I walked into the Nashville Municipal Auditorium on a sticky day in late July. The sights and smells were eerily familiar from my days playing middle school basketball — the distant pop of dribbling basketballs and the whistling scuff of high-top shoes, the smell of sweat and finished hardwood and buttered popcorn sold by a classmate’s PTA mom.
A girl in a gray Hawkettes jersey jogged past me toward her team, her hair held back with pre-wrap and cheeks flushed with exertion. For a moment, I was a point guard again, looking for Maya down court, dropping my shoulder and barreling through a screen. I was screaming and gripping my teammates after Jess scored the buzzer-beater, exhaustion and pride throbbing in our chests. We wore sweat and blood and floor burns like badges. We’d gone to battle together and we had won.
“Grace, I’m Dallas,” said a voice. “Welcome to set!”
A hand reached toward me, piercing the reverie. This was not the gym of my youth — it was the set of Lady Ballers, the first-ever feature length comedy by the Daily Wire. Bonfire Legend CEO and acclaimed producer Dallas Sonnier stood before me in his signature blue Brooks Brothers button down. “Let’s get you to wardrobe.”
The film was being made in secret, so I’d been given little context other than broad plot overviews and casting teasers. “The whole family’s here,” Sonnier said with a wink as he showed me to the court-side press table.
I surveyed the room. For a longtime subscriber to the Daily Wire, it was more fever dream than movie set, like stepping into a parallel universe of characters you’ve come to know and trust. Advertisements for Jeremy’s Razors plastered the walls. Matt Walsh sat near the back of the stands, dressed like a cult leader in a gray kaftan, greasy bun and pedophile sunglasses. Conservative content creators Kangmin Lee and Billie Rae Brandt chatted between takes.
A group of men in wigs and hot pink jerseys that read Lady Ballers warmed up next to my Hawkettes. Was that Blain Crain from Crain & Co in the Blair jersey? Or Tyler Fischer as Felix? What about Davida? Was that David Cone? And is that Clay Travis, founder of Outkick, coaching the Hawkettes?
Jeremy Boreing, director, co-writer and star of Lady Ballers (oh, and the CEO of Daily Wire), called the room to attention. “Extras,” he shouted into the crowd behind me, “this game is going to get rough. I need to hear audience reactions. Oohs, aahs, cheers! You are rooting for the Lady Ballers!”
The game clock started and cameras rolled. Ben Shapiro emerged in a referee uniform and kippah. “Run Kansas for me!” Boreing ordered. Travis and Shapiro came to blows. Shapiro cursed without the signature Shapiro Show “bleep.” The Lady Ballers defeated the Hawkettes in a merciless beatdown.
Timely and Truthful
It doesn’t take a genius to guess the plot. Boreing plays a disaffected basketball coach who gathers a rag-tag team of men to dominate women’s sporting events, specifically a basketball tournament. “There are some movies that should be made but never are. There are some movies that you cannot stop from being made,” co-writer Nick Sheehan. “This was one of those movies. It moved very quickly.”
“One day,” added co-writer Brian A. Hoffman, “Jeremy says, ‘I need you. 9am in the conference room. I got an idea.’” Boreing laid out the idea to Hoffman, Sheehan and Sonnier: a Hangover-esque comedy calling foul on men in women’s sports that would fill a gap in mainstream entertainment.
Hoffman recounted the conversation: “‘I want you guys to write this while on a location scout in Europe’, he said. ‘When I get back, I want a draft. You got two weeks.’”
By the time filming began in July, the movie had been in production for under three months. “They just hit the ground running,” Hoffman continued. “This is incredibly topical. You have to move fast.”
Topical indeed. Lady Ballers comes amidst a roiling cultural battle over transgender inclusion and fairness in women’s sports, sparked in part by trans swimmer Lia Thomas. In 2022, Thomas became the first transgender person to compete in the NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships, winning the 500-meter freestyle, placing eighth in the 100-meter, and tying competitor Riley Gaines (who is featured in Lady Ballers) for fifth in the 200-meter competition (an event in which he ranked 554th in the 2018-19 men’s competition).
