The Tooth Fairy
Making its national debut over the past weekend is a comedy from Fox that features Dwayne Johnson as Derek Thompson aka The Tooth Fairy, a rough-house hockey player whose nickname comes from his penchant for separating opposing players from their teeth.
When Derek discourages a youngster’s dreams, he is sentenced to one week’s hard labor as a real tooth fairy forced to trade in a hockey stick for a magic wand and shoulder pads for wings.
In the process of awkwardly trying to get in and out of strangers’ homes doing his obligations, Derek steadily begins to see the errors of his ways as well as rediscovering his own forgotten dreams.
The star of such films as “Race to Witch Mountain” and “Get Smart” talks about what drew him into the project. “It’s a story with universal appeal,” says Johnson. “It’s a fish-out-of-water tale about believing in the impossible and the magic.”
“The Tooth Fairy is part of our culture,” the actor continues, “and part of the wonderment of being a child. It’s a character that’s never been explored, to this extent, in the movies.”
Johnson has played sporting roles in films before. He was Joe Kingman, a star football player in “The Game Plan”. The producers of that film, Mark Ciardi and Gordon Gray, have considerable experience bringing sports action on screen. In addition to producing “The Tooth Fairy”, these principals of Mayhem Pictures also made “The Rookie”, “Invincible” and “Miracle”.
Like any modern film story that involves sports action sequences, getting them right is critical.
“For Tooth Fairy, we felt it was very important to make a portion of Derek’s life really masculine and sports-oriented, and from this came the idea of making him a hockey player, ” recalls Ciardi. “We brought in Mark Ellis as our hockey stunt coordinator, to bring authenticity to the hockey sequences.”
Ellis also worked on Mayhem’s “Miracle” hockey sequences.
