‘Win Win’ Takes Thomas McCarthy Back Home:
The dream, as it is usually imagined and, in rare cases realized, is to leave behind the small town and shine in the bright lights of Hollywood. Turning that formula around, Thomas McCarthy proved that you can go home again — and in doing so, achieved his greatest success to date with the Paul Giamatti-starring hit film “Win Win.”
The film’s genesis, McCarthy, an actor/writer/director perhaps most instantly recognizable as Dr. Bob from the “Meet the Parents” films, explained, was trading emails with his childhood friend Joe Tiboni. He was at that point practicing as a lawyer for the elderly in their hometown of New Providence, New Jersey, but McCarthy had been encouraging high school wrestling buddy to turn the funny stories he had been relaying into screenwriting form.
“I’ve known Joe since I was 13 and I never anticipated that from Joe I’d get material that I’d say, ‘god this guy is good,’ but he was,” McCarthy remembered in a conversation with The Huffington Post. “And when I had this idea, it was really just kind of a whim on first, but I said why don’t you develop this with me. And he jumped at it, to his credit. Most people wouldn’t, they’d be like no I’ve got a practice and a family and I live here, but he was like hey, I’m game, he’s just that kind of guy. And really that sort of spur of the moment decision made a lot of sense suddenly.”



From there, long walks in the park where they played as kids took a small concept and turned it into a full blown idea, set in the most obvious of places. The film would eventually become the story of a New Providence elderly lawyer and coach of his town’s pathetic high school wrestling team. Familiar, indeed.
“It wasn’t something I ever thought, I can’t wait to go back and make a movie in New Providence,” McCarthy explained. “The kernel of the idea was high school wrestling and then it obviously quickly grew beyond that, but probably half way through that process I was like I know this town, it might be a really interesting experiment to go back and if not actually shoot it, which was my original intention, but at least try to capture that.”
Because of tax reasons, the actual filming actually took place in Long Island, with the production manager for the film presenting a real enough substitute to satisfy McCarthy’s desire for accuracy.
“Those commuter communities are all so similar, I felt like I could tell you where the pizza place was and where the high school was,” he laughed. “The way that translates I think, I was pretty happy with that in terms of the production value.”
The film — a warm dramedy with earnest characters and honest dialog — isn’t totally biographical; Mike Flaherty, the fictional lawyer, played by Paul Giamatti, creates complication by fraudulently placing the client in a nursing home, pocketing money intended for the client out of financial desperation. He then takes in the client’s homeless grandson, who turns out to be an inexplicably prodigy-level wrestling talent played by newcomer Alex Shaffer. Tiboni, so far as the public knows, did not take in a semi-orphaned student or cheat a senior citizen out of money. However, given the basic framework he provided for the character, in a way, the story was about him, with Giamatti using him for some inspiration.