Motion pitches

Motion pitches

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Motion pitches Sport has a long history on film but movies about it have often lapsed into cliché. Now, though, a new generation of filmmakers and an increasingly sophisticated sports media are combining to inspire a cinematic renaissance.

By Eoin Connolly

F

ilm and professional sport are sibling industries. Both born in the 19th century, they have grown to develop remarkable similarities: providing an escape from life and a context for it, creating local heroes and global icons, firing the imaginations of billions and feathering the nests of a lucky few.

Today they live in similar spaces in wider culture and, in a changing world, offer a kind of gold standard for the media.

Sport is generally thought of today in terms of its relationship with television but its history on celluloid is a long one.

One of the earliest surviving film clips is a boxing match between James Corbett and Peter Courtney, staged in Thomas Edison’s Black Maria studio and captured on the Kinetograph system in 1894.

Footage of recent bouts became a regular draw for the cinemas of the early 20th century before other means of broadcast became more accessible.

More substantial recordings of Olympic Games and Fifa World Cups were cinematic landmarks in the decades that followed while in Hollywood, the sports movie became a genre of its own.

Some borrowed from real life to tell tales of the heroic – as in Chariots of Fire – or

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the heinous – like the unsparing biopics of Ty Cobb in Cobb or of Jake La Motta in Raging Bull. Others were concocted to a narrative formula – the underdog, the mentor, the battle against personal problems and an apparently invincible foe – distilled to its purest form in the Rocky series and lovingly parodied in films like Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.

Not every entry in the canon leans so heavily on cliché, of course, and now the opportunities are greater than ever for filmmakers to tell stories about sport that explore the widest range of experiences within it.

In 2009, ESPN launched its 30 for 30 film season: a series of documentaries celebrating its 30th anniversary. Tellingly, these would not be stories about the network and would be solicited from acclaimed filmmakers rather than produced in-house. The result was a remarkable string of films – some of which, like Brett Morgen’s archive-only June 17th, 1994, broke ground not just in the sports genre but in documentary storytelling more generally.

Not only has 30 for 30 since been extended into a second volume, far outlasting its original commemorative

purpose, but two additional series have been ordered. Released in 2013, Nine for IX was a run of documentaries about women’s sport in the age of American Title XI legislation on equal school funding. In the build-up to this year’s Fifa World Cup, ESPN Films will broadcast another ten documentaries under the 30 for 30: Soccer Stories banner. It has also diversified into short films and other accompanying material such as podcasts and magazine articles.

“These are stories about how sports can influence and change culture and the world in really serious and meaningful ways,” says Connor Schell, the ESPN Films vice president and executive producer who now leads the project. “We have to continue to do projects like that and I think that part of the conceit here is that if we can be thoughtful and we can be innovative in our stylistic approaches, we can really reinvent the genre every single time we air a film, and keep pushing it forward and hopefully keep changing what people’s expectations are of a sports story or a sports movie. I don’t think we’ve done that yet, but that’s the sort of ambitious goal that we keep pushing towards and I hope that we can get there.”

Certainly modern sport, with its extensive libraries of footage and ready crop of rich and accessible narratives, seems fertile ground for filmmakers. The question, then, is one of approach: both artistically and logistically.

James Erskine was working in the BBC’s arts department in the late 1990s when he first thought of a new way of telling sports stories, “as more of an exploration of what sport means”. It was not until 2008, when his agent gave him a copy of All Played Out – Pete Davis’ account of England’s 1990 Fifa World Cup campaign – that he acted on that impulse. “I read it,” he recalls, “I loved it, so I bought the rights and set about trying to get financing to make a film on a theatrical scale and try and make it as an emotional story rather than an analysis of anything.”

The result was One Night in Turin, a film which has sent Erskine’s career in a new direction. He has since made From The Ashes, telling the story of England’s comeback cricketing triumph over Australia in 1981, and Battle of the Sexes, which recounts Billie Jean King’s epochal encounter with Bobby Riggs in a ‘mixed singles’ tennis match in 1973. Thematically, the films are of a piece but their journeys to the screen were quite different.

