Tommy Swerdlow

Tommy Swerdlow is an American film screenwriter and actor whose screenwriting credits include Cool Runnings (1993), Little Giants (1994), and Snow Dogs (2002). His work on these studio comedies is tied to unusually specific premises: an improvised Jamaican bobsled team, a youth football team assembled by an overlooked girl, and a Miami dentist who inherits sled dogs in Alaska. Rather than being a performer identified with one franchise, Swerdlow’s career crosses writing and acting in films made during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. His credits therefore connect him to family sports comedy, broad Disney comedy, and cult science-fiction cinema. The range. Cool Runnings, directed by Jon Turteltaub, fictionalizes the formation of Jamaica’s first Olympic bobsled team. Swerdlow shares the film’s screenplay credit with Lynn Siefert and Michael Goldberg. The finished film follows sprinters Derice Bannock, Sanka Coffie, Junior Bevil, and Yul Brenner as they train under former American bobsledder Irv Blitzer and travel to the Winter Olympics in Calgary. Its famous climactic image of the team carrying its damaged sled across the finish line belongs to the movie’s fictionalized treatment of a real sporting milestone. Swerdlow is thus associated with a film that turns an improbable international sports story into comedy. Little Giants was directed by Duwayne Dunham and stars Rick Moranis and Ed O’Neill as brothers Danny and Kevin O’Shea. Swerdlow shares its screenplay credit with James Ferguson and Robert Shallcross. The plot sets Danny’s ragtag Little Giants against Kevin’s Cowboys after Kevin rejects Danny’s daughter Becky from his established youth team. Becky becomes quarterback for the Giants, while the final game gives the underdogs their chance to defeat the better-equipped Cowboys. The cast also includes Shawna Waldron as Becky and Devon Sawa as Junior Floyd. In this credit Swerdlow helped shape a youth-football comedy built around sibling rivalry alone. Snow Dogs, directed by Brian Levant, shifts the setting from suburban football to Alaska. Swerdlow is among the credited screenwriters on the film, whose protagonist, Ted Brooks, is a Miami dentist played by Cuba Gooding Jr. Ted discovers that he was adopted and travels north after learning that his biological mother has died and left him property and a dog-sled team. The movie has him contend with winter travel, the dogs, and the local musher Thunder Jack, played by James Coburn. Swerdlow also appeared as an actor in such films as The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.