–Chicks With Sticks and The Crazy Canucks–have been in the Alberta-born screenwriter's computer for years. And both deal with sports, which he's loved since his youth. Truckey describes them as “underdog stories with upbeat endings”–a motif he clearly enjoys.

While Truckey risks being stereotyped as Canada's jock screenwriter for doing two sports-themed MOWs in one year (and with a sports-related kids' novel in the works too), the stories are very different. Chicks With Sticks is a funny, almost raunchy tale of brilliant hockey player and Olympian manqué Paula Taymore, a single mother who puts together a female team tough and skilful enough to beat Canadian men at their own game.

Truckey conceived the tale years before the Canadian women's hockey team won gold against the Americans at the Salt Lake City Olympics.

At root, he says, the film is about “regaining dignity. Paula had gambled and lost and couldn't live it down: she'd almost made the Olympic team, but she hadn't. She was challenged as a person, a woman, a mother. I love dealing with the idea of excellence–somebody who's good at something but didn't quite get there. Paula's was a self-fulfillment story. 'I had a shot, I didn't quite get it, I'm never going to fall in love again.' And then along it comes. She can't resist, because it's an assault on her dignity that people say, 'You guys can't really play this game'–and it's a man saying it…That was a big hill to climb, and that's what the movie is still about, many drafts and many years later.”

Two out of three ain't bad

Truckey found Chicks With Sticks particularly challenging to write because most of the characters are women. “The film is about three things: hockey, small towns and women. Two out of the three I understand perfectly.” Truckey grew up in the town of Westlock, Alberta, and he's written about hockey before. The 1996 MOW Net Worth, on which he shares a writing credit with Phil Savath, Allison Griffiths and David Cruise, is about the tragic story of Ted Lindsay's attempt to form a union of hockey players during the deeply conservative 1950s. The film won four Geminis.

So Truckey's depiction in Chicks With Sticks of life in a rural community dominated by machismo and sports was nowhere near as tough as creating Paula Taymore.

Taymore, played by Jessalyn Gilsig, is a complex character, haunted by demons. She never played for the Olympic hockey team, ostensibly because of an accident that forced her to go back home. Her motivation for taking on the challenge of beating a hometown men's team goes beyond the obvious war between the sexes. She has something to prove to herself and her family.

“Paula is back home, starting up from zero,” says Truckey. Well, nearly zero. She has a lively seven-year-old boy, Stewart; a cool, if controlling, mom, Edith; and a brother, Ross, who still recruits her for hockey games. Clearly, Paula is a woman who is haunted by her past but also possesses talent and a trusting, if unusual family. In a casting coup, Margot Kidder plays Edith and the scenes between her and Gilsig resonate with a natural depth and emotion.

Giving Taymore a quirky, slightly dysfunctional family adds drama to Truckey's tale. “It gives us more pep,” he says. “Edith wasn't initially Paula's mother and Ross wasn't her brother. They were condensed into a family. It's a bit trite, but I can't deny that you get more collisions when you put people together like that. You give them fewer outs. You want them to face up to things. It ties more into a female world, where you've got people together in more emotional situations.”

Apart from Truckey and one significant male performer (Jason Priestley) Chicks With Sticks is, appropriately enough, dominated by women. It's produced by Debbie Nightingale of the Nightingale Company and Nancy Laing of Earth to Sky, and directed by Kari Skogland.

The film's key broadcasters are The Movie Network, Movie Central, and Alberta's A Channel, and they have also expressed some interest in turning the film into a series.

Truckey says he's already mapped out a season of 13 in his mind, and he hopes that if the series happens the shows will be half hours. “Doing an hour requires a huge machine. It takes a lot of people and a lot of money. And you're wiped out in the end. What I want to do is a more contained, simpler show. You can get a lot of compression and a lot of story into a half hour. You need a high concept organizing device, which is what I'm proposing: it's around hockey.” Instead of concentrating on long arcs that may be meaningless to an audience who hasn't followed every episode, Truckey describes his philosophy as: “Give us a good hard zappy story for that half hour.”

See the Spring 2004 issue of Canadian Screenwriter for the complete interview.