Erskine is speaking in the West End base of New Black Films. It is an independent production company he set up in 2009 with producer Victoria Gregory – whose own credits include the 2011 Formula One documentary Senna. His own office, which has the lived-in feel of a space in constant use, is currently doubling as an editing suite. “We’re very small,’ he says. “There’s only about five of us here.”

For One Night in Turin, other than purchasing archive rights and consulting with the family of the late England manager Sir Bobby Robson, New Black

Films operated without any input from soccer authorities and without recording any additional interviews. From The Ashes then engaged several of the subjects of the 1981 Test series, including Sir Ian Botham, and drew the attention of BBC Sport and the England and Wales Cricket Board at an early stage.

By the time the still-independent Battle of the Sexes appeared last year, it could count on extensive support from the WTA, for whom it was a useful means of celebrating its 40th anniversary.

“I think that knocking around and being

“As we went through their process,” he reveals, “they were actually coming to us and saying, ‘We’re really interested in what you’re doing and this is a really good way of telling the stories that we want to tell but for Fifa as an organisation, this is the story that we haven’t been able to present previously.’ It’s true, it needs someone to have an idea and go to them.”

That much will be familiar to another British documentary director, Paul Crowder. In 2006, Crowder worked with Passion Pictures to create Once In A Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the

“I think the thing about sport is that in our media-dominated age, the last 20 years, it is interrogated in more detail.” around and having a track record is pretty important, actually,” Erskine admits. “I think where you cross that editorial line – or don’t cross that editorial line – is really important as well, and we always want to be independent but work with organisations, and be quite strong and present a story that’s accessible to the neutral.

“If I was remaking One Night in Turin, would I go back and work more closely with the Football Association and football interests? Probably, I think now. I think I’d know how to handle that but perhaps I didn’t when I was starting to make that.”

Erskine professes to having developed a “really good relationship” with IMG and, at the same time, believes that some within the sports industry are coming to realise the soft power that comes with projects like those made by New Black Films. He recalls his experience of working with Fifa on One Night in Turin.

New York Cosmos. Charting the rise and fall of the original North American Soccer League and its glamorous leading team, the film was a relentlessly enjoyable critical hit which earned a theatrical release and support from ESPN and Miramax Films.

Yet making the documentary without the presence of an official body was an exercise in improvisation.

“It was difficult trying to get Pelé,” Crowder admits. “Pelé had a fee in mind, and the fee went up when we asked him the second time. So he was kind of trying to price himself out each time, and the third time the fee went up again and he said, ‘Do you want to ask me again?’” They did not.

There were few such issues on Crowder’s most recent project, 1: Life on the Limit.

Topped and tailed by a horrendous crash in the 1996 Australian Grand Prix which Martin Brundle not only survived, but survived well enough to continue in

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Draft Day is a 2014 release from The Montecito Picture Company and Lionsgate Films starring Kevin Costner and was made with the full consent and technical support of the National Football League, who even let the filmmakers shoot scenes during the real-life draft at Radio City in April 2013

the race, it tells the story of Formula One’s journey from the deadly chaos of the 1960s and 1970s to the fatality-free modern era. While made independently, it had the full support of Formula One Management (FOM) and its long-term head, Bernie Ecclestone. The arrangement opened doors throughout the sport.

“It was literally the first question, I would say, about 99 per cent of the time,” recalls Crowder, speaking days after the film’s UK premiere at the London Film Festival in October 2013. “‘Does Bernie know?’ And being able to say yes just made everyone feel, ‘OK, you can ask question two then.’”

Getting Ecclestone on board first meant getting his attention, which Crowder and producer Michael Shevloff did, after a fashion, by reaching out to FIA official Michael ‘Herbie’ Blash. “He got us a meeting with Bernie,” reveals Crowder. “We met him in a conference room much like this and pitched him, and he was sold in about 20 minutes.”

Winning and keeping that approval was no mean feat – the 2001 Sylvester Stallone flop Driven lost Ecclestone’s blessing in pre-production – and it was also utterly crucial. FOM was able to offer considerable practical assistance 4 | www.sportspromedia.com

such as paddock passes and help securing interview targets such as Ecclestone, Max Mosley and a host of former champions.

