The Bill Simmons Podcast - The Timberwolves Mess, Plus the Evolution of 21st Century Sports Docs With ‘The Last Dance’ Director Jason Hehir

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

The Ringer's Bill Simmons shares his thoughts on the Minnesota Timberwolves sale falling through (2:00). Then, Bill is joined by director-producer Jason Hehir to discuss how the medium of sports docum...entaries has evolved over the 21st century (14:46) before diving into some of Jason's films, including 'The Fab Five' (31:06), the lost Sacramento Kings documentary, 'Down in the Valley' (51:46), 'Andre the Giant' (1:00:57), and 'The Last Dance' (1:13:45). Host: Bill Simmons Guest: Jason Hehir Producer: Kyle Crichton The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming, please checkout theringer.com/RG to find out more or listen to the end of the episode for additional details. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up, we're talking about the evolution of sports stocks with my friend Jason here. Plus, I got some basketball business stuff up next. This episode is brought to you by Prime Video. You know me, I can't go a day without sports. I really can't. And now Monday nights are all about hockey. That's right. There's a new exclusive home for streaming Monday night NHL hockey, and it's on Prime.
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Starting point is 00:01:30 90 calories per 355 mil can. So why not grab some Miller Lites today? Your game time tastes like Miller time. Must be legal drinking age. We're also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network. Put up Manchester by the Sea as the first episode of Rock Bottom Month on the rewatchables. And now, thanks to Larry David, I'm going to tell you what we're doing for the next one on Monday. Because you can watch this movie on Netflix right now.
Starting point is 00:01:59 It is one of my favorite action movies of the last 10 years. It is one of the best prison movies ever made. It is a movie Chris Ryan and I absolutely love and I don't feel like a ton of people know about it. It's called Shot Caller.
Starting point is 00:02:11 So I would highly encourage if you like action movies, prison movies, watch this movie over the weekend. We're going to talk about it on Monday's podcast. Coming up,
Starting point is 00:02:21 my friend Jason here is on. We did Andre the Giant together and we did the Fab Five doc together and a couple other ESPN things. And then, you know, him from The Last Dance, which became one of the biggest sports documentaries ever and one of the biggest documentaries ever. I wanted to talk about the evolution of sports docs through his career and the stuff that he saw. And we started in the mid 2000s and went all the way through.
Starting point is 00:02:44 So we did this in a way that, uh, you kind of have to listen to the whole thing. So if you want to fast forward and listen to just the Fab Five part or just the Andre the Giant part or just the MJ part, you can do that. You can skip ahead. We'll take big notes in the episode description. But I really want you to listen to this from the beginning because I really like Jason. I like the way he thinks. And I think it's an interesting topic. So that's what's coming after the top. I'm going to talk quickly about Minnesota and the NBA and all the weird shit that's going on. That's next. First, our friends from ProJet. I wanted to quickly talk about what's happening with this Minnesota Timberwolves situation because it is one of the most bizarre situations in recent NBA history. And it also is
Starting point is 00:03:45 going to tell us a lot about where the league is going for the rest of the decade. So I do think it's an important business story too. So Glenn Taylor, the much maligned owner of the Timberwolves sells the team to Alex Rodriguez and Mark Lurie in 2021 for $1.5 billion, which immediately seemed low to everybody. Just everybody was like, whoa, that's low. But he did it because he wanted to keep the team in Minnesota and those guys promised they would. And I think he liked those two guys and he felt like, all right, I'd rather sell the team to somebody I like. And I think that's how it went. But the number was low and it's kind of tied into what Taylor's reign was in Minnesota, where he was one of the worst owners in the league. I'm sure he's not a bad guy, but just from a performance standpoint, really bad at owning a basketball
Starting point is 00:04:35 team. Made just a slew of terrible, terrible, terrible decisions. And other than the 2004 season with KG, just not a lot of happy moments for Minnesota fans. So I'm sure they weren't too upset to see him on his way out. But there was this piece of the deal that Lorraine Rodriguez had to hit all these check marks for payments. And it wasn't just like what Ishbia did, where Ishbia was like, here's my money. And he bought the Suns and he's running them the next day. In this case, this was a long process.
Starting point is 00:05:07 They were ingratiated in as minority owners. And eventually the last payment was supposed to be this month. And about a year ago, definitely started hearing things about, hey man, keep an eye on that Minnesota thing. I'm not sure those guys have the money to make the payments. And there was always stuff about, oh, they barely made the last one. So people were kind of watching what would happen with this last payment. It's funny, I swear, I almost talked about this with two weeks ago because I had gotten some intel that they were talking to some heavy,
Starting point is 00:05:40 heavy hitters about coming in for real money to help them with this final chunk, like real money. I'm talking like multiple hundred million dollars. But then it seemed like it was going to happen. And then all of a sudden, either it didn't happen or it did happen. And Glenn Taylor is now being accused by Laurie and Rodriguez of having buyer's remorse. So when the story broke today, a couple hours later after The Athletic wrote about it, Glenn Taylor told John Krasinski, this is on Twitter, these quotes, Glenn Taylor said, quote, we're just saying we had a contract with you guys. You've had your time and this is the end of the contract and we're just going to kind of go on running the way we've been run. So he's
Starting point is 00:06:18 effectively saying they didn't fulfill their commitments. I'm moving on. And then the other tweet was Glenn Taylor tells The Athletic that he does not plan on putting it back on the market. Quote, I just think we built this team. We've got the players down. It appears to me that we should have a very positive run for a number of years, and I want to be a part of that. And whether I believe that or I believe that he wanted to sell the team at a much higher price and these guys didn't come through with their number, he's saying they didn't fulfill their commitments. They're saying immediately, they did a statement that he has seller's remorse and that's why this is happening. And if you're looking at it from
Starting point is 00:06:51 Taylor's side, the price was 1.5 in 2021. Now in 2024, I would say the basement, the lowest possible price for an NBA team would be 3 billion because that's what Charlotte sold for a few months ago. And I just don't think there would be a team less valuable than that. So Mavs sell for $3.5. That was probably a little too low. Suns sell for $4, which was on the high end. But since then, you have a couple of variables. One is that the media deal is coming. And despite what the reports have been, I think the media deals can be pretty big. So that's one piece. And I want to talk about that in one second. The second piece is expansion is definitely coming. And Adam Silver has been talking. He goes to different cities and I think he talks to different owners in different cities and different people. And just in general, the vibe is when we're done with this media rights deal, which should be pretty soon,
Starting point is 00:07:47 we're doing expansion and it's going to be Seattle and Vegas, which I've been telling you in this podcast for two years, if you remember. But they're not definitively saying it's Seattle and Vegas because they want to make as much money as possible from those two teams. And when I say as much money as possible, initially I thought maybe 7 billion, 6.5 billion, the seven combined. Maybe one would be three and a half, one would be three. Then I thought maybe it's eight combined, maybe it's just four and four. And then recently I was thinking this might get to nine. And that's kind of where I settled in my head, especially from talking to people that it would be 9 billion for the the two teams. So $4.5 billion each,
Starting point is 00:08:33 higher than the Suns valuation. And every owner would get a check of $300 million cash. Just wire it to my account. What's interesting about the expansion fees, they don't have to share that money with the players. So this is just a straight check. So if you're selling a team, that's why the Jordan thing was a little curious to me that's why even Cuban even though I know it had been going on for a year why would you sell the team before you got that giant expansion check didn't make a ton of sense to me but in Taylor's case
Starting point is 00:08:56 if those teams are going for 9 billion and again it's going to be Vegas and Seattle unless somebody comes over the top and jacks the price up like let's say some rich Mexico City guy comes in some And again, it's going to be Vegas and Seattle unless somebody comes over the top and jacks the price up. Like let's say some rich Mexico City guy comes in, some kajillionaire who's just like, ah, here's 7 billion for Mexico City NBA team. The league's going to kick the tires on that.
Starting point is 00:09:18 You have to remember, it's a 30 team league. They all share whatever the expansion thing is, and they all share the media deal rights, right? They all get 1 30th of the media deal. And if they add two expansion teams, that 1 30th becomes 1 32, not as much money. So they want a big taste to make up for the money that they're losing on the media deal every year, which means, guess what?
Starting point is 00:09:42 They're taking as much money as possible. There are no discounts. I still think LeBron is getting the biggest team, but guess what? When push comes to shove, if LeBron is involved with a group that's offering, I don't know, 3.8 billion for the expansion team and somebody else is offering five, you think the other owners are going to care that, oh, let's take less. We'll give the lower number to LeBron. They're not, they're going to take the highest number. So we have this big expansion thing and I, I promise you it pretty close to the vest, but I am pretty convinced that they're going to go streamer in a way harder way than people realize. And it's for some of the reasons that we've talked about on this podcast before. You saw it with the NFL and Jason Herr
Starting point is 00:10:38 and I are about to talk about this in a second, but with the NFL, with the Amazon Thursday Night Football, with Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV and YouTube, and then the Peacock game they had. The secret sauce with this is they got an incredible amount of intel on their audience, on audience behavior, how long people watch, where those people are watching from, what ads they like. It's a whole other level. So you compare it to having your games on CBS or TNT, or even like if they're showing it on Max versus showing it on Amazon or showing it on Google slash YouTube.
Starting point is 00:11:16 The amount of intelligence you get, you almost can't put a price on. And for Adam Silver and the owners, like they know this, it would be irresponsible for them to not put at least a decent chunk of their games on one of these streamers because they're not just getting the money from the streamer. They're getting this relationship. They're getting this advanced metrics on their audience, on viewerships, on how they should
Starting point is 00:11:38 approach game presentations, just everything. There's no way they're not doing it. So I actually think the media deal is going to be a little bigger than has been reported because I think anybody that's gotten into the live sports stuff with football has been delighted by it. It's been great. Even Apple doing the MLS, they've been delighted by that. So this is where it's going. And I think the NBA likes to be on the forefront, not on the back front of this stuff. So the media deal is going to be significant. And if I had to bet, I think it's going to be bad for TNT because TNT is kind of the old school past tense way of doing this stuff. I know they're trying to get in there in max and they're trying to belatedly do a whole bunch of stuff. They're in that bundle with ESPN and Fox, but Amazon and Google slash YouTube, it's just a whole other animal for what they're able to do. So we'll see how it goes. But the point is a lot of money's coming. And now this Minnesota story
Starting point is 00:12:39 becomes especially fascinating because it becomes a, you said this, no, you said this, and just somebody's word against somebody else's word on what happened. It's going to have to be litigated in court. If it gets litigated in court and it becomes a real lawsuit, which seems very conceivable now, now we're into texts, now we're into emails, now we're getting a whole window into the prism of how a team gets sold and all the stuff that they had to go through. This could get pretty ugly. But then on top of it, if the Timberwolves go for sale again, and let's say he wants to now sell a 60% stake to somebody else, and that stake is now worth at least $3 billion, maybe even $3.5 billion, and then that sets the market for the rest of this stuff. So I bring all this up because it is just a fascinating time for
Starting point is 00:13:26 this to happen. This specific time, late March, right as the NBA is trying to figure out not just the media deal, but also this expansion thing, which the moment the media deal is done, they're off. Expansion's happening. They're moving. They're going to try to lock down Seattle and Vegas. And I'm telling you, that's how it's going to play out. So we will see with Minnesota. Does this change any of this? What happens if somebody comes in and overpays? Because think about it. Minnesota has Anthony Edwards. If you're doing a draft of best under 30 American players you'd want as the face of your franchise that you'd want to own, if you're some random rich guy and you just want to
Starting point is 00:14:10 sit courtside at the finals because your team's playing, Minnesota would be one of the top three picks. And betting on Edwards with a ton of money, when you think about what did LeBron mean to Cleveland in the 2000s? What did Durant and those guys mean to OKC? When you have a small market team, what's Wemby going to mean to San Antonio? When you have a small market team and you have one of the major stars in the league, the team oftentimes goes, it might double in value just for the years those guys are there. We saw it happen with LeBron where the team was worth one piece when he was in Cleveland and then it was worth another figure when he wasn't. So if I'm some super duper, super duper billionaire, crazy, I don't give a shit, rich guy, you're thinking like, yeah, I'll buy Minnesota. I get to be in the Western finals
Starting point is 00:14:56 sitting courtside and they keep showing me on TV and I'm buying into this league that has this huge media deal coming, I'm in. So I think Glenn Taylor knows that. I also don't know all the mechanics of did they miss the payments, did they didn't. But this has become the most fascinating business story of the year for basketball. So keep an eye on it is all I'm saying. Say goodbye to busted brackets because FanDuel lets you bet on every game of the tourney, whether you're betting on a big upset or a one seat, it's time to go dancing on America's number one sports book. Right now, new customers get $200 in bonus bets. If your first $5 bet wins, I'm going to come up
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Starting point is 00:16:18 See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. All right. As I said, I want to have some smart people on either Tuesdays or Thursdays. This is one of the smartest people I know, Jason Hare. We worked together a bunch of times over the last 15 years. And he then most famously did The Last Dance. I was not involved
Starting point is 00:16:35 in that one, but I was involved in a couple of the things you did. But your career spans basically 21st century sports docs and how they evolved, how they changed, how the mindset behind them changed. So we'll just start how you and I met with Fab Five, which was now considered a 30 for 30, but it's not a 30 for 30. It was during that weird window. 31st or 32nd, I think Unguarded was 31 maybe.
