There were two movies in 2006 that dared to tell unexpectedly subversive stories through movement. The first was Happy Feet, which went from a cuddly penguin tale to an urgent warning of pollution and overfishing. The second was Stick It, a gymnastics dramedy that encouraged athletes to overthrow the judging system as we know it. Both films are masterpieces. But it’s Olympics season, so let’s focus on the one with the hand chalk.
Written and directed by Jessica Bendinger six years after writing another seminal athletics film, Bring It On, Stick It revs things up as we find Texas teenager Haley Graham (Missy Peregrym) returning, against her will, to the world of elite women’s gymnastics as a court-ordered punishment following an arrest. She doesn’t want to be there despite her illustrious talents. In fact, she’d rather go to military school. But coach Burt Vickerman (Jeff Bridges) is willing to take Haley in at his academy, and over the course of the film’s first half she gradually learns to re-love and recommit to a sport that didn’t necessarily love her back. She even makes it to nationals with three of her teammates — all of whom still don’t know why Haley walked out of the World Champions a year prior, costing Team USA its gold medal.
That intrigue dissipates fast, however, when The Man gets involved. The judges are on a hot streak of asshole-ness, deducting points across all gymnasts for the most trivial reasons. “It doesn’t matter how well you do,†Haley narrates in one scene, “it’s how well you follow their rules.†And then, a defiant breaking point: When one of her teammates loses out on a perfect vault score because her bra strap was showing, Haley decides to stage a rebellion where all of the gymnasts, in solidarity, “scratch†their routines to choose the winner themselves in the four apparatuses. It’s about them, for them. They’re done being obedient to an archaic and broken system.
While this scenario has never transcended reality for the sport, Bendinger, a former gymnast herself, advocated for the ending when she realized it presented a more cogent villain — even if several film executives had difficulty seeing her vision.
How does it feel knowing you’ve made the only great gymnastics movie?
It’s very gratifying. It’s a unicorn. It’s wonderful to see younger gymnasts imitating some of the jokes and seeing its influence in gymnastics culture. Imagine if you’re a huge fan of a sport as a kid then you see the athletes in that sport paying tribute to something you made. But also it moved the needle on the conversation early on. Judges had to know about Stick It if they’re in the gymnastics space. It’s the only movie. I’m sure if you’re a conscious and sentient being who cares about humans excelling, you can’t watch that movie and go, This tyranny is correct. Community and collaboration can always help us overcome things.
Stick It revolves around Haley’s personal metamorphosis until the third act transitions into deeper systemic issues. How did you arrive at this idea of a player revolution? To my knowledge this has never happened in an elite competition.
In most conventional stories, you have the personification of a villain or a character who’s the villain. In Bring It On, the villain is socioeconomic inequality. The sense of unfairness is the villain. As I worked on Stick It, there was a pervasive unfairness that was bothering me, which was similar to Bring It On: Why are these people, who can’t do the thing they’re assessing, in charge of the outcome? It’s fucking insane. It’s the tyranny of small preferences that’s very narcissistic and picayune. There’s something so petty there. When you think of the grandiosity of the sport of gymnastics, there’s a huge moment of humanity triumphing over gravity and fear. It’s a metaphor. It’s a powerful and glorious thing with all the things we struggle with — negativity, fear, inner voices, lack of discipline, fear of humiliation and death. It encompasses all the fears, and yet these women transcend it and get out there. It requires a lot of blind faith. And yet this great human endeavor is assessed by bureaucrats. It’s so funny when you think about it. It’s so American. It’s a funny contrast.
As I interrogated my own questions, it led me to that conclusion. If they knew their own power and recognized the situation, they could stand up to that absurdity in their own absurd way and maybe that would be entertaining. Listen, when we were shooting that scratching sequence, people on set were like, We don’t get it, how are you going to make this work? There were definitely a lot of people nervous.
What were they nervous about?
I remember my producer partner, Gail Lyon, was on my side. As you’re shooting a film and something starts to seemingly not work, you want to kill the writer. In that case, it was me. I remember going into the bathroom and I was like, Oh my god, is this going to work? But Gail understood what I was trying to accomplish. We didn’t know if the bra-snapping moments were too overblown. That was a real concern. You don’t know if it’s too small or too big because you’re blowing it up for the screen. If something is too big, it could be cartoonish, and yet it has to deliver. It helps that Missy has a little bit of a rebel naturally in her and she delivered that line. I was trying to walk the line between vulnerability, anger, and still being lovable, despite stirring a lot of shit. When the rebel is healing, they become the renegade who’s acting for the greater good. That’s why it’s so surprising: You really don’t see it coming in the movie, but at the same time it’s all there from the jump.
Did everyone understand what you were trying to accomplish with this change in narrative?
No, not at all. The studio didn’t understand it. To wit, they had to sell Stick It’s negatives three days before we started shooting in order to finance Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3. They were undercapitalized and they sold those negatives to the production company Spyglass. We found that out because we had a mole who was giving us a heads-up. When the executives at Disney had divested, they behaved horribly in ways that would get them canceled now. Female executives were behaving incredibly defensively. It wasn’t our fault that they were undercapitalized on those Pirates sequels, stop punishing us. There was a very problematic culture at Disney at the time. The male Head of Marketing decided not to market the movie…because his rival Head of Production had sold the negative to Spyglass. I was shocked by all those people operating that way for so long.
