Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [396]
Keith is a good friend of mine, and I really like John Skipper. It’s a great company. They do great work, and for me, it’s an ideal situation. They had been trying to get me to do something for them for a while, but I didn’t really know what it should be. Then I saw this documentary on that soccer great on the French team, Zidane, where they had all these cameras on him only, and I thought, that might work even better for basketball. So I went to Kobe, who also happens to be a huge soccer fan, and he said, “Let’s do it.” We had, I think, more than twenty-five cameras on him, and I think it turned out really great. I still have people stop me all the time to tell me how much they liked it.
The people at ESPN enjoy and love sports. That’s what comes through. I’m looking to do more for them.
CONNOR SCHELL, Executive Producer, ESPN Films:
Bill and I had been talking a lot about the different things we could be doing in the documentary space. Bill’s got a real love for documentaries, as do I, Joan Lynch, John Dahl, John Skipper, and John Walsh. We all felt at the time like we could be doing more in the documentary space because it was consistent with the way ESPN wants to present content, and that we were in a better spot producing a high-end documentary about a great story in sports than we were producing a fictionalized, scripted version. And we believed there were real high-end Hollywood filmmakers who had such a passion for sports that, if you let them tell the story they wanted to tell, and if you gave them a platform to get that story out to the world and to the right audience, which ESPN can provide, that something like this project was possible.
So we went after great storytellers who were passionate about a particular story. In the back of our minds, we wanted to create a kind of mosaic to tell a larger story of what sports have meant to America over these thirty years. Once we got going, we knew within forty-five seconds of sitting down with someone whether or not they were going to do this. Either they had something they wanted to explore and we would help them find the angle, or they didn’t and just looked at us like, “Why would I do a documentary for almost no money?”
We had great conversations with Barry Levinson, who came alive as he talked about the Colts. When we sat down with Steve Nash, the first thing he said was “I’ve never made a film before” but that when he was six years old, his teacher would tell him every day about where Terry Fox had run the previous day and that Terry was one of the most meaningful figures in his life; we just knew we had to let him tell that story.
STEVE NASH, Basketball Player:
Maura Mandt bribed me. I’m not kidding. She knew my love of film, and she told me she’d get me a meeting to pitch an idea for the 30 for 30 series if I came to the ESPYs. That was too great an opportunity to miss, so I went to the awards show, and actually had a good time. Terry Fox was one of the most remarkable human beings I had ever heard of, and I couldn’t get his story out of my mind. His strength, courage, and vulnerability were so impressive, and the fact that he was so young was inspiring to me. It was a great honor to bring his journey to film, and I learned a great deal about filmmaking. I was particularly struck by what a difficult process editing can be, and the important influence it has on storytelling. In the end, making this film cemented for me the human potential. Terry was as compelling a person as I’ve ever come across—a seemingly normal, ordinary individual who had the strength to do the extraordinary and create a movement of epic proportion.
In the middle of the 2010 U.S. Open, Mary Carillo, considered one of the best analysts in television sports, abruptly walked off her job at ESPN. She had the grace to go quietly, without a word to the press or any kind of commotion—but her departure was a real setback for the network, though they were hardly about to admit it. They thought they had plenty of tennis personnel as it was, and that Mary Carillo was too opinionated