It took an extra year, but Mitch Mustain’s life story will finally hit the big screen
Last January, we shared an ambiguous trailer for a documentary about former Arkansas and USC quarterback Mitch Mustain.
The documentary, "The Identity Theft of Mitch Mustain,” was supposed to debut at last year’s Little Rock Film Festival. Instead, filmmaker Matthew Wolfe went back to the film room and made what looks like a better product than his initial pitch.
The film chronicles Mustain’s beginnings as the first-ever consensus Gatorade, Parade, and USA Today Player of the Year in high school and the epic collapses that followed. He was the No. 1 quarterback coming out of high school, started 8-0 at Arkansas before being replaced by Casey Dick. He transferred to USC and could never get out of the backup role. He tried his hand at minor league baseball and is now a backup quarterback for the San Jose Sabercats Arena Football team.
It’s a strange story to say the least, but one that will probably pique the interest of college football fans and non-fans alike.
I’ll admit that I mocked the first trailer. It was shots of Mustain playing football juxtaposed with him firing assault rifles and handguns in the woods. It looked more like a story of a man who had gone off the reservation or was training for his first assassination rather than a former star quarterback looking for direction.
However, the new and improved trailer actually tells a story and looks like it could be a pretty decent movie. Former Arkansas basketball coach Nolan Richardson narrates it, which is pretty cool, and it includes music from Grammy-winning Little Rock songwriter David Hodges from the band Evanescence.
“To be honest, I made this film because it’s a movie I wanted to watch,” Wolfe, a native of Fayetteville, Ark., told the Fayetteville Flyer. “I couldn’t believe no one else was trying to tell his story.”
The 90-minute film is once again slated to debut at the Little Rock Film Festival May 15-17. Not sure we here at Dr. Saturday will ever get to see a copy of the film, but I think it would be worth screening. And we welcome comments from anyone who does see it.
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