Sally Field Joins the Team as Complex Mom Jessie Buss in Episode 2 of WINNING TIME: THE RISE OF THE LAKERS DYNASTY

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede Listening to Sally Field, it quickly becomes clear that HBO’s WINNING TIME: THE RISE OF THE LAKERS DYNASTY is more than just a TV show for her. She lived it. “I’m a Lakers fan, I was there in the ’70s and early ’80s, with my sons,” recalled Field, a two-time OSCAR® and three-time EMMY® winner who has been Hollywood royalty for a generation. “I watched Magic (Johnson), and Kareem (Abdul-Jabbar), I watched it all happen. So to be part of this was an added thing for me.” WINNING TIME, which debuted last weekend on Crave, tells the story of the Lakers’ turnaround when Dr. Jerry Buss, played by John C. Reilly, purchased the team. Introduced in Episode 2 on Sunday, March 13 is Field’s character Jessie Buss, who is Jerry’s mom. “She’s the thorn in his side and the love of his life, at the same time,” said Field in a virtual roundtable interview. “We don’t have a lot of real information on her. There were very few pictures of her. And even in everybody’s books, she’s only mentioned a little bit. But we’re able to gather that together, and know that she was a single mother who raised him pretty much on her own. She wanted to be in Hollywood and be a movie star, and took him to Hollywood. That didn’t happen, but she became an accountant. And she was always a big influence in his life.” In a separate virtual roundtable interview, WINNING TIME executive producer Adam McKay acknowledged that Jessie’s significant part of the story is one of the areas in which the timeline was manipulated for dramatic purposes. In real life, Jessie passed away a couple of years before the WINNING TIME narrative begins. But Jessie was such an important person in Jerry’s life that McKay felt she had to be included. “When you look at what the final product is, at what Jerry Buss was, somewhere he had influences, and it had to have been her,” Field said. “And she had to have also been an influence on Jeanie (Jerry’s daughter, played by Hadley Robinson), and look at where Jeanie is now (controlling owner and president of the Lakers). The way we do it is, Jessie tries to give Jeanie some pieces of information about handling men, how you work around them, how you, you know, smile and nod your head, but do what you think is right and let them think it’s their idea. Jessie survived in a hard world.” Not that Jessie is shown to be the perfect parental figure, or anything like that. “We created a relationship between Jessie and Jerry where the only way they really have to love each other is to (verbally) batter each other, to sort of call each other names, to be funny or to be, I don’t know, rambunctious,” Field said. “John (C. Reilly) and I immediately created this banter of talking over top of each other, and so a lot of the stuff we did wasn’t on the page. They would say ‘cut’ and we were still going. You can see the mother in her that wants him to survive, that wants him to be successful. But like many parents, she’s so worried about him failing that in some ways she wants to hold him back, because she doesn’t like to see him hurt.” On the surface, though, perhaps the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. “Jerry’s personality came from somewhere,” Field reasoned. “She’s a bit of a narcissist – not pathological. But still, she’s got her eyelashes, and her hair, and she’s living in a bit of a fantasy, and she wants him in it with her, you know? But at the same time, she would always be there for him, she doesn’t want to let him down. She just sometimes is not the world’s greatest mother. But it comes out of the desperate need for him to be okay.” Speaking of wanting things to be okay, is Field still a Lakers fan today? “I am, yes, yes, I am, I am, I am,” she said, leaving little doubt. “I love the Lakers, even though they’re not having a good season. But that’s okay. You have to go through these seasons. You know, it’s a season of change. And I will always be a Lakers fan. You just can’t beat that out of me, no matter what.” billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv