This terrific interview with Don Johnson over at Grantland went careening under my radar as we barreled into the long weekend last week, but thankfully noted Internet archivist Andrew Sharp went back and dug it up to point out something very important: Don Johnson has written a series about a renegade college football coach who recruits a team full of lawbreakers. And it’s set in the 1980s. And he’s gonna star in it.
You’ve gotten to do some great stuff on TV recently. Eastbound & Down is one of my favorite shows.
Well, that’s funny. I hadn’t even seen the show, and they sent me the script, and my agent said, “Oh no, you gotta see this!” And I watched it and I was like, “Wow! These guys are doing some edgy cool sh*t!” And I thought, I can make this even more outrageous than what they’ve written. I went down there and it was like putting on a comfortable pair of blue jeans. I’ve actually written something that [Eastbound codirector] David Gordon Green is attached to direct. I’m gonna do it for streaming.
Oh, cool. What’s that?
It’s called Score and it’s set in the ’80s, and it’s about the rise of big-time college football. I play this outrageous f*cking coach who breaks all the rules and recruits basically criminals and everybody else and shoots the finger [extends middle finger in my direction] to the NCAA. I wrote it in October and I wanna get it financed completely so I can go to the marketplace without layers and layers of executives and bureaucrats. In my mind if you’re not bringing something to the dance, but you’re taking a big chunk of the cash, I got no room for you.
A few notes:
- Yes.
- This basically sounds like Blue Chips meets The Program meets Miami Vice, starring Don Johnson, in collaboration with one of the guys from Eastbound and Down.
- YES.
Also, I don’t know if any of you have access to Getty images, but if you do, please — PLEASE — go back and look through the archive of Don Johnson photos from the 1980s. I mean…
