The Official Unofficial BS Report Notes Page

130 this project is 3.5 years old

2 “i was known and still am know to send emails from time to time to people that i probably shouldn’t, to people who work much higher in the espn food chain.. the basic message being, ‘why are we the world-wide leader, and why is hbo kicking our butts when it comes to sports docs. we have the resources, money and tape vault.’ when hbo does it, it feels like an event, and we’re not there.”

3 the sports doc genre had gotten tired.

6 obstacles: convince espn, a company that loves to produce things themselves, to hand over these ideas to ppl outside the company. we had to figure out how to convince 5 directors, much less 30. we had to figure out what the stories were

7 in the beginning, thinking there were ten or so obvious stories to tell, but as they went along, realized they weren’t obligated to tell any specific story.

9 everybody has that “one” sports story they’re dying to tell.

1030 in the first six months, people didn’t necessarily want to work with us. they didn’t trust the project aka wanted to know that other big names were attached to it so they wouldn’t feel dumb attaching their name to it. making something of nothing. “so who else is involved?” “well we don’t have anybody yet” “oh well why don’t you get back to me when you have some names” barry levinson (and the band played on, hoop dreams) being on board was the first big step

11 ron shelton, peter berg, levinson - top tier sports doc directors they had on their list to go after. dan klores, alex gibney, barbara koppel are other directors on the top of their game. next, the up and comers who were working on docs, not necessarily sports - they were judged by who had the best story to tell

1230 thought the “Doc and Daryl” doc was a lock until they found out they wanted to get paid

13 bs “you can be candid. sometimes docs didn’t work out bc people wanted to get paid, sometimes it was rights for sports.” getting olympics footage is expensive. getting a key component of the story to cooperate (athlete interview) difficulties. sports stories that update during production (michael jordan and his HOF speech, steinbrenner dying). other directors making stories at the same time (overlap)

14 once we had the first wave of people, then we had offers. we could have done 50 of these. but when we only had 6 directors, getting to 10 looked extremely difficult.

1530 nobody in the company thought that this would actually happen. “this will keep simmons busy he won’t send us any emails for 6 months and when push comes to shove then we’ll see” meanwhile we got a ton of work done

1630 “this is my best advice for anybody who has a crazy idea and is trying to get it done. if you can make it a position where they can’t pick it apart, they literally can’t come up with a reason it shouldn’t happen, that’s where you want to be” “yeah, why wouldn’t we do this? it’s not going to bankrupt the company” lol

21 things that let this series float in 2009/10: dvr, twitter,”going smart” because everything else was going dumb

22 candidness! “ultimately this series worked because every single one was a great film” “not every single case”

2230 .5 .6 ratings for the first few. the U and Klores’ on Reggie Miller got

25 “you’re not going to like all 30 of these, and you shouldn’t!”

26 the approach and the execution matters so much more than the material

30 small picture stuff: the project was split into 5 teams each handling 6 films (espn side)

33 degree of difficulty of the film that didn’t use any new interviews was definitely the hardest. though the two escobars was a film that was done in a year should have taken 4. living in columbia. forming relationships with people.