Almost a quarter of a century later, the Hanson Brothers are still playing hockey. In Slap Shot II: Breaking the Ice, which was recently filmed in rinks throughout the Vancouver area, the players who played the Hansons - Dave Hanson, Jeff Carlson and Steve Carlson - men who played a total of 85 National Hockey League games, accumulating a total of 22 goals (21 by Steve Carlson), have graduated, in stage parlance, from being spear carriers (literally) to co-stars of the movie.

“We never saw ourselves as actors,” says Steve Carlson, outside one of the sets, a South Surrey arena. “But it seems that most of the people who remember the movie remember us. So, when the idea for a sequel came along, we got the call.”

The new film stars the two Carlsons, Hanson, Steven Baldwin, Vancouver actor Callum Keith Rennie, Gary Busey and Jessica Steen. Baldwin plays Linden, a guy who was drummed out of the NHL and now toils in the minor leagues. There, he encounters a group of career minor leaguers, including the Hansons, and eventually moves, with the team, from a second rate league and arenas to a posh private arena owned by an eccentric millionaire (Busey) who has purchased the team in order for it to play “Washington Generals” to his slick “Harlem Globetrotters-style” Omaha Icebreakers.
The film was originally destined for a straight-to-video release. However, Universal Pictures, which made the movie, recently began to have second thoughts. The popularity of the first film could see some theatrical release, particularly in hockey-mad Canada. The film’s director, Steve Boyum, says that he has always seen theatrical potential for the movie.

“One of the requirements that the studio has of me is that I deliver a cut negative and an answer print, so we are finishing on film. You generally don’t finish on film with straight-to-video projects, but the further we go down the road to final production the more I see it as a good movie. I’m too old to delude myself about movies. It may not be the best movie ever made, but it’s better than most and I think the audience would really like to see it on the big screen. I think that in Canada alone there are enough fans of the original movie to justify its release.”

Although Boyum, a former athlete and stunt man, is a native southern Californian who admits to “having no comprehension” of hockey while growing up in the 1960s, he went on to be the second unit director for two Mighty Ducks movies. He says that the movies he helped make might have benefited from his lack of knowledge of the game.
“I think my non-understanding of the game taught me some of the issues that kept (Americans) from being fans. I couldn’t follow the puck whenever I would try to watch it, and so I thought that it would be best to keep the camera on ice level so the audience would know where the puck was. I built a lot of my work around that dynamic and then I would bring faces into it. Now, after making hockey films, I have expanded my thinking from ice level up a bit. But the influences also come from being an athlete and coming out of the stunt world. All those things gave me a background for making hockey movies, but not understanding it at the beginning probably gave me a good point to start from and allowed me to pick hockey apart.”

Boyum, of course, has big shoes to fill. The first Slap Shot was directed by the legendary George Roy Hill, who had previously worked with Paul Newman on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the Oscar-winning The Sting. Hill earned a reputation for his ability to use all of the elements, from music to character development, costumes and set design to create a sense of place, whether it was the wild west or the streets of Chicago in the 1930s or a small town hockey rink. Boyum says that he wanted to make a darker film but says he was also aware that the key to making a sequel to the Hill film was to give the viewing audience the sense that they were in the stands.

“I wanted to pay homage to him and his film but I also wanted to make this film a new experience for everyone,” he says. “What I didn’t want to do is steal too much from George. I had reservations that probably entered into it when I got the script, but when I met the people from the studio they were open to ideas. Basically, the centerpiece of the story is following this former player (Baldwin) down a dark path and then he brings everyone in his wake along with him. In the end of the film he realizes what he has done and changes things. It is a classic drama, in that regard, but it is laced with broad comedy.
“I knew that each of the characters had to be quirkishly individual. I used some of Hill’s character development and then moved forward and we took some new steps with these characters and this story because all of these people are individuals. I also wanted to give the film a retro feel through the clothes of the characters and even some of the stadiums. I felt that would allow some imprint from the original film to be in the sequel.”

To get that imprint, Boyum relied on people like Patricia Flynn, the film’s costume designer. Flynn says that her designing team set out to create uniforms that would help to tell the story and give the movie a sense of place, despite having all of the stadiums located within the Lower Mainland.

“There are several teams involved, and each team has to have a certain look. We have the key teams, the Superchiefs and the Icebreakers and then today we will be doing two flashbacks to supposed pro teams. Then we have sweaters for opposing teams, so that is a fair number of logos and jerseys to create. If you include the different pads, gloves and various pieces of equipment it’s a lot of stuff. But the designs have to appeal to the fans and so, although originally we weren’t going to use the classic Charlestown Chiefs, we soon learned that most people consider the classic jersey to be their favorite.

“Everyone loves these jerseys. If I had manufactured 500 of them I could sell them all at the end of the show, but we have a limited number. They are still being created by lots of knock off companies. When we had our big call out for lots of audience many of the extras were wearing them. There is all kinds of paraphernalia, including baseball caps and toques, that say ‘Charlestown Chiefs.’ It was amazing when I went out to the world of hockey and said I was working with Slap Shot II. Every guy has seen Slap Shot, young or old, especially if you are interested in hockey.”

