While issues of access are complex in the making of any documentary, when the sports industry is involved the process can be particularly labyrinthine. Big-name sports celebs have to be tracked down through a maze of agents and sports associations, and interview requests often require approval from the top of the hierarchy all the way down to the sponsors. Sports footage is not only pricey but protected by a tangled web of rights agreements. Athletes, corporate sponsors, and team organizations are linked through a long trail of mass-market promo campaigns and merchandising schemes.
Creative pitching and deal-making is definitely the name of the game producers have to play. Relationships and partnerships are the key many of the producers of Gemini contenders in the Best Sports Program or Series category used to open the doors of the sports fortress, as well as lots of plain old persistence.
Stick-handling the NHL
‘It is extremely difficult for an independent producer to work in professional hockey – everything is tightly controlled by the nhl and the broadcast networks,’ says TV Eye Entertainment’s Robert MacAskil, who with partner Ian Davey produced the two-hour cbc documentary Forever Rivals that combined more than 40 interviews and rare archival footage to chronicle the bitter 70-year rivalry between the Montreal Canadiens and Toronto Maple Leafs.
A deal with Molstar Communications, exec producers of Molson Hockey Night In Canada, gatekeepers of the nhl organization, teams and players, and the owners of a storehouse of archival footage, unlocked the gates.
Getting in the door at Molstar was no easy feat, says MacAskil. The company is stormed with proposals from producers. TV Eye had to sell the program’s creative and business plan and its marketability.
Merchandising opps helped finance the $350,000 budget. A deal was struck with Random House to publish a companion book, with the advance funneled into production costs. Quality Home Video came on board to release the film. Molstar and the nhl took an equity stake in Forever Rivals, riding exclusively in the back end on home-video revenues.
Instead of paying the high research rates for Molstar staff to find archival footage, the producers were allowed to spend unlimited hours browsing through the archives. However, rights payments (roughly 15% of the budget) were made to Molstar and the nhl and archive staff were compensated.
Turning on the power
Without a connection to a sports conglomerate, Power In Sport producers Ken Dodd, Mary Jollimore and Claude Panet-Raymond ended up funneling roughly 30% of the budget into paying researchers and chase producers, who spent months lining up interviews.
The four-part, half-hour series produced for CBC Newsworld’s sports journalism show Game Night looks at the heavyweight power brokers of the multimillion-dollar sports empire based in Manhattan such as International Management Group founder Mark McCormack, nba commissioner David Stern, and the Baseball Players Union’s Donald Sear.
Without the benefit of insider help, days turned into months as faxes and phone calls were exchanged between executive assistants and diligent guardians of the sports world’s bigwigs and the production staff, says Dodd.
Persistence was the producers’ main strategy, along with trying to sell their high-powered subjects on the fact the program would air nationally across Canada.
‘These people are into studies and demographics and want to know that if they spend half an hour with you enough people are going to watch to make it worth their while,’ explains Dodd. ‘The main question they asked was how important are you and how many people watch you,’ says Dodd.
Accessing footage was much simpler. As an in-house cbc production, the producers could raid the sports and news departments’ libraries as well as piggyback on cbc’s formal agreement to share footage with cbs and take part in the public broadcaster’s gentleman’s agreements with tsn, cnn and Fox to release footage in exchange for favors down the road.
Networks generally charge $1,000 a minute for footage, with a minimum of one minute’s use, says Dodd. If the doc had been produced independently, another $15,000 could easily have been added to the budget, he says.
cbc does not allow sponsors to funnel money directly into journalism programs; however, they can strike deals that offer companies credit at the end of a show. The producers required Nike commercials, and the company, spying a promo opportunity, handed over 400 of its commercials in exchange for a thank-you in the credits.
Doing the ol’ soft shoe with the IOC
An organization’s eagerness to land some media coverage also worked to the advantage of Associated Producers. The International Dance Sport Association was attempting to persuade the International Olympic Committee that ballroom dancing should be recognized as a sport eligible for the Summer Games.
‘They were trying to project a new image and had every desire to have their story told and have a media spotlight placed on them,’ says Associated Producers’ Elliott Halpern. That’s why the organization opened its doors wide and allowed producers Halpern and Simcha Jacobovici to chronicle the association’s quest in the two-hour doc The Dancing Game, coproduced with the National Film Board and aired on cbc’s Witness.
With the organization’s support, the filmmakers shot footage at dance competitions around the world where approval of event sponsors was required.
However, the program also delved into the workings of the International Olympic Committee. Gaining access to the ioc bureaucracy proved difficult.
Gaining the sanctioned cooperation of the ioc for the film could have involved issues of editorial control, so Associated Producers opted to work from the outside.
However, some insider help played a part in overcoming the obstacle. Halpern believes their success was in large part due to the fact that Dick Pound, a Canadian, is an important figure at the ioc and had the clout to make things easier for his fellow countrymen.
As well, the ioc was aware Associated Producers planned to explore the politics involved in Olympic recognition and wanted to make sure its side of the story made it on camera.
Halpern says the ioc ‘is not unmindful of the necessity of ratings given that so much of its revenues come from tv [broadcast of the Games],’ but was aware of the potential for ballroom dance to draw a tv audience. ‘So in terms of access we were covering a story about television, and ironically, I think one of the reasons we were able to get access is because we were television.’
Portraying some of the flavor of the Olympics was required, but they ran into numerous obstacles as anything associated with the event is trademarked at a high commercial value. Even shots of people walking down the street became a problem if any of the five rings on the Olympic flag could be seen in the background.
Pumping up the celebs
Competition to land a celebrity on your show is fierce, says Dale Burshtein, one of the producers of Insight Productions’ kids’ sports magazine Pumped! Yet over the past three years the series has managed to land just about every big name in the sports world.
Burshtein says agents and athletes agree to interview requests because the show does not ask heavy, controversial questions but offers a venue where the stars can show themselves in a lighthearted, fun way.
The show also affords the athletes (and no doubt their sponsors) the opportunity to specifically target their biggest audience base – kids. And being broadcast on one of America’s biggest sports networks, espn i and ii, and sold internationally by espn (as well as tvontario and a regional Winnipeg station) can’t hurt either.
Often athletes involved with a charitable organization will ask to plug the organization in return for coming on the show. But with three seasons to its credit, Pumped! has managed to develop a strong relationship with International Management Group, which reps most of the big-name athletes.
An athlete’s sponsor can at times facilitate an interview request, says Burshtein. For example, Nike set up an interview with tennis player Jim Courier on the Nike lot with all its sports paraphernalia in the background, but stars are not allowed to plug their sponsors on air.
Professional sports organizations and sponsors were not an issue when Gordon Henderson produced a cbc life-and-times documentary on outspoken hockey icon Don Cherry. Henderson worked directly with Cherry and his family, and sponsors realized that although produced independently by 90th Parallel Productions, the project was commissioned for cbc and stringent sponsorship regs applied.
Also in this report:
Profiling Best Direction in a Dramatic TV Series: Kari Skogland p.22
Jon Cassar p.22
Jane Thompson p.27
Profiling Best Writing in a Dramatic Program or Miniseries:
Jim Burt: The non-nominee behind so many nominations p.29
Janis Cole p.29
David Adams Richards p.31
Keith Ross Leckie p.37
Pete White p.37
The nominees list p.44