As evidence that they didn’t understand it, when we had our first focus-group screening in California, it tested through the roof across all quadrants. That rarely happens, and the Disney executives were so shocked. The head of production came up to me after and said, “It’s a false positive, don’t get your hopes up.†Everyone’s jaws dropped that she would be so toxic and negative on the heels of such an overwhelming success. You don’t get those kinds of scores from focus groups often. That’s what we were dealing with.
But it’s kind of perfect in a way, when you think about it. The bureaucrats at the studio, maybe they were responding to the idea of being villainized in the movie. A film executive is kind of like a gymnastics judge. You’re not shouldering the risk, you’re not doing the work, and you’re a salaried employee with great benefits. But the creatives and actors have all the risk. We’re the ones who take the blame and the fall at the end of the day, and yet you stand in judgment? Are you kidding me? It really hurt and sucked to watch people misbehaving like that. It’s disappointing. It’s like they lost their humanity. I wasn’t willing to play that game. I’m not going to kiss the ring if there’s nothing to kiss for.
The instigating factor for the organized rebellion is when a gymnast’s visible bra strap docks a perfect score down a few points. Why did this petty technicality make the most sense to accelerate your commentary? Did you play around with other scenarios?
We discussed undergarments — bras or underwear — as options. We really only had two options: The panty line or the bra strap. Pat Warren, who served as our training and judge consultant, said the stupidest rule in the code of points was a visible bra strap on an athlete. And this was coming from a former judge herself. I loved it because it encapsulates so many ideas in one thing: You have to be a woman and feminine, but you have to cover who you are and not expose that you have needs. You can’t expose your humanity as a woman in all this.
I remember back in 2012, Gabby Douglas got a lot of shit for how her hair looked after she won the all-around gold medal at the Olympics. That was an example in the public square on social media about how a mentality like that can take a hold of people. It’s like, Are you kidding me? How do these people have an opinion about anything about her after she won a medal? It’s outrageous, but there it is. It happens. The fact that they thought they had permission to say something like that is nuts to me. Go, America, I guess.
Why was vault the chosen apparatus to jump-start the scratching?
I wanted to call back to Haley’s debut at the gym when she does a vault and gives the middle finger to the gym and the coach. I liked that symmetry from a storytelling point of view. It was healing. She comes in a brat — very much in the Charli XCX mind-set — and she’s healed by the end. She’s taking it back. She’s claiming it. I’m not doing this for you, I’m doing this for us. But also, the vault is a terrifying apparatus. Look at what happened to Simone Biles at the Tokyo Games. It’s the worst, and as a former gymnast, I hated it.
Running full speed toward an immutable object is psychotic. It’s the best proxy, for me, for the parts of ourselves we’re trying to overcome and the metaphor of the story. You want to overcome that resistance. It won’t move, it’s just there. Your inner tyranny is so well-embodied by the vault. It represents that nagging piece of all of us that we’re trying to overcome. It’s the simplest piece of apparatus. The bars are most complicated, the floor is all yours, and the beam is the scariest. The vault is just like, Ugh.Â
I have to imagine real-life gymnasts found the scratching element to be truthful to their experiences with the judges’ impossible expectations.
The thing about gymnastics culture, which the Larry Nassar event really illustrated, is you have to be so compliant and obedient at a young age to be a good gymnast. The ones who succeed have that ability to trust and have faith in their coaches and the process. I think the culture has improved a lot since the Nassar story broke. The best example of a collective community, coming together to stand up against tyranny, is in the Nassar case. My hope is Stick It was a proxy for the gymnasts to see the power of collaborating like that. I would love it if somehow there’s a correlation. That would mean a lot to me, because that’s a really meaningful moment in American history, not just in gymnastics history.
I’m also curious about the judges themselves. Did they find the humor of this glimpse into a broken system that they’ve caused?
I wish I knew myself. A couple of great things have happened since the movie’s release. They’ve gotten better at scoring and describing the code of points with the “difficulty†and “execution†elements. They show you the green, yellow, and red scores and what it means. So I think they’ve come a long way in terms of trying to be more accurate and fair. Content is king, but context is God. Contextualizing gymnastics scoring for an audience is a very big bite for judges, audiences, and gymnasts. Did the movie make these judges self-reflective? I don’t have an answer for you. I’d instead say that some gymnasts become judges, and I would hope they’re the most compassionate. I do hope it raised some awareness.
The priority for Stick It was to portray gymnastics correctly, but, as we’ve covered, this type of mutiny has never actually happened with scoring. Are you hoping this might be prophetic in the future for gymnasts? Would it be cool to see them control the results?
You know, scoring aside, I’m going to say it already was prophetic. I really do believe it was prophetic in a meaningful way and gave these gymnasts the power and empowered them to think they didn’t have to be silent and could join forces and voices to make a difference. And they did. I believe the prophecy came to pass, and I’m sorry they had to go through a collective trauma in order to find their voices and speak out. It’s terrible, and of course we wish that on no one. However, if they needed a way out, I hope the movie was a beacon for them in some way.
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