Pickleball’s big streaming break: Mary Steenburgen and Producer Mike Witherill on ‘The Dink’

Hollywood has a thing for paddle sports recently. Films like “Challengers,” the tennis movie starring Zendaya, and Timothée Chalamet’s straight-laced venture into the sad world of table tennis with “Marty Supreme” have been box office sellers over the last two years. This year comes the release of Hollywood’s first A-list pickleball film, “The Dink.” 

The first public screening of “The Dink” took place in Grand Rapids on July 11 at Celebration Cinema North. Star actor Mary Steenburgen and Michigan-raised producer Mike Witherill were in town to promote the film, including an appearance at the Beer City Open professional pickleball championships. 

“The Dink” started with screenwriter Sean Clements, best known as the co-host of the Hollywood Handbook podcast. This is Clements’ first feature film. 

“We got the script, and it was great,” Witherill said. “This will not be his last feature, I can assure you. He's a really, really creative writer.”

The film takes place after Dusty (Jake Johnson), a former professional tennis player working at his father’s country club, injures his wrist on the court. His prescription, which he never expected to get, from a sex-addicted doctor (Ben Stiller): play pickleball. Resistant to the country’s fastest-growing sport at first, Dusty grows fond of it in no time—and of his court partner, Candace (Mary Steenburgen). His main issue is hitting the ball too hard.

The pickleballers need more courts, but the old hats running the tennis association, namely Dusty’s father Chuck (Ed Harris), see the new sport’s rapid expansion as a threat to their own existence. “The Coronavirus of sports,” Chuck calls it. Instead of a vote, the association’s bylaws allow for a head-to-head match to decide the outcome. Dusty wants to represent the tennis side, but ends up competing on behalf of his new friends instead.

Witherill’s production company Rivulet Entertainment first collaborated with Stiller on “Nutcrackers.” It was on the heels of that project that he got involved with “The Dink,” which Stiller also produced.

Stiller asked if they wanted to work on another film, which was an easy question for the partners at Rivulet. “It's a pickleball movie with Jake Johnson,” Stiller said, according to Witherill. That was all they needed to hear. 

Academy Award-winning actress Steenburgen, of “Elf” and “Melvin and Howard” fame amongst several other notable titles, was first sold on playing Candace because of the key sport. 

“I was attracted to [the part of Candace] before I read it because it was about pickleball, which I'd fallen in love with already,” Steenburgen said.  “And because it was going to shoot in LA, because it was produced by Ben Stiller, because it was a comedy, because it was Jake Johnson and because Josh Greenbaum's going to direct it. Every single one of those things was a win for me.”

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