In the spring of 2022, Lakers president and controlling owner Jeanie Buss turned on HBO’s Winning Time and was transported back to the start of her career.
The well-received but short-lived series, based on Jeff Pearlman’s book Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s, traced how her father, Dr. Jerry Buss, bought a floundering NBA franchise and quickly turned it into a world-class operation. It brought back vivid memories for Buss—glimpses at her dad’s brilliant and tempestuous ownership, Magic Johnson’s rise to fame, and her own college-aged education inside a male-dominated front office.
“They really captured my dad,” Buss tells TIME. “But it was very frustrating to not be involved with a project that is basically telling your life story.”
Which is why, a couple years earlier, Buss started sniffing around Hollywood to develop projects herself—first by executive-producing a…
