The Temp Tracks and Butt Cracks Behind the ‘Winning Time’ Opening Credits

A few minutes into every episode of HBO’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, viewers are treated to an opening credits montage that looks like an I Love the ’80s Pinterest board (complimentary) and sounds like a car full of pals radiating cig smoke and sunscreen and yelling at you to get in already. Images of palm trees and street dancers and smoggy vistas, the Reverend Jesse Jackson and jewels and a JESUS SAVES sign are slapped on top of one another like wheat-pasted movie posters along Sunset Boulevard. The track, “My Favorite Mutiny,” crests and tumbles and tugs like the cool swells of the ocean. “It kind of has an irreverence to it,” Winning Time music supervisor Gabe Hilfer tells me. “Like, it has an attitude.”

It is an intro that should never be skipped—one that visually and musically captures the same kind of hi-lo SoCal flow that the music critic Ann Powers beautifully evoked in the opening paragraph of her 2019 Lana Del Rey album review: “The trash on the Venice boardwalk,” Powers began, “sparkles like Wet n Wild lip gloss.” That’s exactly the kind of juxtaposition that Winning Time editor Max Koepke had front of mind as he spliced together the images that make up the second season’s opening credits. “There’s the beach,” he tells me, “but there’s also the gridlocked traffic. There’s people dancing, but there’s also people that are kind of destitute.”

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And beyond all the scene setting, the intro brims with reminders that while this is a show with a deep sense of place, it is ultimately a show about people—namely, the people on and around the Los Angeles Lakers. Adrien Brody stalks the sidelines as Pat Riley. Quincy Isaiah beams while palming a ball like Magic Johnson. All as if to ensure that no one forgets what brought us here in the first place: the hoops, the chaotic and lucrative and heartbreaking hoops.

As the Lakers teams of the ’80s demonstrated, some of the best finishes are all about the beginnings. Before an alley-oop becomes a dunk, it starts as a heads-up leveraging of liminal space. Even the most hectic fast break can often be traced back to an initial calm hand and steady eye. So if you’re going to make a TV show about those Showtime Lakers, it helps to establish that strong setup game right from the opening tip. The playmakers responsible for Winning Time certainly have.

Hank Corwin was willing to risk it all for a moon shot. And by moon shot, I mean: a brief video clip of some decades-ago skateboarder’s half-bared ass, dangling out nonchalantly above his high striped socks and low pink shorts. “Well, I mean, it’s perfect,” Corwin says, speaking by Zoom shortly after a walk on the beach with his German shepherd. “It’s, like, the fuck you shot. And it’s, like, the utter freedom!”

As Corwin tells it, HBO’s lawyers weren’t as convinced when told it’d be in the Winning Time credits. It wasn’t the butt crack so much as the clip’s unclear provenance that was the problem. “They couldn’t find where it came from,” says Corwin, the exasperation in his voice rising. “I was going to fall on my sword over that!” He ultimately didn’t have to. Someone eventually signed off on the rights, which is a great thing because it’s the moon that ties the room together: a perfect totem of the time and place in which Winning Time is set, as well as of the ethos and style of the whole production.

A three-time Oscar nominee for his innovative, immersive film editing, Corwin once cut his teeth making ads for corporate clients before working on films like Natural Born Killers and JFK with Oliver Stone. But for the past decade, he has worked closely alongside producer and director Adam McKay on projects ranging from The Big Short to Don’t Look Up and has developed a distinctive style in the process, one he describes as “impressionistic.” (Corwin is “like, my North Star, genius, creative shepherd,” says Hilfer. “Working with him is like you’re working with a mad scientist whose creativity knows no bounds.”) Sometimes this means incorporating snippets of stock contemporary B-roll footage, and sometimes it means highlighting would-be cutting-room floor material gathered either before someone called “action!” or after they yelled “cut!”

“You have no idea the process with Hank in terms of finding the right image, and then once he does, fighting for that image,” Winning Time executive producer Kevin Messick says. “And he’s got a whole reasoning behind it—like, a philosophy.” I tell him I do have some idea, having just spoken with Corwin, whose remarks were peppered with phrases like “hard-hearted lawyers” and “pimples on the ass of progress” and “you can print this!” Messick—who frequently has the honor of being the intermediary between this mad scientist and legal—laughs and says he’s developed a strategy: “I never say no.”

Unlike his colleagues, many of whom are hoops heads, Corwin knew nothing about basketball before working on Winning Time. (He tells me that when a woman with whom he’d worked on some Nike commercials found out that he was part of a Lakers-oriented project, she teased him about the time he asked her what a 3-point line was.) Moreover, as a film and commercial veteran, he also wasn’t really familiar with the rhythms and customs of putting together TV. “I didn’t realize that you do the credits after you cut the pilot,” he says. “And I didn’t even realize that other people are supposed to do the credits!”

The majority of TV title sequences are put together by outside studios that specialize in the design-heavy form: shops such as Elastic, which was behind Game of Thrones’ machinating gears and House of the Dragon’s bloodquaducts, or Imaginary Forces, which iconically defenestrated Mad Men’s Don Draper. One studio, Picturemill, has worked in collaboration with McKay and Messick for more than a decade. It developed many of the visual elements featured throughout the film Vice; it put together the brooding familial resentmentscapes that accompanied celebrated composer Nicholas Britell’s original score for Succession.

But Winning Time’s opening developed a little differently from the norm. Whereas the title sequence for Succession wasn’t commissioned “until much, much, much further down the road” in that show’s development, Messick says, Winning Time’s was established early and internally—though that wasn’t quite the intent.

