[‘Running Point’ Adapts Lakers President Jeanie Buss’ Life for TV

A formative memory for Running Point showrunner David Stassen is when his hometown Chicago Bulls defeated the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1991 NBA Finals. At the time, his teenage self never could’ve imagined that he’d one day loosely adapt the life of the Lakers’ future controlling owner, Jeanie Buss, much less make a TV series that combines two of his first loves: basketball and comedy. But the unlikeliest of dreams has turned into the Kate Hudson-led Running Point, which is now streaming all 10 of its episodes on Netflix.

In 2021, Buss, on the heels of becoming the first female controlling owner to win an NBA Championship, contacted Mindy Kaling about bringing her unique experience in a male-dominated sport to the screen. So Kaling took the ball and ran with it until development hit a snag, leading her to reach out to two of her most reliable collaborators from The Mindy Project, Stassen and his creative partner Ike Barinholtz. (The latter duo also grew up as best friends in Chicago.)

Buss and her own dear friend/Lakers colleague, Linda Rambis, proceeded to invite the Running Point creative team into the Lakers kingdom. From there, they saw the ins and outs of the organization and heard a wide range of stories, both personal and professional. Development coincided with the broadcast of HBO’s controversial series, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, and Lakers Hall of Famers, such as Magic Johnson and Jerry West, weren’t shy about their disapproval of the purportedly biographical but heavily dramatized show. 

In Buss’ case, Stassen never sensed any animosity toward the since-canceled series or her depiction on it. “Jeanie is such an even-keeled person. When Winning Time would come up, she would just be like, ‘I like it. I think it’s good,’” Stassen tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I know there were certain members of that era who weren’t happy with their portrayal, but Jeanie never expressed anything about Winning Time other than her thinking it was a good show.”

Buss and Rambis always gravitated towards the idea of funneling their stories through the fictional lens of the Los Angeles Waves and the Gordon family. But Stassen isn’t entirely sure if their preference was a response to Winning Time and wanting to avoid conflict with their fellow real-life subjects. Regardless, viewers who know the Lakers and Buss family history will be able to recognize plenty of real-life commonalities, whether that’s Isla Gordon’s (Hudson) personal backstory or her discovery of a secret half-brother, which is meant to resemble the Buss family’s own realization of a long-lost sibling in 2018.

“That’s another one of the reasons we pushed to keep it a fictional team. We just wanted to have free rein to tell a funny workplace comedy that’s loosely based on Jeanie Buss,” Stassen says. “We did not want to do the Ryan Murphy or Adam McKay version of dramatizing real events.”

Stassen, who co-wrote three episodes and directed the final two, had the unenviable task of capturing professional basketball on a half-hour comedy budget. Granted, Running Point is primarily geared around its front office and family storylines, but it still needed to complement its off-court drama with some on-court action. Thus, Stassen relied once more on his beloved Chicago Bulls, specifically Michael Jordan’s “Frozen Moment” commercial that was directed by future Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest filmmaker, Jonathan Glazer, in 1996. (Naturally, the commercial features Jordan topping the Lakers yet again.)

“I thought of that commercial to limit the VFX cost, because the court is so lit up but the fans are all in darkness. The darkness helped us because we didn’t have to design detailed people way up in the rafters,” Stassen shares. “So that’s how we designed our basketball look. Michael Jordan, once again, came to the rescue.”

Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Stassen also discusses the orgin story behind Macaulay Cukin’s cameo, as well as how much thought he’s given a potential season two.

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Jeanie Buss and Linda Rambis got the ball rolling on Running Point with Mindy Kaling, and at a certain point, she called two of her trusted lieutenants from The Mindy Project, you and Ike Barinholtz. What’s the unabridged version of the story? 

Jeanie and Linda Rambis approached Mindy and said, “We are two women running a professional men’s basketball team. We have crazy stories. What we have to deal with is unlike what any other owner and VP in sports have to deal with.” So Mindy thought it was a great idea at the time, but Ike and I were unavailable due to History of the World, Part II. We had just agreed to do that, and we couldn’t jump aboard. 