“I was going into the race with my hands tied behind my back,” Gaines later said. There was only one fifth place trophy to be awarded. NCAA officials gave it to Thomas. Gaines, they said, would receive hers in the mail. Athletes like surfer Bethany Hamilton, tennis legend Martina Navratilova and cyclist Hannah Arensman have joined Gaines in protest.
“It reduced everything I had done, everything my teammates, all of the women at that meet, and every elite athlete had done,” Gaines told me over the phone in April for the Conservateur.
Later in the season, Thomas was nominated for the prestigious NCAA Woman of the Year award. Other transgender athletes have recently risen to similar acclaim including power-lifters JayCee Cooper and Laurel Hubbard (the first transgender person to compete at the Olympics) and basketball player Layshia Clarendon (who won the WNBA Community Assist Award in 2021).
The Daily Wire is uniquely suited to tackle the divisive topic. The film by DW personality Matt Walsh, titled What Is A Woman?, was recently ranked among the most successful documentaries of all time with 190 million views and 204,000 shares on X — even after the platform applied a ‘hateful content’ label to the film and limited its distribution for failing to use contributors’ preferred pronouns.
“This film could only be made by Daily Wire,” Sheehan said emphatically of Lady Ballers. “Even Rogan knows that. Daily Wire is the only place that has both the will and the resources.”
“It’s particularly poignant, when we talk about the cultural battle,” Hoffman said. “There is an inherent absurdity to the circumstances we find ourselves in.” Comedy, according to the Lady Ballers writers, is the most appropriate genre to unpack something so serious. For the template to work, though, the material must be timely and truthful. “Putting a mirror up to society — comedy is the best way to do it.”
“Entertainment and movies may seem frivolous, especially when it’s a comedy. But it’s not frivolous,” added Sheehan. “The stories we tell ourselves are important — they’re a prerequisite for civilization.”
More than a Movie — A Parallel Economy
Lunch felt like high school if every table was for cool kids. Hawkettes and Lady Ballers sat together, laughing over Mexican catering. Booms and grips and cameramen chatted over Diet Coke and popcorn. Dallas and I situated ourselves in the center of the action.
To the creative team, Lady Ballers is more than a movie. More than the ephemeral content that characterizes our age, churned out thoughtlessly and doomed for obscurity on the next big streaming platform. Instead, it is an essential building block in a new parallel arts economy built to rival the coasts.
Take it from Mathis Glover, a familiar name to any avid DW fan. Glover joined the company in 2015 as an assistant editor, having never heard the names Klavan or Shapiro. “Back in the day, all production ran through 3 or 4 people,” he told me on set. Since then, he’s worked in “nearly every role,” even relocating with the company from LA to Nashville in 2020. “It was a real leap of faith with the company to come here.”
Almost immediately after the Daily Wire goodbye party in LA (held, ironically, on election night), the COVID pandemic flipped the media landscape upside-down. “People were trained to enjoy entertainment in so many new ways,” Glover said. “There was a hope, a patience to break into entertainment, and all of a sudden, opportunity opened much more broadly. That’s why they’re striking hard.”
Daily Wire began to focus on creating culture, not just commenting on it. In 2021, editor-emeritus and podcast host Ben Shapiro announced that the Daily Wire was beginning a studio for TV and Film that would not promote “indoctrination” or “leftist causes.” Early the next year, Boreing announced plans to invest at least $100 million into children’s entertainment content, followed by the launches of streaming services DailyWire+ and Bentkey.
At the heart of this push is a secret weapon sporting a blue Brooks Brothers button down: Dallas Sonnier. A seasoned producer, filmmaker and one-time manager of Greta Gerwig, Sonnier met Ben Shapiro after bringing his film Run Hide Fight to the Daily Wire. The collaboration, which turned into a formal partnership, led to movies like Shut In, What is a Woman?, and the upcoming Pendragon Cycle. For the 2022 film Terror on the Prairie, the team brought in ousted Disney star Gina Carano and officially parted from SAG-AFTRA due to COVID-19 vaccine requirements.
After years cutting his teeth in Hollywood, Sonnier now focuses on making films for a forgotten audience through his production company Bonfire Legend. “Movies shouldn’t feel like an elitist experience,” he said over lunch. True to his word, he uses what he calls the “Louisiana Cousin Test”: Have his blue-collar Southern cousins heard of the actors he’s hired? Are they compelled by the plot?