A few months back, when I was writing a story about the musical choices in TV series finales, I learned about the concept of “temp love.” It’s when music supervisors and film editors are working through rough cuts of scenes or episodes, and they insert temporary snippets of representative music that just captures the this-is-what-I’m-going-for vibe. This can be a dangerous game. Grow too attached to a placeholder that is either too niche or too popular, and you’ll wind up with a problem: It won’t ultimately be attainable, whether for reasons of obscurity or price.

The Winning Time team’s temp love turned out to be “My Favorite Mutiny” by the Coup, featuring Black Thought and Talib Kweli, a song they discovered after McKay, lying on a sofa, perked up at some music on his iPhone. “He said, ‘Let’s do something with this,’” Corwin says. “The revolutionary spirit of [the song] was really cool, you know, so I cut to that.”

The biggest challenge with “My Favorite Mutiny” wasn’t that it was hard to find or secure. Quite the opposite! The Coup’s frontman, actor-activist-writer-performer-director Boots Riley, had released his award-winning film Sorry to Bother You via the studio Annapurna in 2018, the same year that Annapurna backed Vice. The filmmakers and Riley hit it off then and have been friends since; clearing the rights to “My Favorite Mutiny” wasn’t a particular challenge. Instead, the issue was that HBO executives liked the song so much that it proved to be too high of a bar for other ideas to scale.

Other ideas such as … an original composition from Britell, who has worked with Messick, McKay, and Corwin since The Big Short. (Messick describes the group as “our repertory company.”) “We even recorded a track with a very famous rapper and with music by Nick,” says Messick, “and presented it to [HBO CEO] Casey [Bloys].” In what Messick described as “one of our most loving but firm conversations with Casey,” the executive told them: “Like, guys, the Boots Riley song—you’re not going to be able to beat it,” Messick recalls.

It proved to be a good match. While the song, released in 2006, is from a different time than the Showtime Lakers, it sounds of the moment regardless—it samples from the Lenny Williams record “Half Past Love,” which was released in 1978. And the modern lyrics of “My Favorite Mutiny” dovetail well with a lot of Winning Time’s recurring themes, such as “lash out for your just desserts” (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s arc in the show), “if we waiting for the time to fight, these is thems” (Coach Riley), and “had a foolproof hustle till they traced the payments” (the late, great Jerry Buss).

The Winning Time creative team explored finding a new song for the credits as a refresh between Seasons 1 and 2, but opted instead to just use a different “My Favorite Mutiny” verse, the one performed by Boots Riley himself. “‘I’m sure HBO is going to love those lyrics,’” Koepke remembers Riley joking over the phone when Messick called to inform him. Sample lyrical battle cry: “Never let they punk ass ever defeat you.”

In cutting the new montage for Season 2, Koepke kept a few images from the first season—like a juxtaposition between someone methodically preparing a spoon of caviar and someone lighting up a crack pipe. (There are occasional shots that aren’t stock footage and that were produced and created for the show; the drug user is one of them.) But he mostly added new visuals to help roll the show forward chronologically and thematically. A surfer floundering in a wave is followed by a big smokestack: “It’s like our good times are kind of going down the tubes a little bit,” Koepke says. “Or going up in smoke.” Each image flashes by quickly, but each image contains multitudes, too.

Like when I ask whether one picture is a Transformer toy (no!), I get a crash course in the fascinating career of cult artist Rammellzee, who shows up twice in the Season 2 intro—once in one of his “Garbage Gods” suits. (Koepke would have liked to include Jean-Michel Basquiat or Keith Haring in the sequence, he says, but ultimately, doing so was too expensive.) Or when I mention that it’s fitting that the Season 2 credits feature a different McDonald’s from Season 1, Koepke points out something I never would have caught: The location pictured in the latest title sequence, in San Ysidro, was the site of a 1984 mass shooting that remains the deadliest in California history. I now notice the bullet holes in the windows every time I watch.

In recent years Hilfer has worked on projects with some great title sequences, like both seasons of The White Lotus. “You watch those opening titles,” Hilfer says, “and it’s almost like you need those to detox from whatever you’re dealing with during the day. And it brings you into, like, Italy or Hawaii or whatever it is.” Watching a good intro is like “when you get depressurized before you go into a spaceship in science fiction,” he adds. Switching metaphors, he describes a good main title sequence in a way that the late Lakers owner-impresario Buss would have been proud of. “It brings you into the show,” he says. “It ushers you in and opens the velvet rope. The bouncer is letting you into the club and, like, here you are.”

What might future Winning Time credits look and sound like? “My Favorite Mutiny” does have a third verse, performed by Talib Kweli. (“But beast got it twisted / I’ll untangle it,” he raps.) Recently, HBO also hinted at what a new theme song might look like, releasing a promo video set to the Snoop song “Gz and Hustlas.” But whether any opening song will ever be part of a future Winning Time season is contingent on a much bigger question, which is: Will there be another Winning Time season at all?

Over the past month, the journalist Jeff Pearlman, who wrote the book Showtime, which the series is based on, has publicly fretted on Twitter that the end is nigh. “To be blunt,” he wrote on August 16, “I’m worried there won’t be a season three.” Two days later, he urged people to tune in and spread the good word: “These are weird times in the business, and our eps need views to lock down a third season.”

It’s possible that Pearlman’s crusade will be successful. One Winning Time creator pointed out that the series was finally getting some shine on the Max app. Lakers owner Jeanie Buss and former player Rick Fox traded conspicuous tweets about their hope that the project will one day run long enough to incorporate the turn of the century Shaq-Kobe era. (Buss went so far as to wish cast Tim Robbins as Phil Jackson, her former employee and beau.)

“There’s more stories to tell,” Messick says when I ask him about it, as never-say-no as ever. “If we get a chance to tell them, it’ll be great.” Whether or not Winning Time is ending, we’ll always have its beginning. And the real treasure, as ever, is all the moons along the way.