Ramblings | Smashed Rook Origins

One of the ques­tions I’ve been asked often, espe­cial­ly since the launch of Smashed Rook is: where does the name Smashed Rook come from.  Well, take a seat and I’ll tell you the tale of how this name came about.  It all start­ed with the first movie I ever made enti­tled Bad Sport. 

You may not think it from talk­ing to me now, but I used to be a bit of a hot­head when I lost at games.  Real­ly, it wasn’t just any game, but one that I real­ly think I’m going to win.  Grow­ing up I played a lot of table ten­nis and got pret­ty darn good at the game.  In fact, I felt so con­fi­dent that, when I lost at the game, I would lose my head a lit­tle bit.  After a pad­dle-throw­ing inci­dent, I decid­ed it was time to get that under con­trol and now I’m much bet­ter about being gra­cious in defeat.

When com­ing up with ideas for my first movie, the idea of doing some­thing based on the idea of los­ing your cool when you are beat­en at a game felt pret­ty per­son­al and fun, so I went for it.  Bad Sport took this idea and applied it to chess.  Two peo­ple sit down to a game of chess and upon one of them begin­ning to win, it esca­lates into a beat-down.  You’re prob­a­bly begin­ning to see where this is going.

Dur­ing one of the scenes, the chess set, which I bor­rowed from a friend, is knocked off the table and onto the floor.  The very next thing that hap­pens is the table being knocked over.  In my mind, the table was going to fall over on its side and stop right there.  In the real­i­ty of physics, the table kept its momen­tum and then kept falling flat onto the floor.  Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this hap­pened to be right on top of the chess set loaned to me by my friend.

Nat­u­ral­ly, under the immense weight of the table, the plas­tic chess set was oblit­er­at­ed.  I felt hor­ri­ble about my friend’s chess set and offered to replace it.  This did set up an incred­i­ble shot at the end where you can see the smashed chess set as the char­ac­ter flicks over the last remain­ing piece left standing.

When try­ing to think of a name for my pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny, I want­ed to incor­po­rate my first movie in some way.  Since the smashed chess set sto­ry was so good, I decid­ed to try and asso­ciate it that way.  At that point, it was just about find­ing the chess piece that sound­ed best next to smashed and since most of the pieces made it sound like I was talk­ing about drunk­en mon­archs, I went with rook.

Now you know the sto­ry of where Smashed Rook came from.  To cel­e­brate, let’s sit down and watch the movie that start­ed it all.