Q & A
What inspired you to shoot a documentary about Chicago baseball fan culture?
The 2003 National league playoffs, when the Cubs where two outs away from going to the World Series and a fan interfered with a play that ended up costing the Cubs their chance to win it. Historically the Cubs haven’t been to a World Series in about a century and the outrage this fan created was of epic proportions. His life was threatened because of the Cubs' lust for victory, to the extent that he was exiled from the state until things calmed down. So it was this incident that inspired me. Cubs fan-on-fan violence and the spectacle of Wrigley Field were also factors.
How do you classify what you've created?
I would classify this film as a cinema verite, ethnographic comedy. It documents a spectacular moment in Chicago sports-fan history because both teams where first in their division during the Crosstown series and they swept each other at their home stadiums. I suppose you could classify any vertie style film as a series of video vignettes.
You're a neutral spectator with no team allegiances. What interested you about what you captured?
The way Chicagoans take ownership of their allegiance, and the interaction between the two rivals. For some fans, the rivalry is in good spirit. For others it can lead to violence. It’s the sentiment that fans attach to their teams that really interests me.
You don't step in to narrate the film at all. Rather, a plot develops through the edited sequence of shots and the participants themselves tell the story. What was challenging about telling the story this way?
It took endless days of viewing footage and then revisiting the same footage three or four times to assemble some sort of loose narrative. My film is more about the experience insofar as attempting to make you feel like you are actually bearing witness to this madness. Fans dictated the plot for this film; I can’t even grasp the idea of scripting these events.
The only challenge of this storytelling mode is actually sitting down and completing the project.
What sort of movies have you made in the past?
I’ve been making videos ever since I was a kid. My friends and I grew up in a small town outside of Atlanta. There wasn’t a whole lot to do, so we’d entertain ourselves by making home movies. As we grew older our hobby turned into an obsession, and we couldn’t put down the camera. Most of our videos where loosely scripted, spontaneous comedy shorts that reflected our crass, immature personalities.
Later my interest shifted toward music videos. I have this strange connection with rhythm because I think my life calling was to be a musician, but thankfully my brother destroyed my first guitar and my father wouldn’t let me get a drum set. So I just redirect that drive into editing music videos.
Can you describe your shooting and editing processes up to the film's finalization?
Between the three camera men (including myself) who shot the six games at Wrigley and Cellular fields, we captured over 30 hours of footage. That's a lot of fat to trim for a half-hour film. Editing was rigorous.
In the beginning when we shot on site, I made field-log sheets for everybody to help organize the footage as we shot. That technique didn’t last long. There just wasn’t any time for logging. Especially when you’re working in a verite style capturing spontaneous events as they happen.
So after all six games, I took 30-plus, poorly labeled tapes and loaded them all onto my computer.
Just organizing the raw footage was a daunting process. How do you label and decipher the best shots among so many similar ones? So I devised a system of categories. After two months of organizing, I broke the film into different sections. The arrival, street culture before the game, street culture during the game, fans after the game, interviews.
The problem I ran into was the sequencing of events. I had six games, three on the north side and three on the south side. The challenge was to condense the entire ballgame experience into a film that wouldn't completely bore an audience. Initially I viewed this project as a feature film. I wanted to capture the events from an ethnographic lens. Picture a lot of long, slow shots of people leaving their neighborhoods, getting on the CTA, arriving at the fields, to chronicle the entire trip... . And I did just that. The first cut was feature length and I screened it to several audiences, putting them to sleep.
I ended up bringing in a colleague of mine who helped shoot the film. Having a fresh perspective really helped sculpt the story. After 40 or so versions of the film, I decided to make it a dense half-hour edited similarly to the way I edit music videos.
And how would you describe your editing style?
Spontaneous, intuitive and rigorous…like jazz.
Who influences you?
I rely pretty heavily on personal intuition. But here's a short list: Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett), Mr. Freedom (William Klein), Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars ( D.A. Pennebaker), Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks), Kids in the Hall, Sun Ra, Duke Ellington and Motley Crue.
When did you decide to take your film seriously and market it to the public?
I never viewed this project as a student film because it was something I wanted to do way before I went back to school. The school supplied me with the resources to complete my project, but I have always been motivated to create something that a wider audience might enjoy.
Are you pleased with the outcome?
The film absolutely came out better than I anticipated.
What would you have done differently?
A few things: First, I would make sure my cameras were set in the right format. Secondly, invest in some production assistants. That would help tremendously with the initial organization of tapes.