Newz9
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HBO has responded to former stars of the Los Angeles Lakers who’ve criticized the community’s sequence “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty,” which dramatizes the crew’s championship run within the 1980s.
After initially declining to comment, HBO issued an announcement Tuesday saying: “HBO has a long history of producing compelling content drawn from actual facts and events that are fictionalized in part for dramatic purposes. ‘Winning Time’ is not a documentary and has not been presented as such. However, the series and its depictions are based on extensive factual research and reliable sourcing, and HBO stands resolutely behind our talented creators and cast who have brought a dramatization of this epic chapter in basketball history to the screen.”
HBO, like Newz9, is a unit of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Former Lakers star, coach and basic supervisor Jerry West, by means of his legal professional, demanded a retraction and apology final week over the way in which that he’s depicted within the 10-part sequence, calling the portrayal “fiction pretending to be fact — a deliberately false characterization that has caused great distress to Jerry and his family.”
In the assertion, West cited various former Lakers, each gamers and those that labored in administration, as supporting his contentions.
Separately, former Lakers star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar used his blog to write a chunk decrying “Winning Time” as being “deliberately dishonest” and “drearily dull.” While the Hall of Fame heart confused that he understood historic dramas take liberties with precise occasions and that he doesn’t have a skinny pores and skin when it comes to criticism, he known as the characters within the undertaking “crude stick-figure representations that resemble real people the way Lego Han Solo resembles Harrison Ford.”
As one instance, Abdul-Jabbar pointed to a scene wherein his character (performed by Solomon Hughes) snaps an expletive at a toddler actor whereas filming the film “Airplane!,” which he says by no means occurred.
The community has renewed the series for a second season, stating, “We can’t wait to see how this team will tell the next chapter of this dynasty.”
Abdul-Jabbar singled out producer Adam McKay, who additionally directed the primary episode, writing that whereas he has loved McKay-directed films like “Vice” and “The Big Short” he didn’t like “Don’t Look Up,” suggesting that “Winning Time” “suffers from some of the same shallowness and lazy writing.”
Magic Johnson, who has additionally sought to distance himself from the HBO sequence, not too long ago appeared in “They Call Me Magic,” a four-part documentary on Apple TV+. Another docuseries devoted to the Lakers, related to ESPN’s Chicago Bulls sequence “The Last Dance,” is coming to Hulu later this yr.
Starring John C. Reilly as Lakers proprietor Jerry Buss and Quincy Isaiah as Johnson, the sequence is predicated on Jeff Pearlman’s e-book “Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s.”