A new feature film shot in Charleston, The Late Game, follows a rusty hockey player as he subs in during an amateur “beer league” hockey night. The film’s protagonist Riley (played by Alec Reusch) is busy nursing some post-breakup wounds when he runs into an acquaintance that goes by the name “Proton” (Matthew Archie Starling).
Proton invites Riley to join his beer league hockey team, sponsored by Polly’s Pies, and take part in a late night hockey match at the Carolina Ice Palace. What follows in this indie comedy is a charming hang-out movie filled with hockey pucks, male bonding and personalities that feel very familiar.
The indie comedy is the brainchild of two Charleston natives and childhood friends, Jeffrey Zucker and Jeff Tyner, who developed the script over a three year writing period. The film is Tyner’s writing and directorial debut, with Zucker credited as the lead producer and one of the main actors.
Speaking with the City Paper from Denver, Tyner said he is knee-deep promoting his movie, the last stages of a project that he’s been dreaming of since his college days.
The long haul to get here
“Jeffrey Zucker and I go way back … I mean, we’ve known each other since we were like, 8 or 9. But I wouldn’t say we were really friends until our senior year of high school when we were on the same hockey team and really hit it off. Even though he went to college off in Boston, when he’d be home, we just ended up hanging out a lot.”
That’s when their shared love for hockey movies came about, Tyner said, “and where we very informally started talking about how we would love to make a hockey movie one day.”
Tyner went on to attend film school at the Bowling Green State University in Ohio, which was followed by a stint in sports production.
“I would struggle with the writing process for something hockey related. … Working in sports was actually a really good way for me to learn.”
Tyner’s first post-grad sports gig was as the director of game operations for the Charleston Stingrays.
“I basically ran the production team and the jumbotron games in the intermission, stuff like that,” he said. “And then, because I was a football fan, I ended up parlaying that nine months of experience into a gig at gamecockcentral.com for three years. That was probably where I learned the most in terms of just learning how a camera works — I was kind of a one man production team.”
Fast forward a few years, and Tyner’s old friend Zucker, now a successful entrepreneur, offered Tyner a job as the “director of media” for his many entrepreneurial endeavors. The pair started officially working together in Denver, and it wasn’t long before their college days idea of making a movie rose back up to the surface.
Eventually, Tyner said, he and Zucker would revisit the idea with the usual starts and stops. “Then the [Covid-19] shutdown happened and, I thought, well, I have no excuses now,” Tyner said. “So let’s actually write something.”
Three years of writing and one year of casting, shooting and editing later, The Late Game is making its way onto streaming platforms and silver screens throughout the U.S.
Tyner filled out the cast with local talent in front of and behind the camera. Plus, there’s appearances by key influencers from the hockey community lending their talent, like Brian McGonagle, co-host of the wildly popular hockey podcast Spittin Chiclets, and Zac Bell of Always Hockey fame.
A love letter to hockey
While Tyner’s film incorporates themes about friendship and moving forward, at the core of this film, Tyner said, is a love letter to his favorite sport. One of the reasons he wanted to make this film in the first place, he said, is because there’s not a lot of hockey movies out there that get it right.
“In the 90s, those Mighty Ducks movies were huge,” he said. “And I kind of hated it, even though I watched the movies all the time. I would almost just make myself mad for how incorrectly it was portrayed … That would rile me up.”
While Tyner said he digs movies like Slapshot, Youngblood and Mystery Alaska, there’s one movie in particular that really “gets it.”
“The gold standard is the movie Miracle with Kurt Russell from 2004 based on the 1980 Olympic team that beat the Soviet Union and ended their reign of supremacy,” he said. “There’s nothing like it before or since … the physicality, the intensity. Nothing comes close to it.”
And so writing a story where the sport he clearly loves is accurately and interestingly portrayed proved a challenge that took a long time to figure out.
“The writing part was always the hardest … [This film comes from] close to a decade of trying,” Tyner said. “I hope people have fun, and I hope the hockey crowd really connects with it, because I think beer league can be a really special place.”
To view the film and learn more about The Late Game, check out the trailer or the film’s website.
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