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Pickleball has exploded in popularity in the last decade as a variation of tennis that’s easier on bodies and simpler to pick up for people who want to try something new. When comedy writer Sean Clements heard about a local turf war involving the low-impact sport, his brain started clicking.
“A friend of mine who was involved in the L.A. Tennis Center was trying to get them to add more pickleball courts,” he says. “They only had one, and he wanted to expand, and was talking about all of these contentious meetings and how passionate — and sort of psychotic — everyone was on both sides of it. And I thought like, ‘OK, well, here’s a good backdrop and central conflict.’”
The result is “The Dink,” a new Apple TV+ original movie debuting Friday on the platform. It stars “New Girl” alum Jake Johnson as a past-his-prime tennis pro Dusty Boyd who is encouraged to take up pickleball after he suffers an injury. Though he scoffs at the sport, he soon discovers a community that embraces him, including a friendly woman (Mary Steenburgen) who takes him under her wing. Along the way, his father (Ed Harris) tries to keep pickleballers from further encroaching on his tennis club.
That storyline hit close to home for Clements, a high school tennis player who was having difficulties when he revisited the sport in his 30s. A few friends suggested pickleball could be gentler on his body, and he resisted, but when a writer friend brought him to play with a big group, he was all in.
“I loved it,” he says. “I got hooked. So that became, ‘I’m this former tennis guy who got into the pickleball world,’ and there was a lot of animosity between those two camps. I started going to these open mixers and playing with total strangers, a lot of whom were retirement age. I found that I got adopted by this whole crew of older women who wanted to be partnered with me because I was a little more willing to run down the shots that were far away. That grew into them asking me if I wanted to meet up to play before the mixer, or if I wanted to go get bagels and coffee, or if we should all put together a dinner. The combination of this community embracing someone who is middle-aged, but being treated like they are a young superathlete, was a really good feeling and the kind of ego boost I always crave. That felt like there was a funny dynamic to play with there.”
“The Dink” is a four-quadrant, PG-13 comedy that feels like a throwback to the Frat Pack aughts (there’s even a Ben Stiller cameo), but it’s a bit of a different gear for Clements, a prolific TV writer. His credits include cult hits like “Workaholics,” “Ash vs Evil Dead” and “Severance.” He also co-hosts the showbiz satire podcast “Hollywood Handbook,” which brings on big stars to clown on their persona and the inner workings of the entertainment industry, which incorporates plenty of dry, complex humor alongside his co-host, Hayes Davenport.
How was Clements able to tailor his writing for a wide audience but still give them plenty of laughs? It first comes through the redrafting process.
“The very initial draft and concept of this was a little closer to an ‘Eastbound and Down’-type voice for the character, where he was a little more caustic and aggressive,” Clements says. “As you work on it and you work with your collaborators and have table reads, you find what is working and resonating. We got to a point where when we were going to film, it actually had more curses in it. And we said, ‘That’s the only thing keeping this from being a PG-13,’ because there was no crazy violence or sex or anything. It occurred to us that, ‘If it’s just a little language adjustment to make this something that more people could like, then that’s pretty easy and something we should do.’”
Clements also wanted to bring some warmth to the movie, echoing how he felt when he found his own pickleball community.
“Maybe people who do listen to the podcast or know other stuff that I’ve done would be surprised by how much heart is in the movie,” he says. “A lot of that came from [director] Josh Greenbaum, who really encouraged me to find the emotion of these characters. But I also love that stuff. I’m a little bit of a softie. I think having the turns that put the characters into the situations where they can do the things that we want to see them do but still be surprising was a real goal.”
Those comedic surprises were essential for Clements. As a big fan of sports movies — his favorites range from “Happy Gilmore” and “Major League” to “Without Limits” and “Moneyball” — he knew there were certain moments that fans would expect, but some of the biggest laughs would come from giving them a tweak or subversion.
“In any movie like this, there are certain beats that you are going to crave from it,” he says. “You don’t want to shortchange the audience from some of those moments: Seeing the person get better at the thing, or seeing how they are unable to gut it out against the opponent they’re overmatched by. There are beats that I want in these movies. Some of them are classic, but can you make them not feel cliché by finding a more interesting path to get to them?”
Clements is currently hard at work filming a pilot for Hulu called “Lex,” but would he ever be interested in another story set in the “Dink”-iverse? A chance encounter provided an interesting idea.
“On one of the other interviews we did, one of the guys said that pickleball courts were taking over the basketball courts at the gym that he was a member of,” Clements says. “And I thought, ‘Well, I hadn’t had an idea for a sequel, but man, that’s real potential. They’re at war with the basketball players instead of the tennis players. That’s heightening.’”
Watch the trailer for “The Dink” below.
English (US) ·