Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [167]
I went to John Walsh once and asked him if he knew when Roger Clemens, who was with Boston at the time, was going to be in town because we wanted him for a commercial, and without looking at anything, John went through the Red Sox’s schedule and rotation out loud. In a minute he was able to tell me when Boston was going to be at home and Clemens wouldn’t be pitching. Roger wound up doing a couple really good ones.
HANK PEARLMAN:
In the first round of spots I think we ended up with thirty spots finished. The one that felt right for me just from the start, it was so simple, was Grant Hill playing piano in the lobby. Dan Patrick walks by and just kind of hangs out and talks to him and puts some money in his jar. It was so simple that it sort of crystallized the idea of the athlete’s role. The other one that happened that same round that felt right to me was Jason Kidd coming in on the helicopter with the highlights and Dan and Keith ran out to the helicopter and got the three-quarter-inch tapes—that was when we were still using three-quarter-inch tapes—and you know, Jason Kidd showed up with his highlights. And Jason has a line, “Check out the third quarter; I think it’s pretty good.”
JUDY FEARING:
We wheeled a baby grand piano into the lobby for one commercial on an afternoon during working hours and filled it with smoke. Then we had Michael Buffer announcing anchors as they were coming to work. Howard Katz called me and said, “Judy, you have thirty minutes to get everything out of the lobby. We run a production company here.” So I called him back and said, “The good news is we got everything out, but the bad news is that the van with the piano is stuck under the catwalk.” It had lodged into the side of the building and it couldn’t move. Nobody could get into the facility until they were able to lower all the tires.
ALAN BROCE:
We had no idea which athletes were actually going to show up for this. There were a lot of unknowns. Before we went to Bristol and shot, we had to present scripts or ideas, and I would say, of the fifteen scripts that we presented, we probably shot four. And the rest was all stuff that kind of happened spontaneously. I knew we were on to something great, and the potential was great, and I trusted Hank and I trusted Wieden. I think that was one of the best things about the overall ESPN relationship with Wieden—how much trust we had in each other. And so then we set the date and the script started to get more form, and we started going after talent. And that job sort of fell to me. I would send out letters to agents first trying to describe to them what we were doing, which is hard to do because it wasn’t like a storyboard or script, and then I’d follow up and talk to people. A lot of times I would send them the hockey spots or other ESPN work that we had done. People had started to sense that ESPN was doing good work and interesting stuff. And people were inclined to want to be involved. But then I said, “What we need you guys to do is fly to Hartford, and we’ll pick you up at the airport and drive you to Bristol and we’ll shoot it there.” And usually there was like a five-second pause—like, “Wait a minute, you want us to come to Bristol—to Hartford? And no money?” I said, “We’ll make a thousand-dollar charitable contribution on your behalf.” So it took a ton of convincing. It was hard. It wasn’t convenient for anybody to come to Hartford and do that.
It was tough to get talent in the beginning, and a lot of people we didn’t know if they were going to actually show until the day before, or a couple days before. And we got up to Bristol that first day and, I think, as much preparation as we had done with Norby and John Walsh and everybody on what was coming—the circus that was about to blow into town—I think that when the truck actually rolled in with the amount of people, it totally freaked everybody out. Because they were very clear with