A message from rhymeswithazalea

I've been playing hockey for years and Check Please literally nails the entire game and its culture. How do you write it all so accurately if you've never played? I also play goalie and would love to see a main character between the pipes!

Not only have I never played, I skate like a newborn giraffe and have literally held a hockey stick in my hand once!

And I’m from Texas.

I’ll probably do a FAQ/write-up on the creation of Check,Please!, but long story short, I did 3-months of hockey research my senior year of college in order to write my first screenplay Hardy, a story about a really butch hockey player named Chris Einhardt who falls for his best friend and former teammate. It has intellectual gems like:

MALKOV

…Yeah. Not really. But I mean, everyone has like fucking random thoughts. Okay, say you have like a million thoughts in a year, so maybe like 400 thousand are about girls and stuff, and maybe 400 thousand are about hockey, and maybe 1 of them has to be randomly about a guy. Completely randomly. But that thought may not even be a full thought anyway. And you don’t act on that, because, hey. That’s pretty fucking gay. But there’s a line. Now, gay guys—your friend? Shit. Like 500, 600 thousand thoughts a year about cocks and stuff.

HARDY

Six hundred thousand.

MALKOV

Ehhh, give or take a cock.

HARDY

Okay.

For the writing of that screenplay I interviewed hockey players at Yale (one of whom plays in the AHL!) and roommates of hockey players, talked to the hockey beat reporter for the newspaper, interviewed girls who dated hockey players, watched every single of documentary about hockey ever, checked out books from the library about hockey, hit up JSTOR for scholarly articles on hockey culture, watched Miracle/Goon/Slapshot and took notes during hockey games.

Believe you me, I was paranoid about stepping into this completely foreign culture and making some horrible faux pas. But the upside of the excessive research is that I had all this leftover hockey know-how when I completed the screenplay…

which I used to create Check, Please!