Just this morning, NBA All-Star and Butler Bulldogs legend Gordon Hayward announced his retirement from professional basketball following a 14-year career. He’s not going to Disneyland; Hayward is headed 32 miles northwest of that, to Hollywood.
Hayward, who first rose to national prominence with a 2010 run to the NCAA championship game and has since played for four NBA teams, is now a free agent in the truest sense of the term. And he has exclusively revealed to IndieWire that his next step is playing a more active role in his and partner Simon Hacker‘s production company, Whiskey Creek. That now includes the launch of a distribution arm, as announced on Thursday, with the intent to theatrically release independent films.
“It’s hard to leave something that I’ve been doing for so long and that I’ve obviously loved. I don’t think anyone’s ever truly ready to retire from the game,” Hayward told IndieWire. “But for me personally, I felt like it was just time. I’ve got a family that’s all starting to grow up really fast before my eyes. I’ve got four kids. Just the ability to be able to hang out more with them, go to all their events, be more around was a huge factor for me.”
Those hangs include taking them to the movies — now, presumably, some of those films will be his own.
With 41 road games per season (plus any pre- and post-season travel), NBA players have a lot of alone time. Hayward spent much of his playing video games, launching sneaker lines, and watching movies. Hayward is ready to take a “front seat” in that final hobby. His partner riding shotgun, Hacker, says Hayward is more than a hooper: Hayward has an organic “curiosity” and “a taste for a wide variety of stories.”
And Hacker has the experience.
“Simon is the mastermind here, as he’s been in the industry for such a long time, so he knows all the ins and outs already,” Hayward said. “We’re both learning, but I’m going to be learning even more. I’m a naturally inquisitive person and am really looking forward to getting a chance to learn more and more about the industry and figure it out as we go along here.”
Whiskey Creek’s first release as a distributor will be “Notice to Quit,” an indie dramedy starring Michael Zegen (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) that Hacker wrote and directed as his debut feature. The film has been confirmed for a theatrical release on September 27 on 400-plus screens nationwide, including in AMC, Harkins, Regal, Marcus, and Alamo Drafthouse locations.
Now in control of the distribution, Whiskey Creek keeps the rights and can leverage Hayward’s celebrity (and his estimated $270 million career earnings in addition to the outside capital they’ve raised) to market Hacker’s film. But they don’t want to just promote from within: Whiskey Creek wants to provide the same opportunity for other first-time directors.
“I think we have an opportunity to help bring underserved or overlooked films in the independent space to the market,” Hacker said. He hopes to find filmmakers with a “singular point of view” who can still deliver films with broad audience appeal. They’ll focus on rising storytellers working in between the giant tentpoles and the smallest micro budgets.
For the first time in a very long time, Hayward will not spend his fall prepping for a basketball season. But he’ll stay busy with the fall film festivals, where he and Hacker hope to acquire films and begin development on other features in-house. The basketball player has a long way to go to be a real player in the independent film space, but he’ll be in all the right places.
And no, the versatile forward is not only looking for sports stories. Hacker says he was impressed at Hayward’s desire to go “beyond the obvious,” and Hayward added that he doesn’t want to “pigeonhole” their company in such a limited way.
“I’m open, and we are open to all kinds of different avenues: stories that my kids will enjoy, stories my wife and I will go enjoy, stories that me and the boys will go enjoy,” Hayward said. “We’ve got a lot of stuff planned out to hit all three of those, so we’re open to do a lot of different things.”
Take “Notice to Quit.” The film, originally titled “Zoo,” follows Zegen as a struggling NYC realtor on the verge of being evicted from his own apartment when his 10-year-old daughter (Kasey Bella Suarez) tells him she and her mom will be moving to Florida.
Hayward said he could relate to the film’s themes of fatherhood, navigating a work-life balance, and understanding what’s truly important. Hence today’s farewell.
It was Hayward’s NBA career that brought the guys together. Hayward and Hacker met during a rehab stint in 2017. Then on the Boston Celtics, Hayward fractured his tibia and dislocated his ankle just minutes into the season opener. He was out for the entire year.
Hacker, who got his start as an assistant working under the Safdies on “Good Time,” followed Hayward throughout his rehab process for The Athletic’s five-part documentary series “The Return.” Hayward credits conversations with Hacker with helping him get through the “tedious” recovery process.
One thing they talked about was the gap in the market for middle-class independent films. Traditional distributors have lost output deals or pay-one partners, and many festival darlings go unseen. Whiskey Creek was born.
“There’s so many films that exist that need to have an opportunity to reach people,” Hacker said. “We can help be a conduit to that.”
“When you’re in the NBA and you know you’re going down to the end of the regular season, you don’t want to put things to chance. You want to control your own destiny and feel like you’re giving yourself a moment and a shot here,” Hayward added. “We’re going to put as much work as we can to give ourselves the best chance, and that’s what I feel like we’re doing.”