Mindy then developed it for about a year before wanting to go in a different direction. So Ike and I were just getting free from History of the World, and the timing worked out. We started talking about the world, the family and the characters, and Jeanie and Linda opened up their doors to us. They let us into the Lakers’ facility and showed us every nook and corner of the Lakers’ training center. They told us stories and funny stuff that inspired some of our storylines, including some stuff we can never say.

We then put together the writers’ room, and then the writers’ strike hit. So we waited patiently for it to end and that gave us more time for the show to bake, at least in our heads. And then after the strike, we just hit the ground running. We had about 12 weeks of writing left to do, and then production started about a year ago right now until May of 2024. So that is the nuts-and-bolts version of the story.

Were you able to sign on the dotted line before Jeanie found out that the Chicago Bulls’ 1991 championship win over the L.A. Lakers was one of the greatest moments of your life?

(Laughs) Yes, as you can see behind me [on Zoom], I still have the original, unopened ‘91 Bulls Wheaties box in my office. Linda Rambis is also a Chicagoan, so they know that Ike and I are Chicagoans. They know I’m a Bulls fan, but I’m also just a basketball fan. I love the ‘90s Bulls so much that I know that nothing will ever be as good as that. So I can now appreciate all NBA basketball because I’m not expecting the Bulls to win six titles in eight years again, at least in my lifetime. I had it once, and now I can just appreciate basketball. So I loved getting to tell the stories of a great proud franchise with a family history and being able to mix in comedy. The opportunity to work in a basketball setting, in general, is unbelievable.

Yeah, on paper, Running Point really seems like a dream scenario for you. Comedy and basketball were two of your first loves, and you and Ike had previously developed a comedy with Amy Poehler as an NBA coach. So did this combination feel like a long time coming?

We’d also written a movie back in the day for Imagine Entertainment that was basically City Slickers at a basketball camp. It was about a couple of guys from Cleveland who go to LeBron James’ basketball camp in Miami after he’d left the Cleveland Cavaliers to join the Miami Heat. So, yeah, we’ve always circled around basketball projects. But as much as I love basketball, I was more interested in telling the show’s front office and family dynamic stories. I think you can make drama and comedy in a family and/or business setting, but sports are so dramatic on their own that sometimes it’s hard to dramatize them better than they already are.

It’s no secret that many members of the Lakers family weren’t overly enamored with Winning Time. Did it ever come up along the way?

Jeanie is such an even-keeled person. When Winning Time would come up, she would just be like, “I like it. I think it’s good.” I know there were certain members of that era who weren’t happy with their portrayal, but Jeanie never expressed anything about Winning Time other than her thinking it was a good show.

Did Jeanie and Linda always prefer to adapt their stories into a fictional context and not potentially ruffle any feathers like Winning Time’s semi-biographical approach?

I honestly don’t know if that was the motivation, but they always loved our pitch of the fictional Gordon family and the Los Angeles Waves. 

People who know the Buss and Lakers family history will recognize plenty of partial or inexact overlap. For example, I was actually surprised that you were able to have a secret sibling character, something Jeanie learned in 2018 about an older sister. I figured that details like that might be off limits since they potentially hit too close to home.

That’s another one of the reasons we pushed to keep it a fictional team. We just wanted to have free rein to tell a funny workplace comedy that’s loosely based on Jeanie Buss being a female owner of a professional men’s basketball team. We did not want to do the Ryan Murphy or Adam McKay version of dramatizing real events.

You touched on it earlier, but Jeanie and Linda would offer random stories about Sedale Threatt, Nick Van Exel or any number of past Lakers?

(Laughs) Jeanie, Linda Rambis and Jordan Rambis gave us hours of their time in their boardroom. They would answer our questions and tell us stories to get a feel for what their day-to-day is like. They were not overly fragile. They probably gave us an even split between player stories, front office stories and family/personal stories.

They also love comedy. Running such a huge stressful business, they really have, for decades, fallen back on comedy at night to relax themselves. So they just wanted to watch a fun show, and they did not oversee us or micromanage us. 

