From Football Coach to Filmmaker Brent Ogburn’s Bold Sobriety Story

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“Once you can laugh at yourself, that’s when true healing can begin.” Brent Ogburn doesn’t present it as a mantra so much as a memory — an insight shaped by a day in rehab, then hammered into a film script that wouldn’t let him go. His short, “Turnoff,” unfolds across a single day: a father named Ryan, the fluorescent hush of detox, the unsteady shuffle into a communal space where strangers become mirrors. The cast? Archetypes you’ll recognize if you’ve ever tried to restart your life in public. The tone? Surprisingly funny. Because humor, properly aimed, isn’t a dodge; it’s a door.  

Ogburn’s story begins further back — years coaching high-school football, teaching audio/video, fathering two boys and keeping pace with a schedule that looked noble on paper and unsustainable in practice. In February, a therapist asked the kind of question that tilts a life: Are you ready to accept that the dream might have changed? He was. The whistle got hung up. Space opened. Purpose had room to breathe.  

He’d gotten sober in 2018. Meetings helped, until the pandemic unspooled routines. What re-anchored him was a daily gratitude practice — sparked by a friend handing him Rhonda Byrne’s “The Magic” — that felt like an extension of the rooms, a practical ritual that warmed cold mornings and quieted old noise. Gratitude didn’t replace recovery; it resupplied it.  

“Turnoff” took shape quickly. Ogburn describes the script as something that “poured out,” a collage of real people he encountered in detox and rehab, with one exception: Cal, a veteran of the process who knows every catchphrase in the book and every trap in the mind. Cal is comedic relief with a purpose. In early sobriety, we need to laugh — at ourselves, with each other — so we can finally step back, pause and “play the tape.” Cal is that nudge.  

If he could dream-cast it? Robert Downey Jr. as Cal, for that precise comedic timing that can turn a half-smile into a life raft. And for Ryan — the father pulled between shame and hope — Ryan Gosling. The choices are playful, sure, but they also signal the world Ogburn is building: recovery stories that are cinematic, commercial and emotionally literate.  

What gives the project its charge is Ogburn’s clarity about stakes. Addiction’s physics are unforgiving: no off-button, only a gas pedal that sinks deeper the longer you press. Family days in treatment translate the mechanics for loved ones who don’t “get it,” turning confusion into empathy and, often, into allyship. That shift — from secrecy to story — is the heartbeat of recovery culture today.  

Culture itself is catching up. We’re seeing more films and shows that widen the frame beyond the first 90 days to the long-arc questions: midlife pivots, sponsors with 15 years navigating “classy problems,” the way community and purpose sustain us after the crisis passes. Ogburn’s work lives there, in the after — where laughter is medicine, vulnerability is muscle and art gives people language for the part they could never say out loud.  

There’s also the choice to go public. Ogburn began sharing the project while crowdfunding and was stunned by the number of friends — some known for decades — who quietly disclosed their own struggles. When one person recovers out loud, ten more whisper back. That echo is why projects like “Turnoff” matter: they turn private shame into shared meaning.  

Asked about his “sober superpower,” Ogburn picks listening — not to respond, but to hear. The film takes the same posture. It listens to a single day in rehab and shows us the quiet transactions of hope — how a joke lands like a life preserver, how a group becomes a net, how a person remembers they’re a person. That’s not just a plot; it’s a practice. And it’s one worth watching. 

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SOBER ENTERTAINMENT: Lights, Camera, Sobriety: Why We’re Rooting for the SEED + SPARK Campaign of “Turn Off”

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SOBER ENTERTAINMENT: From Rock Bottom to the Director’s Chair: Aaron Strand on Making Movies That Matter

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All the cool kids go to rehab…

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