Most critically, it released the rights to its modern archives, without which the “action documentary” Crowder and his partners envisaged would have been near impossible. “I honestly don’t think we’d have been able to make the film without their support,” concedes Crowder. “It was the first question.”

The same is true of an altogether bigger-budget affair from The Montecito Picture Company and Lionsgate Films, 2014’s Draft Day. Helmed by Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, it stars Kevin Costner as the fictional general manager of the non-fictional Cleveland Browns who has the chance to rebuild a struggling team when he trades for the number one pick at the NFL Draft. Producer Ali Bell reveals that the decision to press for league involvement came very early, at the script development stage.

“Having them involved was a complete blessing at every turn,” she says, speaking to SportsPro from California during the final stages of post-production in January, “because whenever we had questions about anything they were really just a valuable resource to us in their quest to make the

movie absolutely as authentic as possible.

So stats, histories, procedures, what the coaches and the GMs would actually be doing that day, the players, all of that – just making sure that got our love letter to the sport and the fans correct.”

The production dealt extensively with Tracy Perlman, the NFL vice president of entertainment marketing and promotions who Bell describes as “really the hero of our movie”. As well as gaining clearance to shoot extensively at Radio City during the 2013 draft, the filmmakers were even granted the services of league commissioner Roger Goodell, who arrived before the real-life proceedings got underway to read the names of the fictional draft picks.

Bell and Reitman have previous experience of major product placement – 2009’s Up In The Air features American Airlines extensively – but the partnership with the NFL was a more delicate proposition.

Bell says: “This film’s been more difficult than any other movie we’ve worked on before just because American Airlines is a brand; the NFL is a brand but it’s actually a bunch of real people who are involved who become the face of that brand. So it’s also about being true to those people.

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New Black Films has so far released three sports documentaries: One Night in Turin was made without help from the soccer authorities in 2010, but cricket figures like umpire Dickie Bird (centre) contributed to 2011’s From The Ashes and last year’s Battle of the Sexes was embraced by the WTA

“In the movie, in addition to the NFL teams, we also have the NFL Network, we have ESPN, we have three major universities who are also involved in the picture. So you’re dealing not only with those brands but the people behind them and that always becomes tricky because you have to be respectful and honour who those people are.”

Perhaps even trickier is the staging of on-field football action. Former SMU quarterback Mike Fisher acted as a consultant for those scenes on Draft Day,

Sir Jackie Stewart, Emerson Fittipaldi and Bernie Ecclestone at an early screening of 1

“choreographed almost as if they were dance sequences”, but there is no doubt now that the look of sport on film now bears some debt to television and vice versa.

With such comprehensive broadcast footage available it has been possible to make visually arresting work for some time, as the likes of the NFL’s own NFL Films have long exploited. “Images just tell such great stories on their own,” says Crowder, “and with a little bit of set-up and the right piece of music these images just come to life.”

What has changed, however, is the tenor of the conversation. “I think the thing about sports is that in our mediadominated age, the last 20 years, it is interrogated in more detail,” argues Erskine. “The broadsheets used to have two pages on sport and now they have whole supplements. People write about it more intelligently.”

That, he continues, “is the building block for filmmakers to make films about sport in an intelligent way”.

Erskine notes that the marketing push on Senna – which was rewarded with a global box office take of US$11.86 million to go with its critical acclaim – was more akin to that of a feature film. It also bears mention that its

treatment of archive footage and expert contributions give it an immediacy that mainstream audiences may not expect of a documentary.

That is reflective of a wider recent change in documentary filmmaking in which the sports genre has played a considerable part. Crowder explains that together with his writing partner, Mark Monroe, he attempts to create films “that have an arc as if it was a narrative”.

“You’ve got all the story,” he explains, “so you plot all your points of where this and that happened as if you’re writing a script but we just do it in the documentary style. Then we add the soundtrack, we keep the pace where it’s clipping along and the audience are always engaged, you never let it drag and always ask the question of yourself – and this is the biggest failure of a lot of documentarians – does it matter? Do I care? Does the audience care?”