One day, Jordan Rambis did come to the writers room, and he was really helpful and funny. He has his own perspective on the whole world of players and management and those relationships. He’s the son of Lakers great Kurt Rambis. Kurt married Linda in [1985], and Linda has been best friends with Jeanie for probably 40-plus years. Brenda Song’s character, Ali, is based on Linda’s Chicagoan tough, right-hand woman to the head of the team.

Kate Hudson fit the Jeanie-inspired Team President role to a T. She brings value regardless of this, but did you guys also like that she could draw on her own highly publicized family? 

I honestly did not think of that before she agreed to do it. She’s the right age, she has the right look, she’s great at comedy and she is a movie star. When you get to know her a little bit, you find out that she is so powerful and commanding and confident. She has all these great qualities that really fit into the character. And then I found out that she grew up with Jeanie Buss. Jeanie is older than her, but back in the day, Jeanie took Kate under her wing. She would take her to L.A. Kings games at The Forum, so they were family friends. And, as you said, Kate comes from a famous family. She has all these brothers, one of whom she has a very funny podcast with where they talk and bicker [Oliver Hudson]. So there’s all these dynamics in Kate’s life that just happened to meld perfectly with Isla Gordon.

Were you able to smuggle plenty of your own long-standing basketball takes about the Euro step or favorite stories into the mix? 

I didn’t get too preachy in season one. There might be room going forward to bring a little more of the Euro step and the Manu Ginobli-ism of basketball into it. Maybe we can get more into that as we go forward. But I did want the basketball and all the talk around it to feel as realistic as it could be in a 30-minute comedy. And between me, Ike and producer Joe Mande, who’s a big Timberwolves fan, we had it covered.

I directed the last two episodes, and we had weeks of meetings to figure out how to afford and shoot the basketball sequences on a soundstage. We built a second court on a different soundstage for the arena look. And I kept thinking, “How are we going to do this? It’s too expensive. We can’t do the Winning Time thing where we wrap everything in green [screen]. It’s too much VFX.” But then I remembered this Michael Jordan commercial from 1996 where he’s playing, and it cuts to people watching around the world in slow motion. 

That is literally my favorite commercial of all time. “Frozen Moment” was directed by Jonathan Glazer. [Writer’s Note: A Complete Unknown reminded me of this commercial recently since so much of the movie is people stopping in their tracks to hear the next most important song ever written.]

I just got chills thinking about the bike falling over in the driveway. So I thought of that commercial to limit the VFX cost, because the court is so lit up but the fans are all in darkness. The darkness helped us because we didn’t have to design detailed people way up in the rafters and whatnot. So that’s how we designed our basketball look.

There’s a burner account subplot involving Ness Gordon (Scott MacArthur), and that was likely inspired by the allegations involving the former Philadelphia 76ers’ general manager in 2018.

Yeah, but that’s not the only example. It’s come out in sports that people are worried about their perception in the public, and they do these things with burner accounts on social media. It’s all part of the world that Jeanie and Linda deal with every day.

I did wonder if your Barack Obama basketball story might work its way into this show somehow. I suppose one of the Waves players could’ve regaled the rest of the team with an adaptation of your story. Did you ever float that idea in some capacity?

We didn’t talk about the Obama story, but maybe you should come in and consult for a day. You’re helping me remember all of my basketball experiences that we did not put in the show yet. Between the executives and the family and the players and the coaches, there’s a lot of stories to tell, and that’s why we feel like the show can hopefully go on for a while.

Would you mind regaling the uninitiated readers? 

Growing up in Chicago, I belonged to a health club called the East Bank Club. It had a vibrant basketball scene, and I would play a lot of pickup basketball there. So I would be there every day at four o’clock for pickup games, and a rising star local politician named Barack Obama, who everyone knew, also played games there once in a while. He’d wear running track pants and a T-shirt every day because he was a jogger too. So he would come to the court just to get a little exercise, and I played with him many, many times. I was a really aggressive try-hard college kid, and in one particular game, I was probably playing too tight a defense on a guy in his forties who just wanted to get a little exercise. As a 19 or 20-year-old kid, I was sweating all over him and pushing him, and he missed a couple jumpers with me in his face. And running back down the court after the second or third miss, he whispered in my ear, “Quit fucking undercutting me, kid.” I then saw him later that day in the locker room, and he gave me a finger gun to basically say, “Nice playing.” So he was a totally nice guy, but he had to put me in my place on the court. I still can’t believe I used to play basketball with him.