Starting point is 00:17:02 Yeah. And they just called it ESPN Films for like five or six docs. ESPN Films for like five or six dogs. ESPN Films Presents. Yeah, exactly. And then everyone was saying to you, hey, I love that 30 for 30. And you were like, no, no, it's actually an ESPN Films Presents. And then eventually they just gave up.
Starting point is 00:17:15 Now they say it about, they say they love the Andre the Giant 30 for 30, which was on HBO. It's become a catch all. It's like Kleenex, Band-Aids, 30 for 30. Right. All right. So going backwards, you're at HBO in the 2000s in this class of people that eventually ended up doing a bunch of really good things, but you guys are doing 24-7. There's some hard knocks and then you're doing the old school traditional sports documentary. So what are you doing there? Walk the audience through your path in the 2000s.
Starting point is 00:17:47 I was at NBC for like three years and I met Bob Costas at NBC. And while I was at NBC from 98 through just after 9-11, I taught myself how to edit on this thing called the media 100 which was like the precursor to avid um it was in a it was literally in a closet uh in a hallway at nbc and someone there just taught me how to like i was doing a family video and someone taught me how to like edit a little bit and then the only way i could get my stuff on air i was a pa i was a lab graphics pa and a tape pa they called it for like the people who were actually doing stuff that got on air. But they would let me do features if I edited them myself. So I would do my job during the day.
Starting point is 00:18:30 And then at night, I would stay over in that little closet overnight and teach myself to edit little bumpers, little one-minute Kevin Garnett set to Public Enemy highlights. It was fun. I would have done that. It was like a new toy. I would have done that if it wasn't paid. So I did that for a few years and then when costas went to hbo to to start his show on the record um i went over with him and then i was i was an ap associate producer there on things like the costa show and um inside the nfl doing like little three and a half minutes
Starting point is 00:19:04 feature about emmett smith trying to break the Russian record and go down and interview Jim Brown. It was awesome. It was a dream job. I was 25 years old. I had enough responsibility that it was stressful, but not so much that I could ruin anyone's show or anything. So it was just like constant learn by doing. That was my whole thing. It was like back in the days when I was a bartender, just lie, get the job, lie, and then figure out how to make a Mai Tai and a screwdriver and you're off and running. And try to outwork everybody else.
Starting point is 00:19:32 Yeah. Just keep your head down. Try and make copies, get pizza, run and get coffees. And in the meantime, when you can pick your spots your spots do some work so did that for a while at hbo and then they gave me um which i thought was a punishment the countdown shows that half hour countdown shows for boxing boxing was like their big ticket item it was it was a huge ticket item at hbo overall especially in sports yeah so my boss at the time all i wanted to do was the year-end highlights of 2006 set to music. And I had the music picked out. It was for the Costa show. And I was like, that's the ultimate 10-minute montage of all the best moments. And I had been logging everything for 12 months.
Starting point is 00:20:15 And I was ready to do this thing. I had a song by Explosions in the Sky that I picked out. I wrote to the band and they let me use the song. And then they came in my office one day and they were like, you're doing the countdown to De La Hoya Mayorga. And I was like, who the hell's my orga and i wanted to do that 10 minute little did i know that that's probably the best decision that was made for me in my career because they basically gave me a blank slate they were like we don't like the way the countdown shows are being done now we want to keep them in house so you have your own TV show that you can do. I lost money on that fight. Did you?
Starting point is 00:20:47 Oh, you took my Orga? Yeah. Yeah. The guy who used to smoke Marlboro Reds in the ring after he beat people and ran with them. That won me over. I was like, this guy is smoking. I apologize.
Starting point is 00:20:59 I apologize for convincing you during the countdown show that he had a shot, but that became our MO was like, we have these fights that are often mismatches like we spent on 24-7. That evolved into 24-7. Right. So Floyd- Which, in 24-7, more influential and interesting than I think maybe it gets credit for. I think it gets a little swallowed up by some of the other sports doc stuff, but I fucking love 24 seven. It was like that to me,
Starting point is 00:21:29 the evolution of hard knocks using the hard knock style to actually build suspense for something that's about to happen, which I think was actually their business plan. I think someone in boxing at HBO actually said we should do a football hard knocks. And then they, they elected to call it 24 seven, but that was, and then it was four episodes and episode five was essentially the fight.
Starting point is 00:21:46 So by the time... The game plan, as far as I saw it, from where I sat, I was about to leave HBO and they said, all right, you can have this job. I think I was 29. And they let me hire...
Starting point is 00:21:56 I immediately went and called any of my friends in the business who knew how to edit or shoot or anything. And we literally came over to my apartment. I got pizzas and beers. And I showed them some stuff that I want this thing to look and feel like so we watched Gladiator and we watched Friday Night Lights
Starting point is 00:22:11 so season one it just happened yes I think we watched the movie but season one like just the cutaways to like someone's foot tapping the Peter Berg movie gotcha yeah exactly so very similar styles
Starting point is 00:22:26 because I think Peter directed the pilot too. Yeah. So that was like the... I said the biggest decision made. The biggest decision made in sports television, sports documentaries, was somehow Ross Greenberg got them to put this show on 9.30 on Sunday nights.
Starting point is 00:22:45 You could not have chosen a better time slot for any show because it was after the Sopranos and 10.30, I'm sorry. It was after the Sopranos and Entourage and then 24-7 came on on Sunday nights. That was prime real estate. I still don't know how we convinced them to do it because all of our countdown shows always came on at midnight after a fight on Saturday nights. So we got that time slot and the edict was like, we have the guys who want to watch this fight. We need their girlfriends and people who aren't boxing fans. Because that was basically entourage. It was a guy's audience, but then the girlfriends and the wives also half watching.
Starting point is 00:23:26 So I remember saying this tease that we do in the beginning of the Dale Hoyer Mayweather, the first two minutes of that first show, I remember telling our crew, this is the most important two minutes of your career. If this thing pops off, then people are going to watch next week, and this could be a huge thing. If it's a dud and it just looks like every other
Starting point is 00:23:41 boxing countdown show, then it'll be a great time slot for four weeks. And then it came and went. I think it was just supposed to be one series. It was a limited series for four episodes to promote the hell out of that fight. And it worked because they got 2.4 million pay-per-view buys, which back then set the record. So that was end of December 2006 range? The fight was April 15th, 2007. 2007, okay.
Starting point is 00:24:09 Yeah, the mid-2000s are such a fascinating time for non-scripted sports content, right? Because everyone's kind of realizing something. I mean, I wrote the 30 for 30 memo. That was March 2007. But leading up to that, Hard Knocks hits summer 2001 right and that becomes like whoa this is amazing i i can't believe brian billick's on a hammock talking
Starting point is 00:24:34 about how much he loves ray lewis like this is fucking crazy does he realize they're filming this and we have that whole version of stuff then we we have the old school HBO sports docs. We have ESPN kind of clumsily getting in in some ways, but then another stuff they did was really good. They did that Cosmos doc, I think was somewhere in the 2006 range. So they had a couple of good things, but then they're also trying to do Bronx is Burning. They're trying to do these 10 episode scripted shows.
Starting point is 00:25:03 Yeah, they did the Bobby Knight show. Right. They're making those TV movies that they're making like in Canada and everyone's like, something's here, but how do we get it? And HBO's attitude is where HBO were the best. And they keep cranking out. They were doing sports of the 20th century was their name, the name of their doc series. So literally it had to be at least seven years before what we were doing in 2007 to even be on the whiteboard as something that we may want to do. I say we, like my dream when I got to HBO was to do a documentary for HBO Sports. That was my ultimate dream job. That was anyone's dream who would have been in their 20s at that point. ESPN had a sports century, but I would say by 2003, 2004,
Starting point is 00:25:46 it just became cookie cutter. Well, I watched it when they, when they did the countdown. I remember watching that religiously and it was a big deal when I think it was Jordan Ali with the final night, but they were really well done. They were really different. It looked special.
Starting point is 00:25:58 You knew it. They branded it really well. You could tell what that like kind of sepia tone, like you knew what you were watching. But the, but yeah, 24 seven, they gave us kind of sepia tone like you knew what you were watching yeah but the but yeah 24 7 they gave us kind of a blank slate like literally a blank piece of paper for us to scribble on at that pizza party to be like all right how would we want to do this i remember
Starting point is 00:26:13 the first scene we cut first thing we edited together we had just shot in february of 2007 at floyd's 30th birthday party which was Jet, the nightclub at the Mirage. And when my camera guy and I showed up at Floyd's house, he was getting a haircut in his bathroom, which was three times the size of my studio apartment, the bathroom itself. And he had flown this guy in from Grand Rapids to give him a haircut. So I'm sitting on the edge of this bathtub that is the biggest bathtub you've ever seen. Me and my camera guy are sitting on like this marble base or marble wall of the bathtub. And out of nowhere, in comes 50 Cent on a Segway wearing a hoodie with his own face on it. And we had no idea that he was even in the house.
Starting point is 00:26:56 I vaguely remember this. So we looked at each other and my camera guy, Tom Stuckus, was like, you want to go get the camera? And I was like, yeah, I think you should probably go get that. 50 Cent was a segue. Let's get this. And 50 Cent was at, like, he's had a resurgence here, a renaissance, but he was at the height of his powers at that point. So we cut that
Starting point is 00:27:15 together, and I remember showing it to some of the executives, and they didn't know who he was. And my editor and I were saying, like, no, you don't understand. Because they were advocating for it to be pulled. And my editor and I were saying, no, you don't understand. Because they were advocating for it to be pulled. And my editor, God bless him, Anthony Amoya, he said, put it this way, if 50 Cent
Starting point is 00:27:32 was on Entourage before us, it would be the highest rated episode of Entourage this season. That's how big this guy is. But that was kind of like HBO. I owe that place so much and I still have really good friends from there. But it was the antithesis of what... HBO Sports was the antithesis of what HBO was known as.
Starting point is 00:27:50 We were very... There's a very tweed jacket. We were annexed off from the rest of the company. The blue shirt khaki police. Yeah, exactly. I was called an ESPN. Oh, here come the blue shirt khaki guys. It was a lot of cool...
Starting point is 00:28:02 Here they are. And a lot of... Yeah, a lot of... You they are and a lot of yeah you know what's funny about what you're laying out though boxing was so important for cool content in the 2000s
Starting point is 00:28:13 and I think part of it was because it was still like you know 20 years removed from the Hagler, Hearns, Tyson you know the glory days and then two generations
Starting point is 00:28:21 removed from Ali so you still had yeah there's a bunch of boxing DNA and pop culture that I'm not sure exists in the same way anymore, but also we didn't have YouTube back then. We didn't have social media and we didn't really know anything about these guys other than magazine profiles or when they fought or when they did
Starting point is 00:28:40 interviews or like in all these case, when we were growing up, like, um, you know, I'm older than you, but Ali going on Wide World of Sports and just getting 30 minutes of him with Cosell. And it's like, oh, wow, Ali. But you didn't get his wife.
