Joel Silver (producer of the
new film The Nice Guys)is an alum of
Columbia High School where the first rules of ultimate frisbee were developed.
Quotes from the
Coming Soon article [5/18/2016; Silas Lesnick]:
Joel Silver on his contribution to the sport of ultimate:
"I like to say we developed it."
Joel Silver on his inspiration:
"I went one year to
Mount Hermon...prep school. One summer, there were a couple guys there from Amherst and Amherst was the location of a place called [The
Frisbie Pie Company]. They made these metal pie tins, which is what they first started throwing around there in Massachusetts.... There was
kind of a game that they played at Amherst since the '50s that had
elements of a kind of run and catch game, which I was taught there that summer. Then I brought it back to my high school."
Joel Silver on how he started ultimate at his high school:
"As a joke one day — because it was a kind of counter culture time — I had raised my hand in my student council and I say, 'I'd like to move that we have a committee to investigate the possibility of bringing frisbee into the high school curriculum.' I mean, it was a joke. I didn't expect to have a committee to investigate playing frisbee, so we kind of started playing this game and they just had built that parking lot, which is down the street. They decided to light it at night, because they didn't want a dark, empty parking lot there. They lit it all night, so we had a place to go and we'd come at the end of our evening and we'd all collect there and play this kind of game that we started playing."
"It was popular. People would come and hang out and play this game. We'd play in the winter. It was fun and, by the end of that school year, we played the student council."
Joel Silver on writing game rules and naming the game:
To show what the committee did, I decided to put the rules on paper and so we wrote up the rules. There was a
game then they used to play that Wham-O had put out called 'Guts Frisbee.' It was the dumbest games in the world. You stand there across from each other and throw the frisbee as hard as you can at the other team. It's called
'Guts Frisbee.' Dumbest game. So when my friend who wrote the rules wrote it, he called it ‘Speed Frisbee’. I said, "You can't call it 'Speed Frisbee'! That's as dumb as Guts Frisbee! Let's call it "Ultimate Frisbee." The Ultimate Frisbee, that's what well call it!" So we typed it up, put it in, submitted it, and that was the game."
RELATED: TMZ Sports asks Joel Silver about
ultimate Frisbee
