Cannes (France) (AFP) – The bitter brotherly feud that sparked the creation of sports-shoe brands Adidas and Puma in the same small German town in the 1940s is to be turned into a television series with the help of family archives, its producers announced Sunday. Hollywood-based film producer No Fat Ego is backing the project, which has the blessing of the family behind the Adidas empire founded by Adolf “Adi” Dassler. It will delve into one of the most fascinating fraternal blow-ups in corporate history, which pitted Adi against his brother Rudolf (“Rudi”) who went on to create rival Puma.
The two men jointly ran a family-owned footwear company before falling out during World War II, with their post-conflict animus splitting their town of Herzogenaurach to this day. Scriptwriter Mark Williams, behind the hit Netflix series “Ozark,” has been hired to lead the project and is currently going through Dassler family home videos and memorabilia to work on the story. “Everybody knows the brands, but the story behind them is something we don’t really fully know,” Williams told AFP at the Cannes film festival.
One of the most sensitive areas — particularly for the reputations of the multi-billion-dollar footwear companies today — will be how the brothers are portrayed during the war period. Both became members of the Nazi party in the 1930s, as was customary for the business elite at the time. Rudi went to fight, however, and was arrested by Allied forces on his return to a defeated Germany. “Adi stayed home and tried to keep the company alive,” Williams added. Their factory was seized as part of the war effort and converted into a munitions plant.
The series promises to be a “Succession-type drama between the family” set over several generations, Williams explained, comparing it to the earlier hit HBO series. The head of No Fat Ego, Niels Juul, who has produced Martin Scorsese’s most recent movies, said he was originally drawn to the story after learning about the Dassler brothers’ collaboration with legendary black American runner Jesse Owens. Partly thanks to their innovative spiked shoes, Owens became one of the stars of the 1936 Berlin Olympics which Hitler had hoped would showcase white German supremacy.
No Fat Ego intends to develop the series with full editorial independence before offering it to streaming platforms. “We want to have the creative control, and Mark has to have absolute silence and quiet to do what he does,” Juul told AFP.
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