Starting point is 00:28:54 You didn't get his kids. You didn't get him driving to the gym. You didn't get the kind of access that all of a sudden we were granted with these shows. Because you also, we didn't mention Legendary Nights, which was incredible. And that was probably- That's some of the best stuff that HBO has ever done. Yeah, first half of the 21st century. That was right before I got there, yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:29:09 2000 to 2005-ish maybe, but those docs, I mean, they revived that series later on and did some great work in that as well. Yeah. And it's also, look at how many great boxing movies there are. There's obviously some, When We Were Kings might be my favorite doc of all time. The Ali Frazier doc that Joe Levine did that
Starting point is 00:29:31 I watched when I was in college for HBO about Ali Frazier 1 might be the reason why I'm in this business. I watched that like three times in a row and then watched When We Were Kings and went in an Ali kick and I was like, oh my god, you can do this for a living? You can actually like sit in a room and watch old fights and put music to it and ask people about it,
Starting point is 00:29:49 put their sound bites in. Like it didn't even occur to me that that was a job until then. So I love it. I would love to do another boxing thing someday, but that also seemed like it was a billion years ago. Yeah, the legendary nights, it was a huge influence on just thinking about what 30 for 30 was going to be.
Starting point is 00:30:05 And especially they did that Taylor Chavez one. The amazing thing about it was they were only like 30 minutes. Yeah. And they would pack so much stuff into that 30 minutes. But I would encourage people, if you want to watch a great half hour or something, go watch the Meldrick Taylor Chavez one. Because that's a blueprint for a lot of different content that would come for the next, I don't know, almost 20 years. So you're at HBO. Hagler Leonard.
Starting point is 00:30:29 Yeah, Hagler Leonard was a great one too. So you're at HBO. Ezra's there. Yep. Who else? Some of the other people that you're working with are people that go on to do a bunch of great sports content and all kinds of content over the next decade and a half. Yeah. Especially there were guys at Real Sports, and Real Sports was kind of its own department. But a lot of the producers there were so talented. And Ezra moved over to documentaries
Starting point is 00:30:55 and did a few great docs that he won Emmys for at HBO. And then they got rid of that department. So all these people who were kind of raised in that farm system, they no longer had the farm system. They were just taking outside docs and kind of repackaging them. And HBO was getting basically almost all of the best people. Like anybody who wanted to do this and be in sports, your dream. It was almost like how SNL for comedy writers. Sunday, I want to get on SNL. HBO Sports was like that for a long, long time.
Starting point is 00:31:27 Also consider that if you're working in sports TV for any other network, you're working probably Tuesday through Sunday if you're lucky. You have Mondays off. But a Monday through Friday job in that industry was unheard of. HBO is the only place you could go for that. With money. With actually money to spend
Starting point is 00:31:44 and real camera crews and real cameras and travel. I did three years at NBC and I was making one 10 a day with no benefits and no guarantee that I was a daily hire for three years. And all of a sudden I go to like having benefits and having weekends off. It took me a year or a year or two literally to wake up on Saturday mornings and not be like, oh shit, I'm late for work. I have to be in the studio. Cause it was every single Saturday and Sunday when people are watching sports, you're working, when people are relaxing, you're working. So the schedule, the content, it was just a dream job to have. And the people you were around, like the Ezra's of the world and, um,
Starting point is 00:32:23 Brian Highland and Joe Levine and other great, great talented filmmakers. You were, you were, you were at lunch with these people and just trading ideas with them and just shooting the shit about games that night or their lives. It was really, you look back and realize how special it was. All right. We got to talk Fab Five. We'll take a quick break. This episode is brought to you by Movember. The mustache is back with a vengeance. Look at Travis Kelsey. Before he rocked that Super Bowl ring, he rocked that super soup strainer.
Starting point is 00:32:52 Grow a mustache for Movember. You'll do great things too. You won't win the Super Bowl, but your fundraising will support mental health, suicide prevention, and prostate and testicular cancer research. And if you don't want to grow a mustache, you can still walk or run 60 kilometers,
Starting point is 00:33:07 host an event, or set your own goal and mow your own way. Do great things this November. Sign up now. Just search Movember. All right, so you leave and you do Fab Five for us
Starting point is 00:33:21 for the ESPN Films Presents. And that was a really interesting one because it was heading toward this new model of how sports docs are done, which now is like the model for all celebrity docs where the celebrity is like, well, if I'm going to be in this and I'm going to be interviewed, I want to be involved. I want to be a producer. Like, get me actually in this. And Jalen, who I don't think gets enough credit for a bunch of stuff, but especially this is one of the things where he had the foresight to go, well, wait a second. I can wrangle all these people, but I also, you know, this is, I want to, I'm seeing the big picture here. This is a piece of what I want to do going forward.
Starting point is 00:34:01 I'm retired from sports. Like what, how can I be in media? What kind of things can I do? So he gets everybody except Chris Webber. And that's how I got to know you because we spent, I don't know how many months, you're making the film, but also hoping Chris Webber was going to do an interview and it just never happens. And you're launching Grantland at the time too. That was a blur of a few months. So the chronology of it was that in August of 2010, I'm in line at a Whole Foods in West Hollywood.
Starting point is 00:34:34 I had moved out to LA for a little bit. And I get a phone call from Aaron Cohen, who's one of my best friends and has like 49 Emmys. And he's just incredibly talented writer. He has been hired by Jalen to start working on Jalen's book, his biography that Aaron's going to ghostwrite. And they're also at the same time pitching a doc about the Fab Five. So I'm in line with no job at the time.
Starting point is 00:34:57 I was off and on doing some UFC stuff and just little commercials and things here and there, but no regular gig because I left HBO and moved out to LA. And he says, what do you think of Jalen Rose? And I remember not liking Jalen and thinking that he was just a loud mouth. And I liked Weber. Fab Five, I was glued to because I was in the sweet spot for that generation of 14 years old, who are these guys kind of thing. But I remember not loving Jalen, but he was like, so he's meeting with potential directors for this. They want to do a 30 for 30 about this.
Starting point is 00:35:29 And 30 for 30 was my dream. That was like, if you could ever get invited into that club, I had lunch a long time ago with Jamie Horowitz and Connor shell, like in 2008 or 2009 and pitched them on Bo Jackson and Doc and Daryl. And I think it was like, yeah, if you can get Spike Lee or some big name to do this. Yeah, that was like one of the original ideas was Doc and Daryl. I remember I gave interviews when we were doing the first season
Starting point is 00:35:56 and it was like, yeah, the first five we wanted to do, I don't think we did any of the five. It was like Doc and Daryl, like all the big ideas. And it was just, you realize how hard it is just to get anybody. Yeah, exactly. So I had wanted to do that for a while. So of course I jumped at the chance and I went over to, I think it was ICM at the time and Nick Kahn, who is now Nick Kahn, was then representing Jalen. So I went over to this office, met this guy named Nick Kahn. And next thing I knew I was in a conference room with just me and Jalen. So I went over to this office, met this guy named Nick Khan, and next thing I knew, I was in a conference room
Starting point is 00:36:26 with just me and Jalen sitting there. And all we did was talk about 90s hip hop and how white suburban kids like me were trying to dress like the Fab Five guys on the court and wearing black socks and things like that. But we didn't talk about the movie. What's weird is that was the exact conversation you had with Dave Jacoby the first time you met him too.
Starting point is 00:36:43 It was exactly parallel, all the same content. Yeah, it makes sense. So I was like, it was supposed to go a half hour. It went an hour. There was a guy waiting outside and I was at the peak of my imposter syndrome, which I still have now. But at that point I was like, what am I doing in there? I've never done anything longer than a half hour.
Starting point is 00:37:02 That was great to meet him. He's a much better guy than I thought he was. Maybe someday down the road, I'll bump into him. I'm on my way home and he calls me in the car and says, do you want to do this? So by the time I got back to my apartment, we were greenlit. We shot the interviews with those guys on November 3rd or November 10th of that year. And in the interim, between August and November, it was supposed to air December of 2011 to commemorate the anniversary of their game against Duke.
Starting point is 00:37:32 Freshman year. And then Jack Nicklaus fell through, or one of the 3430s fell through for March. Jack Nicklaus. That was another one of the dream 3430s that ended up not happening. 86 Masters was like, first level, we're doing this. Never happened.
Starting point is 00:37:48 So that fell through, thank God for me, because they said, can you do this? Instead of by December, can you do it by March? And if they said, can you do it by Thursday? I would have said yes. I wasn't going to say no at that point. So normally, I tell people it's normally like a year per hour for a doc from development to research to shooting. If you're doing it correctly. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:38:10 We started shooting on November 3rd or 10th, like I said, and we aired this thing on March 13th. We had a premiere in New York that we didn't show the final version of the movie. We were still editing it. So on March 9th, we had a premiere in Tribeca. And on March 13th, we showed a version that was like a cleaned up version of that one. So this was like... That time in my life is
Starting point is 00:38:31 an absolute blur. All I was doing was going back and forth to the edit room in a cab, eating Pop-Tarts and fried food. And we had three edit rooms going at once. But it was great training for what we had coming up. And then you also have the piece
Starting point is 00:38:47 trying to convince Chris to be in it. That was crazy. So two stories that I remember from that. One is that that day that we interviewed, Jalen got together with Jimmy King and Ray Jackson and hadn't been in the same room with them in a very, very long time. Jawan was still playing for the Heat.
Starting point is 00:39:04 Yeah. And Chris was doing playing for the Heat. Yeah. And Chris was doing his own thing. And Jalen kept on saying, we're going to get Chris. We're going to get Chris. But in the meantime, he was going to get Jimmy and Ray to come to L.A. for the first round of interviews in his apartment, his loft apartment near L.A. Live, which he got that apartment so he could be at your offices because he wanted to like, I give him so much credit because there's so many guys who are former
Starting point is 00:39:27 players as talent would just show up a minute before they're supposed to read the prompter and go home. And Jalen, like, as you can attest, got an office, did the research, really wanted to like,
Starting point is 00:39:36 saw this podcast thing before a lot of people saw it and really realized that hitching is. That's how I met him. He just kind of wandered in my office and we knew each other a little, but he's like, okay, it's time for me to do a podcast. I'm like, all right, let's talk about it. Didn't he corner you at like a Espy's party or something? That was the first time. And then it was like, yeah, yeah. Well, let's follow up on that. It was one of those. And then it was like the next week he's just wandering into my office. You'd been in LA long enough at that point to say, yeah, let's meet someday and never meet again.
Starting point is 00:40:03 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's say, yeah. We should keep talking about that. And then he was right there. So I had, he was going to pick them up at the airport himself. So I was back in his apartment and the Lions were playing and I had the Lions game on and I had, as he was gone, I spread out
Starting point is 00:40:19 all these old articles and I wanted to get them talking. So he came in with the guys and I met them and I was like, all right, let's sit down and watch the game. And like, Hey, let's go through this.
Starting point is 00:40:29 I just wanted to get a feel for it. Cause we're supposed to do three, two hour interviews in a row that night. And he says, Hey man, can you just like leave us alone for a little bit? I just want to catch up with them. And,
Starting point is 00:40:38 um, I'll give you, I'll give you a call when it's time, like when we're ready to go. And I was like, yeah, of course, of course.
Starting point is 00:40:44 Um, Ray, you'll be first. So I'll see you guys in a bit. We'll be upstairs. He had an office and then he had an apartment above the office. So we go up to the apartment and we're sitting there waiting.
