In 1980s Texas, a star player and his coach face off on the basketball court and, figuratively speaking, hard truths are revealed as the onion of their relationship is peeled back.
Director’s Vision for ‘Tiny, Texas
The story of Tiny, Texas mixes hints of Hoosiers and Billy Elliot with The Last Picture Show and Brokeback Mountain. Its look will take clues from great Texas films such as Hell or High Water and No Country for Old Men. It’s a story of fathers and sons, biological and chosen, interwoven with tragedy, awakening, and nostalgic Texana.
“Everything is bigger in Texas, except here in Tiny.”
This self-deprecating motto sums up the lives and times of those who were born and raised in Tiny, a one blinking stoplight town in Comanche County, smack dab in the center of Texas. A few here excel, some don’t belong and leave, and everyone else perseveres day-to-day with dreams of glory days, which are inexorably linked to the fortunes of Tiny High School athletics.
It was my years visiting the real Tiny, Texas in the 1980s, a tiny town named Gustine, and the many friends I made and the extended families I became a part of there, that inspired this story of a teenager at a crossroads and his exiled father who reappears in the nick of time to become an vital beacon on his son’s path to manhood. It’s a story with roots in what I never had as a boy.