In my two days on set, it became apparent that Sonnier, along with Shapiro and Boreing, is the pipeline, siphoning talented creators from the coasts. Take Billie Rae Brant, Kangmin Lee, comedian Tyler Fischer, all of whom Sonnier found on Instagram. “We have so many incredible editors, technicians, directors and producers,” Glover said. “They had to be hired from around the country. Dallas is a big part of that. In slow motion, he’s pulling people towards the source.”
Could Daily Wire be the source, a brave new world for entertainment? They don’t have Netflix’s production budget, but Netflix, Amazon and even Disney and Pixar are trending down. A month before filming commenced, Pixar’s film Elemental suffered their second worst opening weekend of all time, second only to the original Toy Story (before adjustments for inflation). Daily Wire’s subscriber base, on the other hand, grew from 600,000 in April 2022 to over a million subscribers 8 months later.
“Daily Wire might not be comparatively very large,” says writer Sheehan, “but it’s trending upward. Fast.”
With the added benefits of Nashville as a city – quality and cost of life, domestic tourism and the compelling “right to work” law —, Daily Wire is poised for further growth. “A lot of people don’t know what this company is yet, but they are gonna know because there’s a lot of momentum happening quickly,” says Glover. “People are in the right place at the right time.”
Dallas smiled down at his lunch and shook his head. “My career has led me to this,” he said. “It feels good to be on the front lines.”
The New Frontier
Building a rival economy is not without its challenges, including constructing an infrastructure from scratch. “It gets better every week,” says Glover, “but we’re still feeling the pain. You have to fight to pull together extras, to pull together a great crew. In LA, that happens overnight.”
Daily Wire hired 1,600 extras for Lady Ballers’ tournament scenes, the largest number gathered in Nashville since The Day After Tomorrow in 2004. The feat was also a liability. Commotion erupted in the stands before lunchtime on my second day on set as several upset extras staged a protest, “screaming” about Daily Wire’s involvement with the film before.
Confidential information about casting and plot leaked through social media, in direct violation of previously signed nondisclosure agreements. “I’m non-binary so I immediately left when I realized, but can’t believe something so vile is being made in my hometown and at a venue I frequently attend shows at,” said one extra in a tip to the Tennessee Holler.
“I took off four days of work because the money was good and paid in cash each day, but felt so unsafe before production even started that my wife had to come and get me,” they continued. The cast and crew were met with protests for several days after. Though a parallel economy may not be ideal, I thought to myself as I witnessed the uproar, it is far preferable to a capitulating, subservient one.
After the chaos had subsided, I spotted Jeremy Boreing standing alone on the sidelines. He looked out over the court with a blank stare and heavy shoulders, hands in his pockets, hair uncharacteristically flat, pink tie crooked around his neck. I approached him and introduced myself. He glanced at me and nodded, thanking me for coming. The questions I’d prepared to ask him suddenly seemed small.
“How are you feeling?” I floated. He took a deep breath and paused.
“We’re fighting a hundred year battle here,” he said, returning his gaze to the basketball court.
As we stood in comfortable silence, writer Nick Sheehan’s words came to mind. “You know, many times I’ve felt in my life like I’m fighting for something and having to do it completely alone,” he’d said. “Not here.”
In the final championship game, the last scene I witnessed while on set, a team of elementary school girls faced a group of athletic black men. The tiny point guard approached half court for tip-off, peering up at her towering opponent. I saw Jess in the bruises and floor burns on her arms. I saw myself in her determination. I saw my team – and women and girls around the country, for that matter – in her, only this time, we were fighting a losing battle.
Boreing, reenergized, watched the whole thing. All at once, he raised the director’s megaphone to his lips. “CUT!”
Grace Bydalek is a Nebraska native living on the Upper West Side. She is the Director of the Dissident Project, a theatre critic for the New York Sun, and an independent journalist focused on culture, politics and faith.
All photos courtesy of Daily Wire | Taylor Allen Photography
Grace Bydalek is a Nebraska native living on the Upper West Side. She is the Director of the Dissident Project and an independent journalist focused on culture, politics and faith.
Published in the Conservateur on December 1st, 2023