Starting point is 00:40:55 And it was like an hour goes by and two hours go by and two and a half hours go by and two hours and 59 minutes go by. And I'm like, what is going on here? So I go back down to the floor where Jalen's apartment was and the doors open and there was just smoke all through the hallway of the apartment. And I was like, and you can hear that there is a full blown party going on
Starting point is 00:41:19 inside his apartment. I just left. I walk in the apartment and it looked like the dr dre video with like the they're all in the base like you remember that video where it's like they open the fridge it's just 40s in the fridge this apartment had transformed from this tiny little quiet place where i'd set up little clippings for them to like sip a beer and tell me about the old days to a full-blown party and i was like was like, I'm screaming at him because I can't be heard over the music. It was like,
Starting point is 00:41:47 we got a camera crew set up upstairs and Ray comes by and God bless him. But he was, none of those guys were in good condition to be interviewed.
Starting point is 00:41:56 So you can tell who was interviewed first. If you look at the, I don't want to, I don't want to throw anyone under the bus. But if you look at those interviews, again,
Starting point is 00:42:02 you can tell who, who was interviewed the night of the party and who was interviewed the morning after the party. So that was my first indoctrination to that. And they gave incredible interviews. And by the way, speaking of Jalen's commitment to this thing, he was like, what are the guys going to wear when they're interviewed? And I never considered that. I was like, whatever they want to wear, whatever they're comfortable in. He hired on his own dime, a designer who designed those outfits that they're wearing. He sent an outfit down to
Starting point is 00:42:32 Juwan. He wanted them all dressed in black with different kinds of coats and stuff on, but he wanted them all to look the same and unique to everybody else in the film. So anyways, Weber called us on the Thursday night before the Super Bowl of 2011. I think that was the Super Bowl when the lights went out. I think it was the year, but was it I think. Yeah, or maybe Packers-Steelers was one of those. I thought it was a Niners one, but anyways, he called us the Thursday night before that Super Bowl. And he had just gotten off the air with Turner.
Starting point is 00:43:12 And it was like 15 minutes after he got off the air. So it's like 1.15. And he's like, I'm ready to do this. And this was very, very, very late in the game. We're going to air in a month. So I had left slates for him all throughout the rough cut. Like Weber talks about time out here. Weber talks about being recruited here.
Starting point is 00:43:29 Weber talks about childhood here. So he said, all right, you'll come to my place on Monday. Come to work with me Tuesday. Don't tell them that you're working for ESPN. But we'll just hang out for a couple of days. I want to be a producer, not just in name. I really want to do this. We'll do a three-hour interview. We can do it at my house. I was to be a producer, not just in name. I really want to do this. We'll do a three hour interview. We can do it at my house. I was like, this is incredible. But I couldn't afford
Starting point is 00:43:49 to be out of work for one day because we're editing in three rooms nonstop, 100 miles an hour. So Friday goes by, Saturday goes by, Sunday goes by, and I don't hear from him or his assistant. And I'm like, I'm not booking a flight down there if there's no... He sounded great on Thursday night. And then i get an email from his assistant that says like chris wishes you the best of luck but he's not going to participate in this so i was like oh god but that opened up so much more budget money we were going to do the initial conceit of that was five guys sitting around a table at a steakhouse like like the fab five story from their own perspective which would have been a nightmare.
Starting point is 00:44:25 It wouldn't have been good. It would have been really hard to film. It would have been, I don't know, it would have been sloppy. Really hard to film. Yeah. Yeah. But this was, I didn't know how to do, I didn't go to school for this. I knew how to do a documentary just by watching documentaries.
Starting point is 00:44:38 I was way out over my skis. So that opened, that would have also cost like almost six figures to do that one night reserve a steakhouse fly all the guys in juwan was playing for the heat we had to do cameras everywhere nicks or the nets yeah so that opened up the budget to interview steve fisher and duke and fife and voskel and all the other guys that rounded out that story that made it so much more layered than just these five guys saying what they thought. So it was a blessing in disguise.
Starting point is 00:45:10 It was a good lesson. And it's happened so many times. I'm sure it's happened in your career too, that one door closes and nine others open. You think, oh, we can't do this without Chris Webber. Like, all right, you'll find a way. You will be able to do it without him. And people will still watch because it's a fab five. The thing I've learned over the years is it's amazing how many times things go wrong with this stuff.
Starting point is 00:45:31 Yeah. And we'll talk about the most famous example in your career a little later. But you just kind of never know what real life event is going to fuck the thing up. What person who said they were going to be in it all of a sudden doesn't want to be in it. Who wants, I mean, doing a mute,
Starting point is 00:45:47 doing music documentaries. And we've done, you know, I think we'll have done by the end of next year, maybe 13, 14 of them. I can't, it's a hundred times harder than sports.
Starting point is 00:45:57 Cause you've got, yeah, you've got managers and agents and you got labels and you got music rights for stuff. We went down to Miami to interview Juwan Howard. They were playing the Celtics and my brother lives down there. So my brother and I went to the game as Celtics fans.
Starting point is 00:46:11 And I went to get a beer. I was in the bathroom and they had the game on in the bathroom and you hear like, ooh, Juwan Howard takes a horrible hit. He broke his face. He broke his nose during the game. By the time I got back to my seat, my brother was like, Juwan Howard just left.
Starting point is 00:46:28 So we couldn't shoot him that day. He broke his face the night before we shot. So you never know. It's never, ever easy. My memory is hazy now because this was 13 years ago. And I don't remember if I sent an email to him specifically or whoever
Starting point is 00:46:43 his close person was, but we had, we had done enough 30 for thirties at that point that, you know, the whole season was in the, in the bank. So we saw the impact of them. Cause the thing we didn't realize with 30 for 30 was we knew when they aired, you know, we really cared about the first rating cause we didn't know any better. And we didn't realize that there would be rewatchable, right? And we didn't realize how ESPN was going to use them for their schedule to run the same one 10 times.
Starting point is 00:47:11 Or they'd sell them to Netflix. We definitely didn't know that was coming. Netflix, the people who give you DVDs in the mail, this is somehow going to... We didn't know any of that was coming, but we did know by 2000, by the time you're trying to finish this, we knew like, hey man, this is going to be a huge doc.
Starting point is 00:47:33 And this is going to be a thing with a long tail because we watched it change the lives of some of the people we did. So with Fab Five, this is going to be the document. This is it. And if you're not in it, that's it. You're just never going to be in it. This is a whole story about your team that you were the best player on and your voice isn't in it other than his interviews. You're always going to regret it. So I don't know if he regrets it, but I'm sure at least a piece of him does.
Starting point is 00:47:55 I do know, and I respect him a lot. That's the caveat. I still like Weber as a broadcaster and I still loved him as a player when he played. Not just for Michigan, but for the Kings and the Warriors and Bullets and everybody else. I loved his game. But what I didn't tell you, I forgot about that night when we were talking on the Thursday before the Super Bowl, he said like, I'll do it, but, and there were some conditions. And I had an executive from ESPN on the phone with me. And I'm thinking like, you're giving me the conditions?
Starting point is 00:48:22 Like, I don't have the authority to do this. So I'm just nodding along and he's talking to me saying, you got to fire your composer and hire my guy. And I was like, well, that's going to suck for my composer, but okay, whatever, fine. We'll find a way. He's like, I want a full page ad in ESPN, the magazine that promotes my book.
Starting point is 00:48:46 And they're like, Jason, is that okay? I was like, what? Sure. Okay, go ahead. And then he said, wherever we do the premiere, I want to be the one to host the party. And I was like, yeah, man, go for it. Fondue, fountain, chicken finger, whatever you want.
Starting point is 00:49:05 We can do whatever kind of party you want. want like is this what we're discussing right now is like these oh he said he also wanted to do a rap album inspired by the fab five and he wanted to use the logo for the movie as the cover art for the album again i was like i don't know sure okay yeah but see you stumbled into this whole jaylen chris thing that went back to when they were like six years old. And that was the part. And only they know, to this day, only they know what's going on there. And they go way back and they went through a lot of stuff together. And I think fundamentally, if I had to psychoanalyze it,
Starting point is 00:49:34 I don't think Chris liked that Jalen was the one that was doing this. Yeah, I think it was an alpha thing. And that was it. And it just became super petty. Chris was the quote unquote better player, but Jalen was always the leader of that group. And when they played together on the travel teams, Super Friends was their team.
Starting point is 00:49:51 Jalen was the guy who was respected because he was from the real part of Detroit. And Chris wanted to do Detroit Country Day. And that's what made him such an interesting character. And I really wanted to sit down and explore all that with him, but we never got the chance. Well, the funniest thing about the Fab Five, so it comes out and it crushes. It does exactly what we think it's going to do and then becomes one of the most rewatchable ones of that entire run, if not the most rewatchable. And what's interesting is you really see the impact, not just for Jalen, but you saw it on even the other guys.
Starting point is 00:50:21 It changed how people thought of that team because people thought, it was a little different in the early nineties. It was definitely a little more racist with stuff like, why are there socks like that? Why are they wearing the baggy shorts? And then 20 years later with some perspective, it's like, these guys were amazing. Why didn't we appreciate these guys? Why were we rooting for the other team in this? And 30 million people probably watched that game. I don't know how many people have watched the documentary, but I think it had a dramatic impact. I know it did on Jalen. And the thing about Jalen, you know, is he was already really famous. I always say whenever anyone asks me like, what's Jalen like? The first thing I would always say was, well, greatest,
Starting point is 00:51:00 funniest guy, really famous, like shocking how famous he is just walking down the street with him how many people know who he is and love him and come up to him and it's like
Starting point is 00:51:10 he's like the fucking Pied Piper but I think that doc was interesting to watch it I think it really meant a lot to those guys and we saw it happen with the Bad Boy Pistons one
Starting point is 00:51:19 that was another one when that one came out and it just really meant a lot to that team because it changed their perception of what people thought they remembered versus what it actually was. It's a big responsibility for a film. It was also my first taste of which I've gotten many other tastes and
Starting point is 00:51:37 I will continue to get tastes as long as I do this line of work in sports, especially of getting criticism of it's not a documentary. Jalen's condition was these guys, we all have to be listed as producers. So it's not like Ray Jackson was watching rough cuts and making like giving us thoughtful feedback on the composer, but he Jalen insisted that. And I thought, who cares? Like you could list yourself as the King of Spain. I don't care. We just want to make a good movie. So they were listed as producers. And then we immediately got pushback like, oh, it's not a real documentary. If they're producers of it, if they had any say over it. And that's, I mean, that's probably down the line in your questioning here, but that's, that's, what's become the discussion around questioning. It's a conversation
Starting point is 00:52:18 between two friends. How dare you? No, no, no, no. I mean, not your question. I mean, in your list of questions, we haven't gotten to all the stuff now, but every doc now is done at least in part by the superstar who out promoted it and yeah it was the start of a different era of things now i would say reggie was i don't think there were kid gloves at all with reggie like it was all the good and bad of no it was that era and that team but it was a little different i think where it went wrong was when we get to like the mid-2000s like mid-2010s because like i always think of the magic documentary that was one of the orlando magic that was one of the most disappointing ones for me because we had this great idea. It was one of the ones I was the most passionate about, about these two guys and they could have been Kobe and Shaq and instead Kobe and Shaq happened later because it blows up in Orlando and what happened?
Starting point is 00:53:18 Why, why did this happen? And the only way those guys would do interviews is they were producers, right? And then they had a little creative control. And then all of a sudden it's interviews with them at the start of the doc. And I was like, man, something's shifting now. I don't like where this is headed now. This feels less of a documentary and more of like a production. You know what I mean? I get it.
Starting point is 00:53:42 And that's been the pushback on so many of these things. I really felt the brunt of it with the KJ doc. You know what I mean? I get it. And, and, and that's been the pushback on so many of these things. It, it, it, I really felt the brunt of it with the KJ doc. Yeah. Let's talk about that. We'll take a break and then we'll talk about,
Starting point is 00:53:51 uh, the Kings. Y'all afraid of ghosts. How about ghost peppers? It's the moment you've been waiting for. The ghost pepper sandwich is back at Popeye's. A buttermilk battered chicken breast served on a brioche bun with barrel cured pickles. And here's the best part.
Starting point is 00:54:10 It's topped with a sauce made from ghost peppers and on show chilies. If that doesn't send a chill of anticipation down your spine, nothing will. Get your ghost pepper sandwich today at Popeye's before it ghosts you for another year. All right. So then you did, you did the Bernie and Ernie doc for us. That was like, I'm going to say year two at Grantland.
