AUSTIN, Texas — Austin Nichols grew up in Austin, Texas, and still calls the city home. His affection for the city led to his most recent project.
Nichols has been an actor for many years but recently got into directing, and his recent project was directing his first movie called “The Long Shot.” It’s a film inspired by the Save Muny project in Austin that has for years been pushing to preserve Lions Municipal Golf Course from being developed.
“A friend approached me about an idea loosely inspired by Lions and the whole Save Muny story,” said Nichols. “I thought it would be a great half-hour workplace comedy for television.”
Nichols says the interest in the TV show wasn’t what he hoped for, so the decision was made to turn it into a movie.
“We got sick of it and said let’s go make the indy movie and make it ourselves,” said Nichols. “We love this idea, why don’t we make it ourselves.”
That’s what he set out to do a few years back. The script was written by Drew Mackintosh and Nichols took on the role of director. A lot of legwork went into finding locations, finding actors and filming the movie in and around Austin. The result was a comedy that was just released on streaming.
“Honestly, it’s terrifying, and we got really lucky and slotted into this really nice space that was our movie,” said Nichols. “We actually did get a lot of favors and a lot of people did come and work for cheap.”
Nichols was able to tap into some friends from a local film crew he worked with on the TV series “Walker.” He also called in some favors from actors and actresses he knew to be a part of the movie. One of those being Adrianne Palicki, with whom he worked on the TV show “Friday Night Lights.”
“It is really scary going in because at some point somebody is going to call me and say we can’t do that and we’re going to have to rewrite the script,” said Nichols. “I appreciate all those favors more than anything.”
For Nichols, this is another project that is helping him put together a pretty strong sports movie resume. He played a tennis player in the movie “Wimbledon,” a basketball player in the movie “Glory Road,” a surfer in the show “John from Cincinnati” and now he directed a golf movie. It’s not surprising for a guy who grew up very active and was a competitive water skier at a young age.
“Even with this I wasn’t thinking, ‘oh it’s a sports movie, it’s about golf,’” says Nichols. “It’s really funny, it takes perspective and looking back when I was editing, I started to go oh sports, yeah.”
There are a lot of other sports connections in the movie as well, including an appearance from former NFL running back Reggie Bush and plenty of mentions of the hometown Texas Longhorns football team. It was a passion project for Nichols, one that took a lot of work but one he’s proud of.
“I didn’t know this was going to be my first movie (directing) and luckily I got to make something about the place I grew up and the place that I love,” says Nichols.
“The Long Shot” is now streaming on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango.