The female powerhouse trio behind 'Golden Arm' discuss friendship and what makes good story
May 20, 2021
Maureen Bharoocha's Golden Arm, a female-driven comedy with a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer and could be this year's destined-for-cult-status-sleeper-hit, centers on female friendship and arm wrestling (yes, arm wrestling).
The story is driven by Danny (Betsy Sodaro), a truck driver and ol' pro in the competitive arm-wrestling circuit, and her best friend Melanie (Mary Holland), a demure and down-on-her-luck baker with a failing bakery. After Danny injures her wrist in a bout with notorious cheater/champ Brenda the Bonecrusher (Olivia Stambouliah), she persuades her best friend Melanie to train to defeat the Bonecrusher and win a $15,000 cash purse in the Oklahoma City Women's Arm Wrestling competition, under the guise of taking a week off her work at the bakery to help Danny finish her route deliveries.
"It's hard to avoid tropes in comedy. Avoiding tropes takes finesse," says Bharoocha on the hilarious buddy comedy. "You need to find the surprise — the unexpected thing. whether it's punching up a joke on the fly or pivoting in a moment to make a location more authentic. You need to allow the comedic moments to stand out and I think that's how I avoid the pitfalls of comedy tropes."
Golden Arm screenwriter Jenna Milly had this to say about avoiding tropes, "Ann Marie and I started by watching and studying classic sports movies, which we love—but there aren't many for women. There's The Natural, which we pay homage to in the movie, Rudy, A League Of Their Own...but we really wanted to write a movie that we wanted to see. The empowerment happens throughout the arc of the main character, Melanie. The question for her was, 'How can we get her to believe in herself?"
"The idea, the world of Ladies Arm Wrestling, comes from a charity I cofounded about ten years ago, The DC Lady Arm Wrestlers," chimes in co-writer Ann Marie Allison. "I created it with three friends and we built this league and arm-wrestled for charity. Everyone would have personas and entourages…sort of a roller derby-esque feel to it. For me, it was fascinating to see the transformation of women from rehearsal to the match. Lawyers, lobbyists, teachers, some on the very conservative side of things. They’d come to training from their day job, but then she’d show up to the tournament with her persona, like "Amy Smackhouse"—Amy runs an environmental company, but comes in dressed like Amy Winehouse, drinking bourbon, boobs, beehive, with people in her entourage. Then there was the Marketing Exec, Raging Raegan (à la The Exorcist). Her husband comes in dressed like a Priest; she's got puke on her shirt—the whole event just became a spectacle. Watching the creativity inside these ladies and the competitiveness; we were legitimately arm-wrestling—we had arm breaks—but it was this female empowerment that was built into the event! So I was talking to Jenna about it and she wanted to write an article about it, and that's where the concept all began."
"[Writers] Ann Marie [Allison] and Jenna [Milly] originally brought me the idea years ago and asked me to shoot a sizzle about the underground female arm wrestling circuit," she says. "Golden Arm has been a long journey I jumped on five years ago. A year later, we did a live reading with producers. Then, I went on to work at [Jimmy] Kimmel while [the writers] focused on obtaining financing. We were able to shoot it in 2019, and got into SXSW which was then canceled. And here we are."
It's also the creatively combined efforts of Milly, Allison and Bharoocha that lends Golden Arm its magic.
For her part, Bharoocha comes from a long history of directing short films, which perhaps lends itself to the kernelled comedic structure of Golden Arm. Each scene is so memorable in itself, yet are tethered together by a well-developed overall story. Bharoocha says, "I love directing shorts — it’s how I find my tribe. I've done a short with everyone on this movie. And like a short, each moment of this film is really its own short film. As a director, it's your job to break down this fully developed script — a full story — into smaller chunks. You know, when writers have a vision, it's very apparent in the script, but Golden Arm did change a bit tonally. We were trying to avoid broad and unrealistic characters, and grounding it in reality was very important."
Bharoocha adds, "I was lucky because Golden Arm started with strong writers who developed this beautiful comedy with a strong spine. The rest just filled itself in.
Written by: Vanessa King
Vanessa King is an NYC-based producer, screenwriter, and professor who has worked in development with top-level industry talent for nearly two decades. Her work as a writer has received numerous awards, having earned her recognition from industry bodies including AMPAS/Oscar’s Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship (feature) and Sony Worldwide Entertainment’s Emerging Filmmaker Program (TV Series). In 2005, she co-founded the New York Screenwriters Co-Op, New York’s only free-to-the-public screenwriting workshop with over 2000 active members. Vanessa is faculty at Gotham Writer’s Workshop (NYC) and Staffordshire University (UK), where she teaches both television and screenwriting to students, beginner to post-graduate. She recently was Showrunner of the TV pilot “Two Roads”, a concept she co-created and co-wrote for Sony’s VUE Network. Vanessa is passionate about diversity and inclusion within the industry and was a consultant on Final Draft Screenwriting Software’s Diversity and Inclusion product build. She’s a board member of the Diversity List, amplifying top scripts written by female-identifying and BIPOC writers. She is a judge for the Hip Hop Film Festival, The UCLA Graduate Screenwriter’s Showcase and The 24 Hour Film Festival. She was named one of The Huffington Post’s 13 Women To Watch and for three consecutive years, has been named to Vanity Fair’s “Downtown 100”, a list that recognizing New York’s top networkers in the entertainment industry. Originally from Canada, she lives in New York City.- Topics:
- Screenwriting
- Interviews
- TV/Film