Starting point is 00:54:35 I can't even remember all this stuff, but then you're working on this Sacramento Kings doc that I'm going to say we spent a year on. It was my last year at ESPN. Yeah. We, we started shooting that in the summer and I think it probably took us like nine or 10 months end to end to do that. Cause we premiered a Tribeca the following April. It was pitched to us by,
Starting point is 00:54:58 um, by Vivek and by that guy, Adam Mendelsohn, who's like one of LeBron, LeBron's media strategists. Vivek being the owner of the Kings. Vivek, the owner of the Kings. And it was basically, it was how the Kings got saved in Sacramento, Doc. And initially I didn't want to do it because I was like, this sounds like a fucking infomercial. We're just going to be like, oh, Vivek. But as-
Starting point is 00:55:22 I was right with you. As we kind of started talking about it, it was like, man, there's something here because it's really about this city that just got fucked with this team for three decades. Then the 2002 playoffs,
Starting point is 00:55:38 Lakers-Kings happened. This is one of the most traumatic events you can have as a sports city. You have this series stolen from you by your hated rival that's just big and flashy from a big city. And you've kind of never really recovered from it. And then you're about to lose your team. And I think all of us were like, yeah, that's actually the story. It's less about our conquering hero, Vivek. It's like, what is this team? And that's the doc you made and nobody has seen it. It is the lost 30 for 30. I think they've made what?
Starting point is 00:56:08 Almost a hundred now. And that one has been seen by probably a total of a thousand people because the premiere to Tribeca played there for a little bit. Yeah. So what was Tribeca? That was probably like 500 people. Tribeca, we had like a big theater. David Stern sat in front of me with his wife.
Starting point is 00:56:23 We did a panel discussion afterwards um so backing up a little bit what happened was that they pitched that the same doc that you just mentioned to me and i was like ah you know how are we going to make a hero out of a billionaire this seems like a vanity project and then i talked to a local talk radio guy named carmichael dave and when i talked to was like, this dude, this here's our main character. Like, yeah, let's do a doc. Whenever someone who says I don't get sports,
Starting point is 00:56:51 I'm not a sports fan. This is the doc. I'll say, go watch this because this is what sports mean to a city and a community. And this is sports fandom as identity. And not just about what happens in the, in between the lines, but what happens to a city when they have nothing else to rally around besides
Starting point is 00:57:10 this one at the time, shitty team. Keep in mind. I remember saying like, this is basically the Hartford Whalers. They lose the Whalers. Exactly. And now they're just Hartford.
Starting point is 00:57:21 They're 20 minutes from Bristol. And that's all you are as a city, basically. And Connor Schell, being still one of the only executives I've ever looked forward to his notes, when he saw an early rough cut, said, like, we also have to be sure to add in here
Starting point is 00:57:33 that David Stern had just lost the Sonics. Yeah. And he knew that he was retiring and he couldn't lose Sonics and the Kings, you could argue, are two of the most fervent fan bases in the NBA. He couldn't have these be the last two memories
Starting point is 00:57:47 of him as commissioner. Well, I also think he got, he, you know, the Sonics thing was bad for him. So now you lose two teams out of the city in four years. It was a terrible look for him.
Starting point is 00:57:56 On his watch, it looked bad. So he's going to feed all of the test answers to the mayor of Sacramento who was born in Sacramento and is one of the greatest point guards, you know, top 30 point guards ever. Kevin Johnson, who's from there and has decided instead of like retiring with his millions on a beach and playing golf, he's going to go back and live in Sacramento, California and rebuild that place from the ground up. And runs for mayor, gets elected to two terms, and he's going to be the guy that David Stern is telling exactly what to say to the governors in these governor's meetings
Starting point is 00:58:33 in order to keep the Kings in Sacramento. He's the hero in the sports movie, basically. He is. And there's no way around that. And if you mention that in the 90s, he was accused of an improper relationship with a teenage girl, which was known and covered, and he was raked over the coals by the local media about this, but still elected to two terms. having these discussions at the outset. This guy has senatorial, congressional, presidential aspirations. The people on the other side of the aisle are going to come out fervently against him. If we don't mention this thing, which I don't want to get into that, because once you mention, oh, there may have been child abuse in this guy's past, it's like, wait, what? Forget the team.
Starting point is 00:59:22 What did he do? So it was a lesson that I learned. It was a lot of tough lessons I learned that I wouldn't do it any differently. But I also should have done enough digging of my own of all, Ezra, he was like, first of all, good job. And second, Kevin Johnson needs to hire you as his chief of staff. It appeared to some people to be propaganda for Kevin Johnson as the savior of Sacramento. When I wanted it to be an ode to fandom and how much we care
Starting point is 01:00:00 about sports or why we care about sports. The whole closing montage is dads and moms with their sons and daughters at Kings games. Despite the fact that they're the worst team in the league, the entire city came out to have a victory parade just because they stayed in the city.
Starting point is 01:00:15 We finished pretty close to the final cut and then the story about him revived. We finished the final cut. We premiered at Tribeca in April and it was due to premiere. That was it, we finished the final cut. We premiered at Tribeca in April and it was due to premiere. So that was it. That was the final cut.
Starting point is 01:00:30 We were done. So I was working on the 85 Bears doc that summer. And then in September, I'm out in LA to interview someone for the Bears doc and I get a phone call. Deadspin had been running these hit pieces about KJ and they were starting to then real sports did a piece they were starting to be like a lot of negative uh negative feedback and
Starting point is 01:00:51 this it was supposed to premiere in october and this was in september i get a call like hey i was gone from espn because i had left yeah i think i left like three weeks or maybe two weeks after tribeca it was pretty close yeah and they were like we can't air this thing as it is. They wanted me to agree to put out a statement that said, basically, my bad. I need to go back and fix this. They wanted me to do more interviews, interview KJ again. And ultimately, it was just like, well, I'm not saying that. And they were like, well, we can't air this. And they were like, all right, let's wait six months or whatever. They put out some sort of press release that said, we're going to reevaluate the story and we'll discuss it internally. And that's it. It's been collecting
Starting point is 01:01:32 dust ever since. And it's a shame because the people of Sacramento are the one... I was going to do a screening with these people because they cared so much about this doc and about that team. That's the one time. It's so Sacramento Kings fan that the one time they get to watch something that they can celebrate, it gets squashed by the guy who was previously their hero. So there's something Shakespearean about it, but it was, I learned a ton of lessons, but I'll say this. I just started Carmichael Dave two weeks ago in the city. I still have really good friends from that doc. It was a great lesson to me that I'm okay with it. I was okay with... We had a fun premiere. A thousand people came to see that. But the fact that it didn't go
Starting point is 01:02:10 on TV and I didn't get my director's statement and my face on ESPN at the beginning, I realized what I cared about is the process and the making of it and the fun of meeting the new people. I know this sounds saccharine, but honestly, it reminded me, all right, you have a dream job. And if the quote unquote glory of it airing on ESPN and being celebrated and all that, that's secondary. The main part is like, if a tree falls in the forest, if you make a doc and no one sees it, is it still a fun time? And it was an incredibly fun time, but I still have great memories and great friends from. So a lot of lessons. Still weird to make something and then it's just like in a closet. Yeah, it is. I have a couple of friends who wrote books and the book just never happened for
Starting point is 01:02:51 whatever reason. Or they finished in the book company and said, no, actually we don't want it. And then that's kind of it. Or a script. I wrote that movie for ESPN in 2004 about the Red Sox and Yankees doing Chase and A-Rod. Spent the whole summer on it, and then it got killed in October right as we were about to start production on it. Yeah, and that was it. It was just gone. It just disappeared.
Starting point is 01:03:14 It's like, all right, that was... But again, that's a lesson of like, okay, that didn't happen, but if that did happen, who knows what the reviews would have been. I wouldn't change a thing. Of all the disappointments, of all the ups and downs that we've talked about here. Curveballs thrown at you. I wouldn't change one thing.
Starting point is 01:03:32 All right, we'll take one more break and then we're gonna do Andre. Three, two, one, zero. The final seconds of the game separate true fans from the rest. The fans that are there for every victory, defeat, agony, and ecstasy. And when the buzzer sounds, you deserve a Coke Zero Sugar. The one with irresistible taste and zero sugar. Win or lose, Coke Zero Sugar is the most refreshing way to end the game. Coke Zero Sugar. Best Coke ever.
Starting point is 01:04:05 Learn more at Coca-Cola.ca. TD and your small business go together like... TD's small business account managers have in-depth business banking expertise, so they can give you the advice and resources you need to make your day-to-day easier. So if you're ready to meet your small business match, we're ready for you. Visit td.com slash small business match to book an appointment with one of our advisors. All right. So you did the 85 bears 30 for 30 after I was gone. I might not have watched that one because it's too painful for me because of the Super Bowl 20.
Starting point is 01:04:49 If I watched it, I might have just been drunk. It was painful for me too. Yeah, you're from Massachusetts. That was just brutal. And then we got together because we started working on Andre the Giant. But the caveat was you knew you were potentially doing the last dance in this Michael Jordan thing. And if it got going and all the money for it got figured out, you wouldn't be able to do Andre. Now I'm in the weird position of my friend, Mike Tolan is one of the last dance producers
Starting point is 01:05:15 and I'm rooting for his project to get delayed. So you could do my project while telling him, oh man, I hope that MJ thing works out. And I'm like, I really hope it doesn't work out. I hope Jason can do Andre. Well, I remember you kept on saying, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. And then I finally met with him and you were like, oh shit. I really never thought it was going to happen.
Starting point is 01:05:31 It might happen. Yeah, I never believed it. Because we had kicked the tires. That was, you know, 09. We were trying to find directors for that footage. Yeah, it was a bit earlier than that. And it was just like, yeah, it was 08, 09. And it was like, he'll never do it.
Starting point is 01:05:45 You don't have enough money. He doesn't need to do it. There's no check you can write. So Mike Tolan came to me in July of 16 to discuss that project. And then I met with the NBA and I met with Jordan's people. There was a full like vetting process. Yeah. Of the gauntlet that I had to go through. and I met with Jordan's people, there was a full like vetting process. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:06:07 Of the gauntlet that I had to go through. And finally, like the final boss you have to meet is Michael Jordan. So September 27th, 2017, two days before my birthday, you were in town that night. Cause like I came to meet you. We all went out to dinner. Yeah. And that's when I told you, I just met with Michael
Starting point is 01:06:24 and you're like, oh shit, this actually might happen. Yeah. And that's when I told you, I just met with Michael and you're like, oh shit, this actually might happen. Yeah. That was when I was like, oh my God. But we had gotten far enough down the road. I was well into shooting Andre at that point.
Starting point is 01:06:33 So the timing did work out. So concurrently, Mike's trying to get MJ and I'm trying to convince the WWE to let us do a Vince documentary for HBO and had this Zoom that you weren't before we had found you as a director. We do this Zoom
Starting point is 01:06:47 and trying to... I forget who was on the Zoom from the HBO side, but we were just trying to get Vince fired up about it. And they're all just sitting there on their Zoom and their conference table just not moving. And then about 20 minutes in, I'm getting excited talking about Andre.
Starting point is 01:07:04 And then Vince is like, I remember one time. And then just goes into Vince mode. And then we get you. And now we're in a race for you to try to finish Andre before you start this Michael Jordan thing. And you're going all over the place. But you end up spending time doing the interviews with Vince, which now has become one of the famous memes now of the last year. Isn't that funny? Like years later, there's another Vince crying meme
Starting point is 01:07:42 that is overtaking the original Vince crying meme. But I saw the Andre one one coming back that's when he says he was special and he like grabs his ear yeah um i remember this well this is going back to hbo but one of their first pieces of feedback was we have to take that out because we can hear your voice in it and we we don't let our directors have their voice in the documentary so it's like what are we doing guys so anyways um yeah we we were shooting concurrently i was i was researching reading like a stack of mj books up to my waist as i was doing the interviews for andre and the timing just worked out perfectly we ended up finishing and in December of 17. We aired it. We premiered it.
