There are many aspects of NBA star Kobe Bryant's life that could be movie material. His relationship with wife Vanessa, his tragic death in a helicopter crash, his childhood, or his prowess on the basketball courts during his heyday.
Now, there's a new movie in the works about Bryant, and there's even a script. But it focuses on a lesser-known moment in the late basketball star's life.
The script has been described as a cross between the movies Air and Moneyball, according to Variety, which revealed that Warner Bros. has obtained the spec script.
The script by Alex Sohn and Gavin Johannsen is called "With the 8th Pick?" and it focuses on the draft day in which Bryant, surprisingly, wasn't chosen at the top. The title doesn't refer to Bryant being chosen with the 8th pick, though, because he was the 13th pick in the 1996 NBA Draft. It's more complicated.
The Charlotte Hornets, not the Lakers, chose him, and then traded him to the Lakers for Vlade Divac, according to Variety.
The movie is perhaps a reverse of Air, which celebrates a famously good decision to recruit a young Michael Jordan for a Nike advertising campaign. It sounds like an obvious choice now, but it wasn't at the time.
In the Bryant draft scenario, the team with the 8th draft pick (the New Jersey Nets) failed to choose Bryant, who obviously ended up becoming an NBA legend for a different team, the L.A. Lakers.
The New Jersey Nets GM John Nash wanted to draft Bryant, but the plan fell apart, according to Variety.
According to Deadline, the movie script tells the story of Nash and Nets coach John Calipari. They wanted Bryant, but they didn't have the money to make the plan work, and Bryant was a Lakers' fan.
Had they prevailed, the move would have changed NBA history and the course of Bryant's life, and the movie script focuses on this critical decision-making juncture. In addition to Air, the movie is also being compared to The Social Network, which showed Mark Zuckerberg's development of Facebook.