Mike Tollin was on vacation in Aspen seven years ago when his wife handed him a Sports Illustrated story about an unusual friendship between a high school football coach and a gentle, mentally challenged man. “You gotta make this movie,” she told him. By the time the vacation was over, Tollin, ’77, decided he would.
Radio, starring Cuba Gooding Jr., Ed Harris and Debra Winger, came to the big screen in October. Directed and produced by Tollin, it tells how the relationship between the man nicknamed Radio and coach Harold Jones transformed them both, as well as the town of Anderson, S.C. There is a real Radio in Anderson and a real Coach Jones, too. The movie compresses the timeline of their ongoing friendship but remains true to its spirit. In movie parlance, it is “inspired by a true story.”
For Tollin, termed a “superproducer” by the Hollywood Reporter, the movie highlights a career the Philadelphia native could not have foreseen when he started studying economics at Stanford.
“So many kids in school are in such a hurry to lay out a career path. I just never bothered,” Tollin says. If you overplan, “you miss all the twists and turns, which are the most interesting part of life anyway.”
One fortuitous twist came when Tollin was studying in a Stanford program in England. The theme of that year’s coursework happened to be film and broadcasting. The economics major found himself learning from a stream of world-renowned documentary filmmakers. Back at the Farm, he landed in a sports writing class taught by New York Times scribe Leonard Koppett.
Tollin got a chance to put these new influences together after graduation, when he went to work for his father’s best friend (and, as it happens, his best friend’s father), writing, producing and directing for a syndicated television series called Greatest Sports Legends. “Three days after Commencement, I was back in the Philadelphia Public Library researching the career of [baseball player] Ted Williams,” Tollin says. “It was kind of a dream for a sports nut like me.”
Later he filmed documentaries. He traveled to Africa to follow a group of Special Olympians in their quest to scale Mount Kilimanjaro and made Let Me Be Brave with his first partner in film, Gary Cohen, ’77, with whom he once announced basketball games over KZSU radio. Aired in 1990 on CBS, the film won an Emmy.
After moving to Los Angeles, Tollin collaborated with Brian Robbins to write, produce and direct the well-received Hardwood Dreams (1994), about a team of talented basketball players at a violence-plagued inner-city high school. The two partnered again to make the acclaimed Chasing the Dream (1995), the story of baseball great Hank Aaron’s mission to break Babe Ruth’s homerun record, framed in the context of the civil-rights movement.
Today, they head Tollin/Robbins Productions, which has made three documentaries and nine feature films since 1993, including Radio, Big Fat Liar and Varsity Blues. The company also has launched 12 successful television series, five of which are currently in production. These include The WB’s Smallville and What I Like About You and Nickelodeon’s All That and The Amanda Show. For a time, Tollin/Robbins programs occupied the kids’ channel’s entire Saturday evening lineup. Recently the company launched a talent management division. Though he writes less these days, Tollin himself is a triple threat, with credits as a writer, director and producer.
Few of Tollin’s projects trade in violence and sex. Most tell the story of human achievement, often in the face of daunting challenges and in a sports milieu. “Our films are hopeful,” Tollin says. “It’s not about celebrating despair. That’s not what we’re about.”
Mike Rich, who wrote the Radio script (as well as The Rookie and Finding Forrester), says the working conditions at Tollin/ Robbins mirror the values the company depicts on screen. “You need to understand that Mike is in an industry in which there aren’t a lot of good, decent people,” he says. But Tollin has found a way to succeed while keeping family (his wife, Robbie, 11-year-old Georgia and 4-year-old Lucas) at the forefront of his life and bringing those values to the office.
At an early stage of writing the Radio script, Rich and Tollin were trying to flesh out the dynamic between Radio and Coach Jones. They talked by phone and e-mailed frequently between Tollin’s office in Los Angeles and Rich’s home in Portland, Ore. “Mike had a couple of suggestions that I think he felt I might have disagreed with,” Rich says. “Any [other] director or producer would have asked me to come out to L.A. to explain it. But Mike flew up to Portland. That is really unusual, for someone from Hollywood to have that kind of courtesy.”
Tollin also traveled to Anderson seven years ago and spent several days with Jones, as other would-be producers waged their campaign for story rights over phone lines. “Out of all of ’em that called, he flew down here to visit,” Jones says. “We thought that he was real sincere. The thing we asked was, don’t embarrass Radio or the school or Anderson in any way.”
Tollin promised he would not, eventually gaining the trust of Jones, Radio and Sports Illustrated writer Gary Smith and securing the rights from all three. Jones and Radio met Tollin’s family and spent time with the cast when they came to film in South Carolina last year.
Radio is set in familiar cinematic territory, in and around high school football and basketball games. For his first foray into big-time features with A-list stars, Tollin risks centering a film around a spectator; the pretty cheerleader and quarterback are supporting characters. But the gambit works. For this viewer at least, Radio’s story was both deeply moving and thoroughly captivating.
For Rich, working with Tollin was different from any filmmaking experience he has had. “I don’t want to work with him one more time,” he says. “I want to work with him ten more times.”
Perhaps Tollin inspires such loyalty because he exemplifies commitment: he’s a determined, lifelong fan of the Philadelphia Phillies—a team he calls the “losingest” in sports history. The Phillies have won exactly one World Series championship in their 120-year history. That was in 1980. “And I was there,” he says. That win, while wondrous, fanned his “affliction.” Unlike Red Sox or Cubs fans, Tollin notes, “we don’t get any credit for our misery.”
Tollin claims there is an upside to having his heart broken season after season: he’s developed the knack of not expecting too much but hoping for the best. “It’s kind of a good way to go through life,” he says.
It’s an attitude that may help when Radio is released. “Of course I hope [it] is a commercial success, but I won’t have an ounce of regret if it isn’t,” says Tollin. Because of the long years, hard work and financial risk required to bring a film to the screen, he and Robbins decided some time back to take on only projects they feel passionate about.
Apparently there’s been no lack of such projects. They have two new TV shows this fall—ABC’s I’m With Her, about the life of an average guy married to a celebrity (created by Brooke Shields’s husband, writer Chris Henchy) and The WB’s One Tree Hill—in addition to their ongoing series. In January, Paramount Pictures, with MTV Films, will release another Tollin/Robbins film co-produced with Spyglass Entertainment. Perfect Score features a group of high schoolers who conspire to steal the answers to the Scholastic Aptitude Test.
For a guy who started out making small, thoughtful documentaries, Tollin sometimes marvels to find himself so close to Hollywood’s center of gravity. He remembers how no one took him seriously when he arrived in L.A. “Now it’s like, how did we get here?” he says.
By championing the underdog, it seems, Tollin may no longer be able to claim that mantle for himself.
ANN MARSH, ’88, is a freelance writer in Southern California.
