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y n o p i s Johnny Pigskin tells the story of an eighteen-year-old Kiowa boy, Running Wind, who was forcibly removed from his tribe’s reservation in Oklahoma and sent to the Haskell Indian Boarding School in Lawrence, Kansas. Upon arriving at the school, he was assigned the name Johnny, and, against his wishes, was forced to play the “White Man’s” sport of football. Because of his extraordinary running speed and prowess carrying the ball, he was nicknamed “Johnny Pigskin.” Based on the true story of the Haskell team that played Notre Dame in football in 1914, Johnny Pigskin is also the story of Coach Burt Kennedy, who was fired as head coach of the Kansas University football team and went across town, volunteered his time, and molded a group of high school Indians from different warring tribes into a national-caliber team. Coach Kennedy, who still has the best win-loss percentage of any Kansas University football, helped make football a source of great pride for not only the Haskell students, but also for Indian tribes around the country. Football became so important to Native Americans that over 80 tribes gathered in Lawrence for the dedication of the Haskell Football Stadium in 1926, at that time, the largest gathering of different tribes in history. But Johnny Pigskin is also about the day-to-day struggle to survive at the boarding school; about an inter-tribal love triangle between Johnny, his best friend Bird Maguire, Kickapoo, and Bird’s girlfriend Maggie Bigfire, Osage; about the Harvard-trained Iroquois assistant coach Henry LeClair, who struggled trying to integrate European intellectualism with tribal spiritual life; and about Arthur, the huge Apache disciplinarian (known as Big Butt) who joined the team and re-channelled his anger into crushing the opponents. The script for Johnny Pigskin, written by Tom Carmody and JT O’Neal, has won numerous awards in national screenplay competitions, including: • Semifinalist, 2005 Austin Film Festival (top 28 scripts out of 4,300 submitted) • Finalist, 2004 Cinequest Film Festival • Finalist, 2004 Great Plains Film Festival • Semifinalist, 2004 American Accolades Screenplay Competition • Official Selection, 2003 IFP Market, New York City Richard Walter, chair of the prestigious UCLA Screenwriting Program, commented on the script: “Johnny Pigskin manages to take on Native Americans and the clash of cultures without being preachy and cliché-ridden. There’s first rate craft here across the board: character, tale, dialogue. Truly a remarkable accomplishment.” |