Oakland’s film is too $ hort, Sleepy Floyd

Oakland has gone through a lot in recent years, losing a legend of sport and a beloved actor – not to mention two sports franchises.

Perhaps a way of dealing with is to escape the cinema, or a particular film, where you can huluer and shout like a pile of punks for east bay adolescents give a whhuppin to neonazis outside the 924 Gilman Street Music Club. If this has not been PEP, how about encouraging a fictitious version of the legend of the Golden State Warriors Eric “Sleepy” Floyd when he slammed really rotten guys?

You get all this madness and more – as well as belts of true history and nostalgia – through “Freaky Tales”, the anxiously awaited spring film will release a bloody and bloody walk on the wild side in 1987 Oakland. Written and produced by the film duo Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (“Half Nelson”, “Captain Marvel” of 2019), this big somole of fat to the city opens Friday in the rooms of the region and connects its points of the intrigue through four scenarios, certain roots rooted in the truth.

“I think Oakland needs this film right now,” said Fleck, born in Berkeley, in an interview with Boden in one of the star locations of the film – the venerable theater of Grand Lake.

“The city has gone through difficult moments. We have lost Rickey Henderson, Angus Cloud (fire” Euphoria “star that appears in the film). We have just lost many people … The Oakland A. I think (this film) is only a celebration.”

And how. “Freaky Tales” made her debutch debut at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024 and received High-Fives rounds last month from an enthusiastic crowd gathering for a special projection organized at the Grand Lake. East Bay’s red carpet came out of local icons, including rapper Too $ Hort and Sleepy Floyd, as well as stars Pedro Pascal, Jay Ellis, Ben Mendsohn and more.

“Freaky Tales” takes up the vitality and creative power of Oakland while celebrating gender cinema that has become fashionable at the age of VHS. A dominant love for Oakland mixes with a surreal DIY of key characters, local events and places while the scenarios jump from a confrontation of rap between two workers in ice cream and too $ hort (played by rapper Symba, a native of Berkeley) and shenanigans of Tarantino Sauvages implicating Sleepy Floyd (played by Allilis). Too $ hort – whose 1987 song lends to the film its title – tells and appears for a cameo while Floyd – who now lives in North Carolina – also has a cameo.

One of the brightest smiles in the film comes in a scene where the Pascal debt collector character enters a local video store where he joined a hilarious conversation with a clerk in love with the film, played by Tom Hanks, from Concord.

Pascal says that the shooting of this scene was a very professional and personal moment.

“Not only was I with Tom Hanks, but I was on a set which was a model of a real VHS rental store that I grew up. Hanks.

Pascal remembers Hanks with emotion to point a few spots around Oakland, the actor knows well, at some point saying to Pascal: “I had the ass kicked in this corner.” »»

Oakland has become a home for creative cinema outside the box. Some of the films that shot there include the first “Fruitvale Station” by the director of Oakland Ryan Coogler, “Fruitvale Station”, “Blindspotting” of 2018 natives of East Bay Rafael and Daveed Diggs and Boots Riley’s Surreal 2018 Drama Drama “Sorry to disturb you”, with Lakeith Stanfield. To generate even more scripts in the Baie region, Casal and the black list have created the Bay list, a project to highlight the 10 best scripts in the scripting community in the Bay region. Boden and Fleck are also involved.

Everyone behind and in front of the camera of “Freaky Tales” becomes a little nostalgic, because this film plunges into a way of being of East Bay, but it has lively edges.

Why, however, takes place in 1987 Oakland? Two words: Sleepy Floyd.

“This is a confluence of reasons that really draws around this game Sleepy Floyd in 1987 (a play of eliminations of Lakers-Warriors in which Floyd scored 51 points),” said Fleck, a huge booster of sports teams in the Bay region. His passion is such that he wrote a living and personal commentary by Mercury News who urged A John Fisher’s owner not to leave Oakland high and dry. (Fleck, which attended the Diablo Valley College of Pleasant Hill before going to the Arts School of New York University, remains indigenous as never leaving the Bay region.)

“I listened to the game (Lakers / Warriors) on the radio and heard (Warriors sports commentator) Greg Papa Play-Play, where he called Sleepy Floyd” Superman “,” recalls Fleck. “It was just making my head for years later.”

Boden heard his collaborator as filmmakers presenting various iterations of “history on a child in the region of the bay in the 80s” for more than a decade, then helped him to transform him into “four stories that concern all these different outsiders in the bay of East which enter into this genre, mixture of tapes, mixture and in a way packed by action”, she said.

The first story was inspired by a real incident where 924 customers on Gilman street faced a group of skinheads in a moment David against Goliath, she said. Floyd’s latest scenario takes the nickname “Superman” and fled with him in a bloody way.

Since the intrigue depends on a few real personalities and plunges them into unique absurd situations and – in the case of Sleepy Floyd, it would be easy to assume that not everyone would jump on board in an instant.

But everyone did it. The rapper of East Bay Too $ Hort, who still lives in East bay, did not hesitate.

“He was on board the first day,” said Fleck. “As soon as we told him what it was and what we wanted to do, he said” cool, let’s do it. “In fact, the influential musician was then executive producer.

“We were a little more nervous at the idea of ​​approaching sleepy given where we take (its story).”

They didn’t need to be.

“He was super nice and united,” said Fleck.

Floyd took the call with Fleck and Boden to discuss the film after saying that he had received a message via Linkedin from the studio.

“I was just blown away because I didn’t know what the call would be for,” recalls Floyd. “They gave me the base of the film and that it was going to be based on the 1987 match with the Warriors. I did not know that I would kill people exactly,” he said, laughing. In the film, Floyd is also the spokesperson for the celebrity of Psytopics, a spiritual center of the cult type of East Bay.

The experience of being part of the film and returning to the bay prompted great memories for him.

“It makes me feel good and proud,” said Floyd. “To be able to have a moment that still lives today in the psyche and the memory of people…. It brings this game, that night, to life. Because when you get away more and more, it is only a memory and a statistical.”

Floyd also becomes nostalgic for what it was for him to be in the team at home and play the Oakland Coliseum. (The day before the first of Grand Lake, Floyd and others on the film attended a Warriors match in San Francisco. He and Too $ hort remembered the moment when the Warriors played in Oakland.)

“We were talking at night last night and it was just like a family there (at the Oakland Coliseum),” he said, while praising the new Warriors excavations at the Chase Center. “But you knew the bailiffs. You knew the people in the parking lots. You are developing relationships with these people over the years. You lose that. I’m sure they earn it all.

What was particularly fun for Fleck is to plunge stories into real places that have personal and personal meaning for him, even if the original companies are no longer there – like Loard’s ice cream on Boulevard MacArthur or the Sweet Jimmie club and the gathering point, at the house now at the new parish.

Although the “bizarre tales” are centered on the city, the filmmakers see him have a wide attraction even if the audience in the bay region could resume the allusions that others could miss.

“The intention was that people around the world enter the film and have a good time. It’s n ° 1,” said Fleck. “But yes, for people in the bay region, there are a lot of Easter eggs.”

For this reason and others, “Freaky Tales” is a type of film the best experienced with a crowd in cinemas, said Boden.

“Look, we admit, all our films have not been great pleasures of exuberant crowds where you have an entire audience that screams, applauding and laugh. But this film is like a contagious experience to do with other people.

Originally published: April 1, 2025 at 11:05 a.m.