You shot Running Point in Los Angeles, which, by all accounts, is not easy to pull off. Increasing production in L.A. was a big topic of conversation even before the recent wildfires added another reason for it. How did you swing it?

At our level, we never heard any discussion about not shooting the show in L.A. My friend Jonathan Nolan recently spoke at one of the award shows about getting production back in L.A., and at the premiere, I mentioned how lucky we were to shoot in L.A. It’s become a privilege more than an expectation to shoot in L.A., and I’m very grateful to Warner Bros. and Netflix that we got to do it in L.A. 

And now, more than ever, we need it. We just need it. We need to make it more possible. L.A. is hurting after the fires, the strikes and COVID, so we have to shoot more in L.A. The state has to do whatever it has to do to make it more feasible. It puts people to work, and it benefits the entire community. It just makes the city, and everyone’s lives in it, better. So we’re really lucky that our show about a famous L.A. family was able to shoot here. It wouldn’t be right to do it anywhere else. So that’s my little stump speech. It’s a big deal, and I hope things are beginning to turn. I hope Governor Newsom can make it more feasible for more productions.

Macaulay Culkin has a fun cameo in the penultimate episode you directed. Was he visiting his partner, Brenda Song, on set one day when someone just threw it out there at the last minute?  

Well, Macaulay is a huge basketball fan. He’s a big Knicks fan. He’s a born-and-raised New Yorker. So, one day, toward the end of shooting, Brenda just brought it up. She was like, “Mack would do a cameo.” We already had this part for a rowdy fan in one of the last episodes, and that became Mack, as a little wink to the audience. He’s such a nice guy, and he had fun. He was very low maintenance.

Having played one of Chicago’s favorite fictional sons, Kevin McCallister, he certainly adds to the show’s Chicago DNA.

Yes, he’s an important Chicago icon for everyone, not just Chicagoans.

Chet Hanks plays a key role on this show, and his character, Travis Bugg, mostly aligns with the persona he puts out there. Is it even a persona? Is that really who he is behind the scenes?

He’s such a nice, soft-spoken guy behind the scenes. He is a naturally gifted performer. He is a good improviser. A lot of times he would just throw a little flourish at the end of a scene, and that would end up making the cut. And the musician and rapper side of him in real life just blended so well with the character of Travis Bugg. It was kismet that he found the part and put himself on tape for it. And as soon as we saw his audition, we knew that it was him.

One of your actors, Dane DiLiegro, who was the new Predator in Prey, played college ball. But overall, how important was it to cast actors with some basketball experience? 

During casting, we thought it was going to matter, but in the bigger picture, it was much more important that they seemed like their characters in the locker room or in the offices or wherever the scenes were set. So I think we managed to pull off the basketball without exposing anyone too much. The show is 80 percent business/family stories, and 20 percent basketball stories. So the basketball definitely took a backseat to comedy and performance.

The basketball players still worked really hard on their roles. They cared about what position they played and what number they were and where they would sit in the locker room and who would be friends with whom. They really thought about all of it because they wanted the dynamics of the team to feel real. 

Was Ike ever in the mix for a role? Or was he too busy playing a despicable studio executive on The Studio? 

Yeah, he was always committed to The Studio, and unfortunately, due to the strike, the timing of both productions overlapped almost exactly. So he couldn’t have done both shows.

It’s fairly common for actors to base their character choices on the people they’re working with, be it the director or a producer. Did Scott MacArthur draw his performance on Ike at all?

Yeah, there’s a lot of Ike in the character of Ness, for sure. Ness is the well-meaning, goofy, privileged son of the family, but he’s kind of the heart of the family. Ike has a big heart, and his characters usually have a big heart. Scott is also a Chicagoan and an old friend. He usually plays scumbags, and he’s really good at it. 

