Eleven years after Peter Berg premiered his directorial debut, the dark comedy "Very Bad Things" at the Toronto International Film Festival, the writer/director/producer/actor/dude-who-must-never-sleep is bringing another project to the Canadian fest: a documentary about his long-time friend and hockey legend Wayne Gretzky called, "Kings Ransom."
The hour-long film stems from ESPN's "30 for 30" series, a collection of documentaries that focus on characters and events that have altered the sports landscape in the years since the cable network launched in 1979.
"ESPN came and were basically like, 'You can do anything that you want,'" Berg told MTV News during some downtime on the set of "Friday Night Lights," which he exec produces. "So I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And someone had decided they should do one on Wayne and so Wayne called me and said, 'Would you do me?' And I said, 'Hell yeah, I'd do you in a second!'"
Berg's doc concentrates on Gretzky's NHL-changing trade in 1988 from the four-time Stanley Cup-winning Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings—a team in a vastly bigger market but one with neither a strong hockey tradition nor a roster that could help Gretzky win another championship. The future Hall of Famer went on to break a ridiculous number of NHL records, but he never again won a Cup.
"It's pretty clear that he's conflicted at this point in his life," Berg said, pointing out that one of the strongest moments in the documentary is when they discuss how much he might have won had he stayed in Edmonton. "If Gretzky had never been traded, they potentially win ten Cups and go down as the greatest sports dynasty franchise in history."
Two decades after the trade, Berg said, hockey continues to struggle to find a mainstream audience in the US, but he sees the Gretzky trade as a "unique microcosm of the sports world" that will both appeal to sports fans and illuminate the tricky world of the business side of sports.
"I have no illusions that the world is going to come running to a Gretzky documentary," he said of the film that premieres in Toronto on September 13th and then airs on ESPN on October 6 at 8 p.m. "But I think the time is right. I think a lot of young athletes don't understand who he was and how important he was to the sport. It was one of the biggest trades in sport's history. And Gretzky was just magical with a hockey puck."
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