Dave Babych, a former player with Winnipeg and Vancouver, saw the original film while playing junior hockey in Portland, Oregon. Twenty four years later, he has a small role in the sequel. He says that while most observers thought the Hansons were violent, he felt that the style of hockey reflected the times. “At that time hockey was played in that kind of style no matter where you were and so it wasn’t out of the norm. Everyone who was in hockey knew how true to life that story was. I am sure they embellished it a little bit but it was such a good story and it told you what happened on the road and the silly things that went on, which made it a classic, certainly for those of who played the game. There was also an innocence too it and, while it was violent, there was nothing that was too crazy. I think that the other thing that most of us who played hockey related to was that the Hansons were three guys who grew up in the country. They were tough but the bright lights were all new to them.”

They dressed the part. Surprisingly, the off-ice clothes the Hansons wore in Slap Shot haven’t changed too much. Costume designer Flynn wanted their fashion sense to be retro, but more as a way of fitting within the personalities fans of the movie remember and not by their own design.

“We have clothes that fit their personalities,” she says. “Jeff is more the hayseed type, with a bib and overalls and basic variations, because we remember them as being naive and unsophisticated country boys. They wear Converse runners in different colours so we can tell them apart, and there is just a slight difference in their jackets. When I was fitting Jeff and Steve and Dave they said ‘we don’t wear fashion jeans. We just don’t.’ So the clothes we designed fit who they are. They wear jeans, T-shirts and tennis shoes and that is what I went with. I felt we should stay authentic and not try to re-design something that is obviously hugely successful the way it is. People want them to be the Hanson Brothers. They’re hockey guys, nothing more, nothing less.”

Babych says that while he didn’t know much about acting professionally before he started working on the film, he has learned a lot from watching actors like Steven Baldwin and Callum Keith Rennie. And, he says, he did some acting on skates long before the movies enlisted his services.

“I have been acting for 20 years playing hockey and I think Steve (Boyum) didn’t want me to alter my approach. He just wanted me to play myself. When I did my other job, as hockey coordinator, he said ‘just add something that you think might happen every day in a dressing room or on the ice, even the goofy things.’ So a lot of this stuff is goofy but most of it does happen. I think the credibility will come during the real hockey scenes, because in the movie hockey moves back to its roots. I think real fans will appreciate that more than the rest of the audience.

“I had a lot of fun playing hockey. So if you take something too seriously, you are just going to hurt yourself. But the more fun you have with something the harder you’re going to work at it. I don’t think I’m taking away from the work ethic when I say that you have to enjoy it. If you go to your job every day for 25 years and you don’t enjoy it, and then you get a gold watch, you think ‘I didn’t accomplish a damn thing.’ But I think this is great. It’s a nice way to end your playing career. I told the guys ‘I am going to hang my Chiefs sweater up there with my Team Canada sweater and my team sweaters and my all-star sweaters’ because this is nice touch.

Jo-Ann Chorney grew up with the NHL. A native of Thunder Bay, her brother Mark played with Los Angeles Kings. She had watched Slap Shot and knew about the Hanson Brothers and their hockey careers from talking to her brother and his friends.
“I had fond memories of the original film because it got into the essence of hockey. You either like hockey or you don’t and if you do, it becomes part of your soul. If you don’t like hockey, you might think the movie is just about the working class’s notion of sport. I never viewed it that way because in our family hockey didn’t carry these negative stereotypes.”

Chorney’s knowledge of small town rinks came into play when she was hired as a production designer for the sequel. “We had to make the arenas look like they were a progression from minor leagues to the big leagues. Towards the end we were doing a lot more things with graphics in terms of the look of the ice surface. We went from corporate hockey to ‘real’ hockey in the story line so I just followed the story. As the games got bigger and more showier the art work became bigger and more graphic. We put in more local advertising and changed the paint textures. I think we did a pretty good job. Everything becomes cleaner, more streamlined, more sophisticated and less gritty with as clean and corporate look as possible.”

Of course some of the early rinks were a lot less corporate. Joel Ransom, the film’s director of photography, says that the low budget film (it cost $4million U.S.) needed to shoot all of the interiors in 25 days. He felt that the lack of money and the need to shoot quickly could actually have benefits in terms of the look of the film.
“When I walked into some of the rinks we used, I fell in love with them. The whole look was gritty and crummy, which I felt worked well for a hockey movie. I felt we should embrace that gritty look so that by the time the team made the big leagues it would have a ‘white light’ feel. When I was shooting in the early rinks, I just used the existing light. I said ‘let’s go look at what we can do with the money and gave it a grittier feel.’ When we got to the Pacific Coliseum we hung up 70 space lights on the ceiling and used some shutter work to give it a staccato look.”

Although Ransom was able to find ways of making the budget work for him, shooting a feature film in less than a month, for just $4 million is never going to be easy. “There were some days where we were averaging 70 setups a day,” he says. “By contrast, when we were shooting The X-Files, we were doing 24 setups a day. There are occasions when you will do as few as18 on some features. We were lucky that we were shooting in ice rinks for the most part, because it’s easy to move around. You light the ice rink and move on. For the most part, there is a lot of available light. We were also fortunate in having only one day time exterior.”

Ransom says that he was happy enough with the shoot to agree with Boyum that it should be more just a straight-to-video package, despite the low budget and the short shooting schedule. “I think that after the studio started watching it, they started to change their minds. It’s been 25 years since the last film and I think they will discover that a lot of people have been waiting for this movie. They love the Hansons. And why wouldn’t they. It was certainly the thing that appealed to me from the first time I heard about it. I thought, ‘hey, it’s Slap Shot II. What could be more fun than that?”

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