1989 Dallas Team
104 · 2026-04-14 · medium
It used to be that a woman had to go to Russia or Turkiye to make a million bucks playing basketball. Not anymore! Monday saw the first WNBA Draft of the new billion-dollar CBA epoch, accompanied by massive free agent and trade traffic; it's truly the beginning of a landmark era. Four decades ago, the only way for an American girl to get into pro hoops was a computer error. Yes, that's right, I'm reporting to you today from the Earth-2 where Perfect Profile (1989) is not only canon, is not only based on events that actually happened, but represents historical reality that is really real. From the jump, this movie asks you to root for a Hugo Boss douchebag who owns a defense contractor called CompuSearch International, and he also owns hotels, restaurants, shopping malls and an "NBA" franchise. Plenty of current-day midwits would queue up to stan this sort of guy, but the rest of us hope that Brad Johnson gets shot to death before the ten-minute mark. No such luck. He's boo-hoo sadz because not enough people call him sir, he says things like "I spell success W-I-N," and he sexually assaults a female-voiced computer terminal. He blackmails a nerd – it's implied multiple times that CompuSearch has intel on him – to build an advanced analytics model to locate the undersized pass-first point guard who'll take the Dallas Team to the top. But uh-oh, guess what, it's Nancy Lieberman! Common mistake, forgetting to add a gender column to your player table in 1989. I mean, does Ken Pomeroy even bother to do that in 2026? There's roster friction at first, because Hey Girls Can't Play Sports, but then there's a training montage backed by a song that sounds like The Fixx but isn't. "Nobody knows why it is that women have never been inducted into pro ball before," says the color commentator, "if it's the weaker-sex stigma, or if people think they just don't fill the bill. Some people might think that just because they're women they simply don't belong. Well, all that's moot now, because here comes the Dallas Team!" Spoilers: the Team wins the "national championship of the world" over the Los Angeles Team, and the boss and player get their fuck on but because this is a PG-rated 80s "comedy" this happens off-camera. This movie predicted Google, Moneyball, Mark Cuban, AI slop, and cyber-warfare from years and decades out. Can your zero-budget, zero-star movie do all that? If you like spliced-in footage of NBA arenas to show "crowds" attending the games (all held at Loos Field House), if you can handle repetitive reaction shots with the head coach standing in front of a blank white wall, if you ever wanted to see Larry Bird in CGI blackface, Perfect Profile is the perfect basketball movie for you. It's on Tubi and YouTube, for free, and for some reason it's only been logged 28 times on Letterboxd. As always, movie 'Dokus are brought to you by BMDb.