Starting point is 01:08:27 Is this the anniversary? We premiered it on March 29th in LA. And then it aired on April 10th of 2018. And I started officially working on MJ the day after Martin Luther King Day of 2018. So everything overlapped. I remember there was one time, I don't know, maybe it was like second or third cut, and you came over and we were just in my little guest house
Starting point is 01:08:50 going through it all day. And I was like, this is exactly why I love doing this shit. It was just me and you. And we were just going through every ounce of it, trying to just figure out how do we take this from one piece to another because some directors don't like to do that and then other people really like to do it that's the fun part man to me that was the most fun part of all this shit is yes absolutely sitting like having an idea for like
Starting point is 01:09:17 a song and a soundbite and a piece of footage and in your head thinking like i think that the alchemy is there if we put this together the right way and getting into an edit room. I've rushed back to edit rooms late at night just to see, now I have added at home, but just to see that come to life and be like, boom, that's it. And that's one of the tent poles of the entire project is going to be,
Starting point is 01:09:36 we just need to build to here. When we did the last dance and when Michael cried and said break, that moment was always going to be the end of one of the last episodes. Not the last episode, but that's the first thing we cut was that scene. Right.
Starting point is 01:09:50 Because it was like, this is going to go to credits on episode seven or eight or something. It's too good a bite. It's our best bite. So those are the, that's, and when you're with people who were just as fired up as you,
Starting point is 01:09:59 like we were that day in your guest house, there's nothing better than that. That's why I mentioned like the- It's funny what you remember about shit like this because I remember there were two spots in the Andre doc where we were like, the flow is off
Starting point is 01:10:13 right here. What is the exact number of seconds we should be spending in this spot? I remember one of it was midway through the doc and you had to do this thing about how Andre liked to unwind and he would go off and he had this little like, Oh yeah, whatever. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:10:30 And it was important because it showed like a human side. He had this couple made good pictures, but it also took us away from like the meat. It came to a screeching halt. Yeah. And it was just like, all right, we lost momentum. And we always, we were talking about like how a doc is like, you're on the highway and you can get off at an exit to like take a piss, but you can't get off at an exit to eat and just like- You can stop to eat, but you can't stay overnight.
Starting point is 01:10:54 Get on the highway, get back on. You gotta go. And it was like, how exactly long should this be? And then you were over and over again, I'm down to 52 seconds, down to 49 seconds. And then finally, it was the right where it didn't take people out of it. Because you don't want people to, as soon as they drift, that's it. Especially now. That's one of the biggest challenges of making a doc now is that everyone has a TikTok level of attention span. So if you're not grabbing people every 90 seconds, you're losing eyeballs. And you think of like, you ride the train here in New York and you see people watching documentaries and you're like, how are you paying attention to everything that's going on around
Starting point is 01:11:35 you? It's almost like a podcast. So it's one way to go to sleep at night. It's like, all right, well, people are going to be watching this with one eye anyway. But also it's frustrating because you're like, I went back recently. My wife had never seen Ezra's OJ doc. Yeah. And I went back recently and watched that. And that is maybe the most brilliant doc I've ever seen. But I was at dinner with Ezra the other night and I was like, I don't know if this would have been made. I think that the executives now would have been like, where's the propulsiveness?
Starting point is 01:12:07 Where's the energy? Where's the every 90 seconds we got to get? There has to be a blade of grass in the first six minutes. And the algorithm says this. Yeah, it would have been four parts, not five. Yes. At the speed that he wanted to tell it, he told that story and the pacing that he wanted to tell it.
Starting point is 01:12:22 And it was of his volition. It was really a director's meeting him at that point. And now it's, it almost feels like we work for a tech company sometimes. And then it's like, you can only be in archival for 90 seconds at a time. You can't have a soundbite that's longer than this. The music has to be like, there's not a mathematical formula sheet they give you, but you get, after a while, you know what their notes are going to be. And you, it's the worst thing to do. But as a filmmaker, you just kind of like, you gird yourself to be like, all right, we can't do that because they're not going to like it. I love it, but they're not going to like it. So let's save each other. Let's save everybody the
Starting point is 01:12:56 time and do it the way that they're going to want to do it. Lose the battle to win the war. And it's not the best way to make a film, but that's where we are today. I'm lucky enough to even have the opportunity to make a movie. So I'm not going to really piss and moan about it, but it's definitely not the way that it used to be, which was like kind of the wild West. Like you try it your way. Like the,
Starting point is 01:13:13 the, the, the symbolist brothers would do something different than Ezra would do something different than John Hawk would do something different than Spike Lee. And it was great because there was no formula to all those 30 for 30s. Right now. And now I think that a lot of stuff looks very, And it was great because there was no formula to all those 30 for 30s. Right. And now I think that a lot of stuff looks very, very similar across the board, especially in sports stocks.
Starting point is 01:13:32 Yeah, that's definitely the case in sports stocks. I think so. Intelligence can be a really good thing. And then it could also be a bad thing because you can even see it. Like, I mean, we can look at podcasts. We can tell what the retention rate is for every episode and yeah um you can tell what the demo is and how long how long uh people listen do they like 40 minute episodes or an hour 20 and blah blah blah but at some point you got to trust your instincts on this stuff too and i think you know as it's it's
Starting point is 01:14:03 interesting to watch and the intelligence of user behavior start to change the course of how sports is being consumed in general because we're watching it happen now in football and basketball. I personally don't think the NBA is going to run it back with ESPN and TNT, almost definitely TNT, because they're going to want to go to one of the streamers because they're going to want to want the intelligence on all their fan base and all the behavior. That's what the NFL got with their Sunday ticket year. And that's what they're getting from Thursday Night Football with Amazon. They're able to tell exactly who's watching. And the Peacock game.
Starting point is 01:14:41 Yeah, they're getting who's their audience, how long are they watching, where are they watching from, how old are are they they're getting all this shit that you can't get from a network and if we start doing that with documentaries it's like no no actually here's what you did wrong with the last dance and you should have done this and actually it should have been six episodes like at some point the creativity of this stuff has to matter too that's already being done it's it's definitely being done whereas like all right i want to tell this story in three parts um and it's going to be 120 minutes long well if you do it in four parts 30 minutes each are our viewers like 30 minute chunks better than 40 minute chunks yeah but that's going to fuck up the cliffhanger
Starting point is 01:15:22 that's going to fuck up the flow of the story That's going to fuck up the flow of the story. It's like, I have a book that's 300 pages long. It's got 10 chapters. Well, can you make it 15 chapters with the exact same content? It's like, well, where are we going to, where am I going to end it? It's, I get it. They hold the keys and they are the gatekeepers and we really can't make these docs without their agreement and working in concert with them. And nine times out of 10, there's blood on the tracks, but it ends up being fine. But I just, I long for, those days were really exciting in 2007
Starting point is 01:15:52 when it was me and my buddy sitting in my apartment, having pizza and beers and being like, well, what if we didn't have any reporters? What if we didn't have Max Kellerman and Burt Sugar? What if it was just the people in the camps? And what if we shot this handheld as if they were amateurs and didn't use jib shots and big tropes that reality shows used at the time? That was the magic of it, was sitting there with this room crackling with creative
Starting point is 01:16:17 energy and people excited to do something new. It's coming. Docs right now do not look like, especially sports docs, do not look like they did 15 years ago. And in 15 years, they will not look like they do now. Yeah, they're definitely better. By and large, a lot better. And we're in the golden era and I'm lucky that I was born in 1976.
Starting point is 01:16:35 Like I could not be luckier to have come along at this time in this, but they're not going to look like in five or 10 years what they look like right now. So I've spent a lot of time thinking recently about like, all right, what are they going to look? What's going to be, where are we going to zag?
Starting point is 01:16:48 Or so many of these docs now, myself included, I'm guilty. I'm guilty of it as well. Well, and what's left, what stories are left to tell, I think is another issue. That's another, that's another concern. Like to me, like Andre was one of my favorite experiences because I just felt like we had a good story. We told it, we had a great time working together. We got it to the best possible. Yeah. We got it to the best possible place to get to. There weren't a lot of people involved. That was like, that's, that's why I think, you know, you had the opposite experience with the last dance, which we will get to right after this break.
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Starting point is 01:18:11 There's so much of you and your heritage to discover. Don't wait. Ancestry DNA kits are on sale now for a limited time. Visit Ancestry.ca for details. Terms apply. All right, so Last Dance, which became by far the most successful thing you were involved with and one of the most successful sports documentaries of all last couple episodes in isolation from your crew and people are in different parts and you're just trying to get shit up. And it's not, none of it is the typical documentary experience combined with, it's not the typical human experience combined with, are we all going to die? And it's like, April 19th, I got to get this last dance thing.
Starting point is 01:19:06 It seemed like a disaster for the doc and it ended up being weirdly the best thing that ever could have happened in the doc because we had nothing to do on April 19th. Yeah, which you never could have. That's another example of like, just go with the flow. You cannot predict what's going to happen. Keep your head down and try and do good work
Starting point is 01:19:23 and hopefully the chips fall in the right place. But I look back at that experience, the way that you look back at like college where you lived in a shitty place and it had like mice and there were like so many days where in the moment, you would have been like,
Starting point is 01:19:39 God, I can't wait to get out of here. And you look back at it and you're like, man, that was such a blast. And I love those people. And I miss that aspect of here. And you look back at it and you're like, man, that was such a blast. And I love those people. And I miss that aspect of it. So rose colored glass is easy to look back, especially because the doc was successful and people's careers thrive from that. And it worked out well for so many people involved at the time, very stressful. But I get that question sometimes of like, how much harder was it because it was supposed to air on off nights
Starting point is 01:20:08 of the finals in June of 2018 so game one was on a Thursday episodes one and two would air on Friday and so on throughout the finals they were going to checkerboard them with the finals it always would have done a big number because it's Michael Jordan 2020 not 2000
Starting point is 01:20:24 I'm sorry. 2020. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although first they said it was coming in 2018 and 2019 and 2020 finally. It's coming for four years. Yes. So, or 24, depending on how you look at it. So, the fact that we had a deadline that was like, all right, it has to air because the deadline
Starting point is 01:20:46 had been pushed so many times. And so many people who were very powerful involved were like, all right, you know what? You don't want to do it our way? We're not doing it. And it got pushed and pushed and pushed. Finally, now they publicized, April 19th, this is coming. That was a relief for us because you can't give me notes on April 20th on episodes one and two anymore. We're done. They aired. You can't give me notes. Anything beyond like April 17th, you can't give me notes because we can't do them in time. So now we had like, we knew, I use the example, like if I told you sprint as fast as you can and I didn't tell you when to stop, that really fucks with your mind because you're like, I'm going as hard as you can. And I wouldn't, and I didn't tell you when to stop. That really
Starting point is 01:21:26 fucks with your mind because you're like, I'm going as hard as I can. But if I say sprint down to that telephone pole as fast as you can, you can do that all day because you have an end goal in mind when you don't have the end in mind. And we had four entities who are used to getting their way, billion dollar entities in the Jordan brand and the NBA and Netflix. Right. And the Jordan brand is the hardest one to deal with because they're trying to protect their guy. Right.
Starting point is 01:21:54 Way less of that than I anticipated. I thought that was going to be by far the hardest part of the doc. And they, the only time we ever got pushback that I had to take something out was there was a clip of Scotty in the locker room, in the training room with Michael. And I think Ron Harper saying, and this was part of that,
Starting point is 01:22:15 like 400 hours of behind the scenes footage in the 98 season, he was saying something to the effect that when they win the championship, he's going to take a cattle prod and stick it up Jerry Krause's ass and give him a heart attack. And everyone laughed. And they were like, whoa, you got to take that out. And it was to the point where I followed poor Dion Kakouros, who was a great guy and a big executive at the NBA. I followed him to his train station at Grand Central to his train, like the actual, like when he's getting on the train and like pulled him off the train and said, dude, you got to let me put it on. Cause I was trying to show people all of the hazing that this poor guy endured. And the way that audiences took it when it came out was,
Starting point is 01:22:55 oh, he's shitting on Jerry Krause and making Michael a hero. That was never my intent. My intent was to show what this guy went through to keep that team together. But that was the only time. And it was Michael's people who led the charge saying, you can't do that. He's got a wife who's alive and it's enough. We get it. They hazed him. They bullied him. But that was the only thing. They went from the beginning of the process saying, you don't need to interview Michael. He's been interviewed 8,000 times. Any soundbite you need, you can find. No baseball, no gambling, no dad. They wanted just the 98 season when we started.