The borrowing of one cinematic form from another is going the other way, too.

“Rush [the Ron Howard-directed story of Formula One drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda] probably came about because of Senna,” suggests Erskine, “and perhaps went for a more conventional Hollywood structure than Senna itself did.”

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Director Paul Crowder (right) and writing partner Mark Monroe (left) at a premiere with Dave Grohl

Connor Schell is a vice president at ESPN Films

A more exacting approach to reality is welcome in the scripted sports movie, which is inherently and infamously difficult to execute. “It’s the same with doing a movie about a rock band,” jokes Crowder of many attempts to synthesise sporting life. “As soon as someone puts in the script, ‘Hey, man, grab my axe,’ it just sounds so wrong and forced.”

New Black Films’ next project, out in the summer of 2014, is Shooting for Socrates. A computer in Erskine’s office carries footage from the film, mid-edit. Inspired by a chance meeting between the director and the former soccer player David Campbell, it tells the story of Troubles-plagued Northern Ireland’s encounter with Brazil at the 1986 Fifa World Cup. Though dramatised, the project was initially intended as a documentary, with Erskine securing archive footage and screenwriter Marie Jones working closely with members of the Northern Ireland team.

Erskine has been wary of treading the “fine line” between the real and the recreated, one which sports films so often cross.

“What we’re trying to do with Socrates is show not what’s on the pitch but what’s off the pitch,” he says. Rather than staging the soccer scenes, new scenes have been shot so that the colour grading matches archive recordings to prevent the images from jarring.

“It’s a massive challenge to do that,” adds Erskine, “but the challenge that we

reality series, broadcast by Zee TV in India, now also bears the MLB name, which offers an immediate in-built marketing hook.

Therein lies a vital advantage of making films about sport. Draft Day will be released ahead of the main event itself in May, with the NFL set to offer promotional support, while the DVD release could be tagged to the start of the new football season in the autumn.

1 has had not only the hard support of Formula One Management but also the softer benefits that come with having so many famous names available to speak on its behalf. It also has a more serendipitous place in a spiritual trilogy with Rush and Senna, films which were conceived after Crowder got to work, with all three distributed by Studio Canal.

For a small company like New Black Films, which can rarely rely on being a priority for distributors, such benefits are seized upon with gratitude. “We have to be very smart about when we’re going to release these things,” says Erskine.

One Night in Turin was released in the UK ahead of the 2010 Fifa World Cup, a canny move whose effectiveness was partly dulled by England’s disastrous showing in that tournament. From The Ashes drew interest from sportswriters looking for an anniversary angle on a famous cricketing summer.

Battle of the Sexes, Erskine recalls, was greeted sceptically at first by distributors but its low-spend media campaign has been the most effective so far. Its UK

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have also as documentary makers is that we’re conscious of not showing stuff that looks fake, which most – Escape to Victory – sports things do.”

The crossover between documentary and feature filmmaking is evident again in Disney’s Million Dollar Arm. It is based on the tale of agent JB Bernstein, who in 2008 successfully launched a reality television programme seeking India’s first Major League Baseball (MLB) superstar, and the series’ winners Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel. While making the film, Disney went in-house for the help of one of its own properties: ESPN Films.

“Obviously, what I do every day with my team on 30 for 30 is make the effort to tell great, non-fiction sports stories and increasingly across our company we tell those in the most appropriate form,” says Connor Schell, who is an executive producer on Million Dollar Arm. “So sometimes that’s a 90-minute documentary, sometimes that’s a sevenminute short film, and in this case, I mean, Million Dollar Arm is an incredible non-fiction sports story about an unlikely protagonist and two really amazing kids who go on this journey, and when Disney set out to make the movie they had conversations with us about getting involved and just helping along the way in terms of story structure, etc.”

The project also has the MLB seal of approval, with the licensed marks of the league and its teams adding “a level of authenticity” to events on screen. The

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Coming attractions

Gold BBC Films, British Film Institute, AL Films. Directed by James Watkins. Daniel Radcliffe stars as Sebastian Coe in a film recounting the future London 2012 frontman’s rivalry with Steve Ovett at the 1980 Olympics. Due for release in late 2014.

release coincided with Wimbledon, its American release with the US Open, and its Australian release with the Australian Open. In Billie Jean King, meanwhile, it has had a committed and unusually effective spokesperson.

