“So between us, we land somewhere in the middle.”Ī: Exactly. “I have the most unstable job in existence,” he told me the other day. Convery retains sole screenwriting credit for “Air,” thanks to Affleck’s impulse to help a talented newcomer.Ĭonvery and his wife, a Veterans Affairs pharmacist, live in Venice Beach, California. Chris Tucker came on board as Nike exec Howard White Marlon Wayans joined the ensemble as George Raveling, the player turned coach and, as Jordan said in 2015, the guy who actually pushed Jordan into considering Nike over Converse or Adidas for a shoe deal. Others who weren’t in it originally ended up with a piece of the narrative. Convery’s version underwent an Affleck rewrite and, at Jordan’s request - in “Air” we see the superstar only in long shot, usually just off-camera, or in archival footage - several characters were beefed up (his mother, Deloris Jordan, for example Jordan encouraged the casting of Viola Davis).
Not that the “Air” script sailed through unchanged. Suddenly (or finally) Convery went from unproduced to produced, by way of Affleck and Damon’s production company Artists Equity. The writer found a champion through Mandalay Pictures head Peter Guber, one of the forces behind ESPN’s “The Last Dance.” Then Affleck and Damon got interested. Last year, Convery made Variety’s “10 Screenwriters to Watch.” By then, “Air” had happened.
In his 20s, he had two of his scripts on the coveted Black List, an annual shortlist of unproduced screenplays. Until “Air,” Convery was part of Los Angeles’ great ocean of unproduced screenwriters, though he’d come a lot closer than most. “Argo” style, with shoes instead of hostages, it sells a rousing, semi-fictionalized version of events surrounding the invention of Nike’s Air Jordan shoe line the gumption of Nike marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro (portrayed by Matt Damon), among others, in securing Michael Jordan for an unprecedented sponsorship deal and the backstory of how a “film nerd” (his phrase) from Chicago’s western suburbs grew up to be Alex Convery. Many famous hands collaborated on director Ben Affleck’s “Air,” now in theaters.
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