Starting point is 01:23:34 This was in 2016 when we were first meeting with them. All the way to 2020, and they really weren't giving pushback on that level. What we were getting was a lot of pushback from everybody on things like, Michael doesn't listen to hip-hop. There can't be pushback on that level. What we were getting was a lot of pushback from everybody on things like, Michael doesn't listen to hip hop. There can't be hip hop in this. Or use this angle instead of that angle.
Starting point is 01:23:53 It was little things like that. Things that I didn't anticipate them trying to interfere with, they interfered with. And your musical choices. A lot of times, yeah. Hey, why are you using that song what about this song instead which is like if you're a director it's a direct violation once you once you're suggesting alternate musical choices but that thing is you're working with people that had never made one before so they
Starting point is 01:24:18 don't i remember i said to someone on michael's team i was like listen all due respect it would be like if i came to you and told you how to design and sell a shoe. Yeah. And they were like, totally get it. But this is the way it is. And you're going to have to deal with it. I was like, okay. Well, so for people listening who don't really understand how hard it is to make a documentary, because you're basically, you're going into the all-time rabbit hole for a year, in this case, a couple of years.
Starting point is 01:24:44 You're interviewing all these different people. You're cataloging the interviews, trying to remember what soundbites might pop. You're also cataloging all of the archive video at the same time. You're trying to build some sort of outline. Then you're trying to figure out which interviews, which pieces can I use to help tell my story of this archive. So you have that whole process, but now you're getting notes too. Once you start having like the super duper rough cuts or whatever, and you're sending stuff out, but you're sending out, normally the best case scenario is you're sending it to one place and they're giving you notes back. Two is doable. You're getting notes back from Netflix, ESPN, your production team, and then MJ's team. You're getting four different sets of notes that just come to you.
Starting point is 01:25:30 And the NBA. Oh, and the NBA. There's five. The NBA is in the front of the line. All sending you bullet point notes of like, do this. We don't like this. Have you considered this? And now you have to harness all these different notes from all these different places,
Starting point is 01:25:44 which is the kind of thing that can drive somebody crazy. And it did. Yeah. Ask my then girlfriend, now wife. Like I was, I was tearing my hair out
Starting point is 01:25:53 because there was so many things going on internally. It was, it would be hard enough to do this without the notes. We had five edit rooms going at all times, cranking on
Starting point is 01:26:01 five different parts of the doc. So you go in on Tuesday morning and sit with the editor for the beginning of episode two, and then you go into the next room and we'll work on the middle of episode six. And then you go into the next room and you work on the end of episode one. Put it this way. It took us a year and a half to finish episode one. And it took us 12 days to do episode 10. That's how compressed that timeline was at the end because everyone had the time. It was like, okay, let's get, you're never going to get, especially from those four entities, you're never going to get no notes. It's never going to be
Starting point is 01:26:36 done. So if, if it was going to air in a year, be like, yeah, given by the end, by March, we were getting 30 pages of notes single spaced total from these four entities and on page nine it would say too much rodman and on page 26 it would say more rodman right so we actually uh john doll god bless him came in from espn and he was like the notes whisperer like he had to be the guy who vetted everything and made a document that at least made sense because you literally can't do more and less of the same thing. The other thing about you, one reason we like each other is we both run a little hot every once in a while. I was watching this from afar because I was involved and you were telling me
Starting point is 01:27:21 some of this stuff and I was like, oh my God, I'm just going to be reading the New York, New York post headline one day. I was like, sports documentary director strangles. So this is going to go bad. I'm not proud of, of some of those meetings, but I was at my wits end, man. Like we, and top of that, everyone, not just me, everyone's dealing with, especially in New York, you hear sirens all day long with people dying in them outside. But if you look back, if you go to those like Jalen and Jacoby recaps that we did, you can tell how bad that week was by the condition of my voice, which I lost screaming on the phone a couple of times. Everybody was just at their wits end with that thing. What do you remember all these years later about just being in a room with MJ,
Starting point is 01:28:12 trying to interview him a couple of times? Is that something you could have done 10 years earlier in your career or did you need the reservoir of experience to even handle somebody like that who's so famous and who's so smart about how to control a room. Yeah. I don't think I could have sat there in the chair. It wouldn't have been nearly as effective an interview. I had experience with more people of high stature at that point and more experience with nerves and butterflies, but still there's no one who's going to eclipse him. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:28:46 Obama, Clinton magic, no matter who Larry bird being for Boston, Jordan's a different beast when he walks in the room. It's just like he radiates fame. I try to write about this in my basketball book. Like there's just something different about it. Plus he's tall and it's just,
Starting point is 01:28:59 he's tall and he has enormous like when he's, when he's talking to you and his finger comes out, his finger looks like it's 18 inches long. And it's not just fame. There's fame and then there's significance. This guy is like talking to Santa Claus. It's like talking to the Statue of Liberty. Like this is something, he's a staple in my childhood,
Starting point is 01:29:19 an indelible staple on what I wore, what was on my wall, what we watched on TV, what we acted like. And it doesn't even seem like he's a real person. He's like a folk hero. So when you meet him, it's like, wait a second, this guy actually like, he actually, his nose itches sometimes. Like he actually has to clear his throat sometimes because you always see everything too. It's like edited.
Starting point is 01:29:39 Everything I'd ever seen was like edited and put together. So to see him just operating in the world as a normal guy and laughing at jokes and stuff, his team was smart enough to put me in front of them a few times before we actually sat down to interview. So I got to spend like an hour here or there with him. So at least he knew. So he's a little camaraderie with them. Would have said yes to anybody, I'm sure. But they vetted me. And then I could demonstrate to him a little bit at a time that I wasn't going to be the guy posing for pictures. I wasn't going to fanboy out. And I had some modicum of knowledge of what I was talking about. I remember he quizzed me the first time we met. We were talking about his 63-point game against the Celtics because I was there. That's the only time I'd ever been in
Starting point is 01:30:22 the same room with him in my entire life before that meeting in 2017 was at that game with my dad. And he was like, when was that again? And I was like, April 20th, 1986. It was game two, blah, blah, blah. So little things like that, I could prove to him, like, I knew what I was talking about. I had read the books. I had done the research. When I met with Phil Jackson, we went to his house in Montana and he literally slammed the door in my face. Tolan and I went up to the door, rang the bell and he said, can I help you? He thought we were like fans who had found his address. And we were told through other people that he knows you're coming. He did not know we were coming. He literally slammed the door in our face. And then he called his daughter who knew some people at the NBA and they vouched for us. So he led us into his house and we set up in the backyard. And he said, who's in charge? And I said, I am.
Starting point is 01:31:10 And he said, what kind of research have you done? And I told him that for two years, I had read over 10,000 pages. And like, I am the one telling this story for better or worse. Same thing with Isaiah. He pulled me aside and said, what kind of research have you done for this story? Of course, everyone, they know they kind of have to do it. MJ sent a letter to 105 people saying like, Jason's team is going to call you.
Starting point is 01:31:34 I vouch for this doc. I'm participating. I hope you'll participate too. So people, everyone except Carl Malone and Brian Russell said yes to us. So, but they wanted to know that they were in good hands. I'm sure, obviously, people in the interim have mixed feelings about their participation
Starting point is 01:31:53 and what the doc said and what it didn't say and all that. But it was a process. Yeah, that was an interesting outcome of that. I mean, that's when a documentary gets big enough, and especially if you're framing it a certain way over 10 episodes, right? The person it's about is going to be the hero. And then everybody that goes against the hero, they're not the villains necessarily, but it's the sports movie and they're on the other team of the sports movie. And I really like Isaiah. When we had our bad boys experience with him,
Starting point is 01:32:27 Jalen and I got to watch him watch the bad boys doc in real time because he hadn't seen it. He was so emotional watching it because I just feel like he's really torn up that that team and Isaiah himself just didn't get the credit they probably deserve. So when I was watching it, it was the best and the worst of them because sometimes he can't help himself either. So he had a couple of quotes. Yeah, those guys are wired that way. Yeah, where you're like, I have to use that. He said it. But then you think the shocking
Starting point is 01:32:56 thing to me was Pippen though, how mad Pippen was about it. And it really seems like they've had a breach ever since. Pippen and Jordan, this feels really bad. Like I don't feel like Pippen's like 100% recovered from the doc, and I don't really fully understand it. I can't speak to their relationship. I can't obviously speak to the making of the doc and Scotty's role as a main character in that doc. Put it this way.
Starting point is 01:33:22 I cared so much about showing the full context of the decisions he made in taking that shitty contract and why he was doing the things he was doing that we went to hamburg arkansas to show that he came from this place of abject poverty where 11 people lived under one roof and a shack with two of them in wheelchairs. This was a guy who was taught from the time he was a little kid that it can all go out the window if you step on the wrong step and you fall down and you have a terrible accident or his dad has a stroke in front of him at his kitchen table. His dad's in a wheelchair most of his- That's why he took whatever it was, million over eight years or over seven years or whatever
Starting point is 01:34:05 whatever that contract was which they told him not to take and blah blah blah but we dedicated an entire episode to him which was the second episode michael gets the first scotty gets the second dennis gets the third and phil gets the fourth that was always the plan and i knew that we had to show the migraine game because that's when they could not overcome the Pistons in game seven of 1990. Scotty gets a migraine and they lose. You have to show that. And you have to show-
Starting point is 01:34:32 During the social media era, that goes a lot worse for him, I think. The migraine- Way worse. Yeah, it was bad at the moment. Believe me, we could have leaned into a lot of these things. And I'm not out there to ruin anybody's life. And there were more inflammatory soundbites
Starting point is 01:34:44 we could have used about people's feelings on his team about that. But I felt for the guy. And I thought like, all right, he's had enough. Like he says he's seeing double. There's other, Michael said he says he had a migraine. If he has a migraine, what can I say? I mean, Michael said enough right there.
Starting point is 01:34:59 Then you have to show what's going on with the Bulls while Michael is off playing baseball. Because this is a doc about the Bulls dynasty Michael is off playing baseball. This is a doc about the Bulls dynasty. As much as people wanted to call it the Michael Jordan doc, it's about the dynasty. Of course, it stars him. He's the Alpha and the Omega. In those 18 months when he eventually decides to come back, part of it is because what's going on with the Bulls.
Starting point is 01:35:18 Yes. He had a great season when he was gone. It was awesome. Also, what fans outside of Chicago especially, like me, remember is that he wouldn't go in when that play He had a great season when he was gone. And he, but he also, what fans outside of Chicago, especially like me, remember is that he wouldn't go in when that play was called for Tony and Tony hits the shot. And that was one of the things that Scott is going to be remembered by.
Starting point is 01:35:34 We had to include that. But in my mind, I'm thinking in episode 10, he's going to get his redemption because game six of the 98 finals might be the grittiest, toughest non NFL performance I've ever seen any athlete give. We all know what it feels like when you pull your back out. His back's almost broken.
Starting point is 01:35:50 I wrote, when I did the pyramid piece about him for my basketball book, I spent a bunch of time on him not going back in that 94 game because I actually thought it was defensible. I get it. Like, he took so much shit for that, but it was like, they're building him up that whole year as, this is your team. You've got to carry us. We don't have Michael.
Starting point is 01:36:12 It's you, it's you, it's you, it's you. And when you put somebody in that state of mind, like, they expect to take that last shot.