He was terrific in the Breaking Bad movie, El Camino.

Yeah, he’s a really talented actor, and Ness accessed a different part of Scott that we knew he had in him. Scott, in real life, is known for having off-the-wall ideas, and there’s some of that in Ness. I’m also friends with Scott’s mom, and she always gets upset when he’s sporting a tank top or a gross beard or he’s showing his ass on camera. So I was very happy that I got to dress him up in a suit and have him be a bit more clean cut. His mom can now see him as the son she remembers.

I remember urging you to watch The Leftovers over a decade ago, but as a show that opens with a mother’s newborn disappearing in front of her eyes, it wasn’t a good fit due to your own newborn at the time. So I’m glad that your paths still crossed with Justin Theroux. 

Yeah, I did end up watching The Leftovers during COVID, and I fucking loved it. Theroux is the best, and he’s so funny. He’s a gifted comedic actor and such a goofball on set. He’s constantly doing bits and joking around. He can really do it all. He can be a leading man-type like he was on The Leftovers, and then he can be more of a character actor like he is on our show. He can even write something like Tropic Thunder, which is a perfect comedy. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time. So we were so lucky that he did this part on our show. Our cast is incredible.

Do you already have the broad strokes for a potential Running Point season two?

Ike, Mindy and I have all thought about it separately, but we have not talked about it together yet. We’re waiting for that season two order.

You’re working with Bill Lawrence right now on an HBO comedy starring Steve Carell. It’s a father-daughter series that’s set at a college. What kind of tone are you working with here? 

We are aiming for it to be comedy-forward. We are going for big jokes. The concept of Steve Carell getting to do college, not that he’s a student, but Steve Carell in a college environment, you have to just lean into those fish-out-of-water, funny moments that come to mind. But it’s an HBO comedy. The tone is not as huge and crazy as Righteous Gemstones, but there are some Silicon Valley-like character relationships and jokes. It’s in that sort of arena.

Despite all the success you’re having in television, are you still keeping one foot in the feature door? 

Ike and I are writing a movie for New Line right now, and we’re always thinking of fun pitches. So we’re still doing both, yeah.

Speaking of which, I just spoke to Seth Gordon about Back in Action, and I saw that you received an additional literary material (ALM) credit for it. I’m assuming your Central Intelligence producer, Beau Bauman, brought you onboard. Can you say what you contributed? 

Honestly, I don’t remember exactly. I wrote some jokes, and I went to a screening of it with a couple other people. Seth is awesome, and Beau is an old friend from Central Intelligence and other things we’ve worked on together. I think Beau told me that a really long passcode joke that I contributed did really well at screenings. [Writer’s Note: This occurs when Cameron Diaz’s character is typing in the code at her mother’s entrance gate.]

It sounds like ALM credits can be as minimal as writing a few jokes or polishing a scene. They didn’t start crediting these contributions until 2022, so I suppose it’s meant to give credit to screenwriters who were previously considered script doctors.

I think it’s fair. To be honest, writer roundtables [to collectively punch up a project] can be a fun experience where you meet people, but a lot of contributions can happen during a roundtable. And you basically sign all of your rights away when you might have re-engineered the first act. Or you might have come up with a joke that gets used in the trailer and it helps get however many millions of people to see the movie. So there was previously no acknowledgement of it, and I think it’s an important thing to now have these [ALM] credits.

You just attended Mindy’s Hollywood Walk of Fame Ceremony. Did it feel like a family reunion in a lot of ways?

Exactly. It was awesome because so many people who worked on The Mindy Project were there. Growing up, the local Chicago news would cover Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremonies, and to now watch one happen in person was so surreal. B.J. Novak gave such a great opening speech that was so funny and heartfelt about Mindy. Mindy’s speech was so funny and sweet, as well. But the most special part of it was probably being back together with many of the Mindy Project people.

In closing, I must say that I’m still riding high on your story about the “Frozen Moment” commercial. 

Michael Jordan, once again, came to the rescue.

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Running Point is now streaming on Netflix.

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