Very few people know that it took the James Van Der Beek epic VARSITY BLUES decades to make it to the screen. Probably because no one cares. But they should, because it wasn’t always bound to be a watered-down, half-assed ripoff of better sports movies starring some kid with a big forehead and a ridiculous accent. In the beginning, at least, the kid's forehead was much smaller.

For those unaware, and consider yourselves lucky, VARSITY tells the story of young, downtrodden Jonathon Moxon, known to his friends as "Mox," a second-string quarterback in a small Texas town where everyone eats football, drinks football, and gets nasty bowel obstructions from football. The entire city lives in fear of Jon Voight, which seems about right. I've only ever visited Texas briefly, but it would hardly surprise me if there weren't whole tri-county areas ruled with an iron fist by the star of SUPERBABIES: BABY GENIUSES 2.

Life is tough for poor Mox. He's only kind of popular. His girlfriend is only fairly hot. His forehead has to be checked into overhead baggage when he flies. Just when we think things can't get any worse, the regular quarterback gets injured, and Mox is utterly surprised when, in spite of having joined the football team and practiced with them for years, he has to... play football. This infuriates Mox, who clashes with coach Jon Voight, because this is what teenagers do. Yep, I remember the first time I clashed with Jon Voight. Don’t we all? It was my friend's seventh birthday. I wanted chocolate ice cream, but all they had was strawberry. Jon Voight called me an ingrate who didn’t deserve to lick the drippings from other people’s cones off of a truck stop bathroom floor. Then he punched me in the groin.

Anyway, Mox is some kind of football savant, and wins a bunch of games. This pisses off Jon Voight really bad. The end.

When VARSITY BLUES debuted in early 1999, most of the fans of big-foreheaded drama in the audience could be forgiven for not knowing the script's long, storied history in Hollywood. Conceived by the screenwriting duo of Mickey and Jackie Young, who had previously written YUCKO GOES TO CAMP, YUCKO JOINS THE ARMY, and I HOPE YOU DIE, YUCKO, the script that would go on to become VARSITY BLUES first came into the hands of Jack Warner in 1933. Titled JIMBO RADINKSI AND HIS VARSITY PLAYERS, it told the tale of a plucky young Vermont tennis pro named Dave, who makes a bet with his fraternity buddies that he can eat a bag of dirt. Warner, going through his third divorce at the time, rejected it as "too ethnic."

It reappeared two years later as a vehicle for vaudeville comedian Roscoe "Addie" Addison to show off his scandalous stage act, where he plagiarized late 19th century French authors while wearing a bra on his head. The script had started to take on a more familiar form, abandoning the tennis angle altogether in favor of Addison's preferred football, although the story still lacked the requisite stench of alcoholism and boredom. Unfortunately, the project was dumped when Addison was indicted for conspiring to fix the price of ham. Although never convicted, the comedian's career never recovered from the taint of bacon scandal.

Ten years later, Addison's son Alan tried to sell his father's script to Paramount to star Ronald Reagan. Reagan was keen on the idea, but to be fair, he was also keen on, at any given time of the day, everything from walnuts to King Louis XIV. He once spent an entire week trying to get studios to make a movie about "the guy who invented toast."

In the intervening years, the younger Addison had added several key elements to the story, including the Billy Bob character, Mox's grotesquely overweight best friend. He also added the infamous "whipped cream bikini" scene, although at the time, it was to be worn by Reagan.

Paramount, finding the script both too racy and not commercial enough (the market for compromising pictures of Reagan would not peak until several decades later), passed on the project. Over the next twenty years, Addison attempted to sell the project as a musical, a war movie, a historical epic, a science fiction film, a "gay western," and an educational filmstrip about the dangers of VD. At one point, a young Jon Voight was even attached to play the lead, but at the time, the script was to be a "rock 'n' roll" biopic about Knute Rockne, with music by the Bay City Rollers.

And so it came to pass, years later, that Voight would return to the project, older, less discriminating, slightly confused. Probably unable to control his bowels. Sometimes showing up on the set in a dress and demanding to be addressed as "Dorothy." Spending all his free time behind the set, reenacting the Great Chicago Fire with a magnifying glass and Lincoln Logs. Naturally, there’s little (if any) proof for any of this, but one has to imagine that these are only natural reactions to looking back at one’s career and finding yourself gone from Academy Award winner to playing second fiddle to Dawson.

Someday, in the not-so-distant future, Dawson, too, will find himself playing second-fiddle to some young kid with a hipper, "edgier" forehead. But don't cry, Dawson, don't cry. That's Hollywood.

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