Starting point is 01:36:18 We're watching with the Celtics right now, Jason Tatum. I don't think he's necessarily the best option for them in a lot of these games when it's tied with 19 seconds left, but it's his team. So they kind of have to give him the ball, whether that's the right idea or not, who knows. But with Pittman, I think he's like, wait a second, I'm not going to fucking get the last shot. You just told me I was the guy for
Starting point is 01:36:39 eight months. But they ran that play earlier in the season. And it worked. In the exact same situation and it worked. And by the way, what goes unsaid is how clutch is Tony Kukoc to hit that shot? Right. It was a really tough shot. But yeah, it's too bad that he got stuck with that. I thought he was treated fairly in the totality of the doc. I thought you did a really good job covering all of him. I have my theory, which is that he hasn't watched the whole thing and was told by so many
Starting point is 01:37:06 people, they did you wrong. They just like, all right, I'm not going to watch it. That's my theory. I'll, I'll never get to talk to him again about it.
Starting point is 01:37:15 And, and I, I regret the way that anyone would feel bad coming out of it. But if everyone feels great about a doc at the end of it, then you probably didn't do your job because we're not there to make friends with these guys. Yeah. Did you,
Starting point is 01:37:26 you created the iPad thing, right? That was you. Did anyone do that before you? I mean, the Maisels did it during Gimme Shelter when they showed Nick Jagger. Oh, yeah, you're right.
Starting point is 01:37:37 You're right. I just don't remember like, here's an iPad where you watch this and narrate. And if that's happened before Last Dance, I don't remember it. I think it's been used in other mediums.
Starting point is 01:37:48 We did a dumbed down version of it in Bernie and Ernie where I was showing Ernie Grunfeld, Bernard King, talking about being beaten by the cops while he was at Tennessee. Now, we didn't shoot it the right way and I was learning as I went.
Starting point is 01:37:59 The way you shot it, I felt like was unique because just him getting it, like the look on his face. And he knew it was coming. It was like, we couldn't have foreseen that. He was like performative with it too, in a way that made it more fun. I just don't remember seeing that before.
Starting point is 01:38:12 My whole thing was to, my philosophy going in with him was don't ask him questions in order, chronologically, keep him on his toes. And I had a, when I would look at him in the chair, I would, I would make a mental note of like, his shoulders are in line with that table behind him. Once they go down below that table and he's sagging and getting sick of talking to me, pull out the iPad. Right. As a little gift, as a little treat, as a little toy. He likes nothing better than, than games. It's, it's, it's like my parents, my mom used to tell me that, that when they brought us to church or somewhere, we were little
Starting point is 01:38:49 kids, she'd pull out like a bag of Cheerios. And then five minutes later, a matchbox car. And then five minutes later, something else to play with. That was the reason why. And also I'm one of those meetings that where I met with him, when I told you they set up those meetings, somehow I asked him, um, have you ever been thrown out of a game? And he was trying to remember. And somehow his fight with Reggie Miller came up.
Starting point is 01:39:12 So I pulled my phone out and I Googled Michael Jordan fights. And this like seven minute montage that some genius did on YouTube that would make him want to run through a wall came up and I showed it to him and he took the phone from me and just locked in. And he's mumbling to himself like, yeah, the night before I saw him in a bar the night before. And he told me that he was just, he was giving the backstory to all these fights and all these moments. And I was like, oh my God, like this is, this is what I need to, anytime I I'm on these shoots and the first story I want to tell my friends or my brothers or you, that should be in the doc. That's the lesson. I was like, all right, we have to find
Starting point is 01:39:49 a way to recreate this and also to get these people in the room because it's not going to fire him up if I tell him Isaiah said this to me. But if I show him Isaiah saying it, his competitive fire is immediately stoked. The second interview we did with him when we sat down, one of the first questions was, are you watching? It was during the playoffs. It was May of 2019. And I said, he said, yes. And I said, what do you miss the most? And I barely got the question out of my mouth.
Starting point is 01:40:20 And he said, proving people wrong. That's what I miss the most. Proving people wrong. Who needs to prove anything less than Michael Jordan does? But as we know from the doc, he found a way to conjure these antagonizations from people
Starting point is 01:40:38 that didn't even exist. He had to just make them up. I think Brady did a lot of the same thing. Yeah, it was so cool to watch. All those guys do. It was so cool to watch what you did with it because I still have the DVD the NBA gave us. I'm going to say like 07, 08 of this 1998 version.
Starting point is 01:40:55 The one by John Cusack. Yeah, and it was two hours, but the footage was the meal ticket. And it was like, oh my God, you have this? It was a little like the Beatles doc when they had that last album. It was like, wait, this existed? It was one of those. And to watch it all crafted the right way.
Starting point is 01:41:14 Did you interview Kobe for it? I can't remember. I did. We interviewed him in July of 2019. We interviewed him the day of the ESPYs in 2019 because we interviewed him at his office. As soon as we finished, he was going to his helicopter to take a helicopter to the Staples Center for the...
Starting point is 01:41:31 Obviously, it wasn't the day of the accident, but for the ESPYs that night. I got to watch it again. I feel like that whole... It was in that COVID blur. I've seen pieces of it because sometimes it's on the different channels, but I got to watch it start to finish. LeBron wasn't in it though.
Starting point is 01:41:47 He was not. No. Episode, episode five was Kobe. Cause that was the all-star break. We had that footage of him at the all-star game and Michael saying in the, the East locker room, that little Laker boy is going to,
Starting point is 01:42:00 I forget what he said. It seems like he had kind of blessed Kobe, but it's interesting to me that LeBron's not in it and not really, wasn't really mentioned in the doc, right? Once you open that door, then you have to have that discussion. And I was never interested in having that discussion.
Starting point is 01:42:17 If people in a, in a, you know, if they're at a bar and having this discussion about the goat, if they want to cite things that they saw in the last dance, great. But I never wanted to sit there. Cause we're going to ask LeBron. And you know what he's going to say?
Starting point is 01:42:30 He's going to say, I admired the guy. I wore 23 because of him. I grew up watching him. We'll show a picture of him wearing Jordans. There's going to be no surprises there. It doesn't help your 98 story. No, we're trying to keep it. Our present tense was the 90s.
Starting point is 01:42:44 And LeBron was not a part of that story. That makes sense. Yeah, because I don't think, I think since Last Dance came out, the GOAT conversation then heats up to another level. And then I do think it affected LeBron. I think it's affected where he sees his place in it and the competition of it.
Starting point is 01:43:03 And in a weird way, it was the best possible thing that could happen for his career. It's like this new carrot that popped up. Yeah. Oh, you think that guy's the goat? Cause he wins the title right after the last dance. Cause it was generational too,
Starting point is 01:43:17 is that kids, my nephew's age were team LeBron and guys, our age were team MJ. And now all these kids are watching The Last Dance and like, oh, wait a second. This guy actually was really, really good. Rasell and I were talking about on Sunday nights because we didn't have sports to talk about. We were amazed that people under 30 didn't know any of this. They were like, oh, that Dennis Rodman. What a crazy guy. I'm like, yeah, it's Dennis Rodman. You didn't know this? But what's been the response since? Because you did a lot of media when it came out, but since it came out, and then it became this thing that people point to when they're trying to, like some music, I want to do my last dance of this and that, and it's become a little bit of the lingo now. But what's it been like to watch that over the last four years as it's discussed that way?
Starting point is 01:44:08 It's great that that's become kind of parlance for like, oh, the Pats are going to do their last dance and wait till the Warriors do their last dance and wait till LeBron does his last dance. It's, as we see, like you said, these things are cyclical. And 15 years ago, I got a call from Michael Buble saying, can you do my version of 24-7? And it's like, what, are you going to box Harry Connick? How are we doing a 24-7 about Michael Buble?
Starting point is 01:44:35 What he meant was, can you go behind the scenes with me with great editors and great cinematographers and make a doc about me? So then it was like our 30 to 30. Then it was our last dance. And now it's our drive to survive, a drive to survive. And now it's like our quarterback. These things are cyclical. And every couple of years,
Starting point is 01:44:55 something comes out and through some magic, it hits and becomes part of the vernacular. Are you going to direct my last dance, my last year of podcasting? Are you rolling on it? We're already rolling. This is it. 2024, I'm done. Let me know who you want me to hire
Starting point is 01:45:13 to log 400 hours of you sitting in the corner of that room podcasting. Just me with different camera angles doing a podcast. Wait, so you did the Boston, you finally did your Bostonoston charles stewart project which yeah that's that's one of the things i'm gonna say yeah is that the what's happened is that it got me meetings that i've always wanted to have to discuss stories that aren't sports related i still want to if i have the opportunity always do sports docs but charles stewart murder
Starting point is 01:45:42 in boston on hbo is a good example of a story i always wanted to tell confided on the max app now find it on max yeah um so that was like right after the last dance came out i got a bunch of general meetings and one of them was like with priscilla presley and we're doing an elvis documentary now there's things that opportunities that came from that that i i could never never have foreseen. And so many, the gift and the curse of projects like this is when you work with great people. I can't find any of the editors that worked on The Last Dance because they're all, they are the most wanted people in our corner of the business.
Starting point is 01:46:19 Abai is doing your event stock. I would love to have Abai on, I'd pay him out of my own pocket to have him on this stuff. I showed you like 15 minutes of it six months ago. And you're like, who edited this? Was this Abai? Like you instinctively do. You said this guy Abai.
Starting point is 01:46:33 And that was my first. It was really good. The chunk that you showed me, it was, it was the Montreal screw job. Yeah. And I was like, who cut this in the middle of like watching it?
Starting point is 01:46:42 I was like, who cut this? And you're like, is this guy Abai? And I was like, Oh, this? And you're like, is this guy Abai? And I was like, oh, that's my dude. So that's been great is to see people thrive and get opportunities
Starting point is 01:46:52 who worked their asses off on this thing for three, on this thing, The Last Dance for three years, now be in positions where they can flex their muscle and be that next generation of storytellers.
Starting point is 01:47:02 Charles Stewart was great. It dredged up. I was going to school in Worcester at that point when all that was going down, and it dredged up a lot of ugly Boston stuff that was an unfortunate part of that story. But also on the higher end of a just, wait, what happened?
Starting point is 01:47:22 True crime story. Because I feel like they force a lot of these now where it's like, it what happened true crime story you know like because i feel like they force a lot of these now or it's like it's a true crime and it's and then it's like but that one i think is a really compelling one because it had enough because it was kind of a social justice doc disguised as a true crime doc so the true crime it, the twist of that story was compelling enough that it could be your normal true crime top 10 on Netflix, whatever murder doc is on right now. But I'm not really interested in doing tragedy porn or murder porn, which is watchable, but I'm just not interested in that. But this was an opportunity to examine the modern history of racism in Boston through
Starting point is 01:48:07 the lens of that murder case. And I've always been ambivalent about telling people that I'm from Boston because of the reputation that we have being from there. And I was interested in really kind of holding a mirror up to us and saying, all right, what is the history of this racism? Is it warranted, the reputation? Yes, it is. And what have we done since to ameliorate it?
Starting point is 01:48:26 So that was a really, really cool project. I mean, I stayed in my parents' basement like 18 times over the last two years to go back and do that. So it was really like drove my mom's car to the interviews and stuff. It was really like a labor of love. So you don't want to pitch a tragedy porn series to Netflix? I think that's the title. They probably would buy it in the room. Murder porn. So we're calling it tragedy porn. No, tragedy porn. You guys watch TP this week?
Starting point is 01:48:55 Really good episode. Yeah. A lot of blood, a lot of crying. F3, more tragedy. All right. This was fun. We went too long, but I had a great time I hope we get to work together again
Starting point is 01:49:08 at some point in our lives we will before you retire off to a balcony in Malibu somewhere before I retire in 8 months Jason Hare good to see you you too man thanks for having me alright that's it for the pod thanks to Jason Hare
Starting point is 01:49:24 thanks to Steve Cerruti and Kyle Creighton as well. Enjoy the weekend. I will see you on few years with him. On the wayside, I'm a person I never was. I don't have a few years with him. Must be 21 plus and president in select states. Fando is offering online sports wagering in Kansas under an agreement with Kansas Star Casino LLC. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.
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