Beyond Shooting for Socrates – “This time Fifa are very aware of it and supportive of the film from the concept” – Erskine is soon to finish work on a documentary about the late cyclist Marco Pantani, which New Black Films hopes will appeal to the Italian’s devoted fanbase.

“I guess I don’t want to be known as just the sports guy but, pragmatically, there’s a market for the films,” says Erskine, who has further sporting projects in pre-production. “People want to watch them, and people are drawn to them and they’re marketable and that’s really important in a media-diverse age.”

Those are sentiments shared by Crowder. “That, basically, was our feeling about Formula One,” he says. “‘Well, if we can’t make the film as broad as we’d like to, at the very least we’ve got 600 million Formula One fans that we can appeal to and if we can just nail one per cent of those, we’ll be doing fine.’”

For bigger production companies, the equation is quite different. Bell says she would do another sports film “in a

Fifa.com

F2014 (working title) Leveuh Films, Fifa. Directed by Frédéric Auburtin. Filmed in Azerbaijan, France and Brazil, this a dramatised history of Fifa starring Tim Roth as Sepp Blatter, Gerard Depardieu as Jules Rimet, Sam Neill as João Havelange and Nicholas Gleaves as Uefa’s Henri Delauney. It has been co-funded by world soccer’s governing body. Due for release in summer 2014.

British actor Tim Roth meets Fifa president Sepp Blatter, who he will play in an upcoming film

Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics Disney. Directed by Antoine Fuqua.

Based on the 2007 bestseller by the sportswriter and ESPN television reporter Jeremy Schaap, author of Cinderella Man. Release date TBC.

heartbeat”, but believes it is becoming tougher for independent studios in Hollywood to make major projects happen.

“Movies don’t just play here in the United States,” she notes, “they play around the world, and that makes sports movies really hard because you look at them and think, well, there’s not an NFL team in Beijing.”

Of course, Bell is speaking as a producer without the backing of a media company with ties to the sports industry. The likes of Disney, Fox and NBC Universal could conceivably draw upon a range of assets to make a major undertaking worthwhile. Broadcast rights, access to archives, partnerships with teams and sponsors, even on-air presenting talent: all could be leveraged to support the production and marketing of mainstream film ventures, with TV tie-ins a further possibility. Ultimately, though, there is both a grander alchemy at work and a simple rule to obey. As Schell puts it: “I think that, generally, the feature film business comes down to if you can be successful with these projects.”

At the lower end of the scale, teams and organisations are already seeing what they can achieve. For example, Premier League soccer club Arsenal and agency partner MP & Silva have embarked on an in-house set of documentaries with former players.

Still playing: The Class of 92 Boundless. Directed by Benjamin and Gabe Turner. David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Gary and Phil Neville, and Nicky Butt rise from Manchester United’s youth team to Champions League glory.

Released in the UK in November 2013.

A feature-length edition with record scorer Thierry Henry was released on Apple’s iTunes Store in late 2013.

Yet those creating the films will be wary of too much convergence of media interests. “Trust your filmmakers is the key,” says Crowder, who suggests an independent artist is likelier to “ride the fine lines – the controversial lines” of a story where the interest and entertainment are found.

“I think the only way good films get made is that they’re willed into being,” says Erskine, “I don’t think they can come up as a marketing idea.”

For all that can be gained in shared passions, there is plenty to be lost in having “too much synergy”.

“It’s very hard to work for a client,” Erskine says. “It changes a lot of films.

I’ve made films for clients that have a vested interest in the subject matter as opposed to a broadcaster and you can make really beautiful films but you’re never going to be able to make the film with the same degree of heart in it.

“Unless you get a really brave chief exec of one of those organisations that goes, ‘Hey, James Erskine. I’ve decided you’re the man who’s going to make this film and I’m not going to interfere with you.’ And then actually stick to their word.”

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