7 1/2 Cinema presents: No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson
Private, Work in Progress Screening
ESPN

Private, Work in Progress Screening

Oscar nominee Steve James returns to his hometown for a documentary of high school phenom Allen Iverson. The fallout from the 1973 incident and subsequent trial landed the nation's best high school athlete in jail and sharply divided the city along racial lines.


10/11/09 - 10/11/09

4p


Private, Work in Progress Screening

No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson - On February 13, 1993, 17-year-old high school basketball star Allen Iverson entered a Hampton, Virginia bowling alley with several classmates. The night defined Iverson's young life when a quarrel erupted into a brawl, pitting Iverson's black friends against a group of older white men.

The fallout from the fight and the subsequent trial landed the nation's best high school athlete in jail and sharply divided the city along racial lines.

Steve James returns to his hometown of Hampton to take a personal look at this still disputed incident and examine its impact on Iverson and the shared community.



TV Sports For 30th Anniversary, ESPN Hands Camera to Someone Else - Richard Sandomir, New York Times 9/28/09 Bill Simmons, ESPN’s “Sports Guy,” said that HBO helped to inspire him two years ago when he prodded the worldwide leader in sports to commemorate its 30th year with 30 independently produced documentaries.

Wayne Gretzky, left, with Peter Berg, who is making a film about when Gretzky was traded.

“I was watching an old HBO Sports documentary and got mad that HBO had this monopoly,” said Simmons, the blogger-turned-ESPN.com columnist who is an executive producer for the “30 for 30” project. “I thought, we’re a sports network and they’re not, but it’s always, oh, they have a new documentary.”

Passionately — and hyperbolically — Simmons added, “I want nothing more than to destroy them.”

Through the end of 2010, ESPN will try to shift the tectonic plates in the sports documentary business, as it has in so many other segments of sports, and carry the equivalent of six or seven years’ worth of HBO’s sports documentary output.

“We want to be the first stop for documentary makers to tell great stories,” said John Skipper, ESPN’s executive vice president for content, who has welcomed Simmons’s expanded role beyond columnist.

On Oct. 6, ESPN will begin to roll the seven documentaries to be shown this year, each examining a story from the past 30 years — from the machinations behind Wayne Gretzky’s trade to Los Angeles (directed by Peter Berg) and the tragedy of the Muhammad Ali-Larry Holmes bout (Albert Maysles) to the fall of Marion Jones (John Singleton) and the charitable work of the Norwegian Olympian Johann Olav Koss (Frank Marshall).

Steve James, who directed the Oscar-nominated “Hoop Dreams,” is making a film about Allen Iverson’s conviction for “maiming by mob” for his involvement in a brawl when he was in high school.

“James is our grand slam,” Simmons said.

There is nothing about Tiger Woods, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds or the 1980 United States Olympic hockey team, but one of the programs is about Michael Jordan, the minor league baseball player, by Ron Shelton (“Bull Durham”).

Another, by Mike Tollin (whose “Chasing the Dream” was an Oscar nominee), seeks to assign blame for the demise of the United States Football League, which hired the firm he co-owned as its video-production company.

The roster of filmmakers also includes the two-time Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple, who is directing a film about the Steinbrenner-era Yankees, and Barry Levinson, the Oscar-winning director of “Rain Man,” whose charming film about the Baltimore Colts marching band serves as a Charm City football bookend to his “Diner.” Simmons said, “We wanted to tell stories that people hadn’t heard of or hadn’t thought of for a while.”

Alex Gibney, whose “Taxi to the Dark Side” won the 2008 Oscar for documentary feature, said that he was pleased with the creative freedom that ESPN had promised him for his film about Steve Bartman, who interfered with a foul ball during Game 6 of the 2003 Marlins-Cubs National League Championship Series.

“They’re saying, do it in your style,” he said. “It’s the opposite of what you’d expect from a branded cable network, which can be bristling to an independent filmmaker, where you become just a sausage maker.”

He said he was far from completing the Bartman story, which will come late in the “30 for 30” cycle.

“It’s not the search for Bartman,” he said about the legendarily reviled fan who has fled from public view. Instead, Gibney said, he is intrigued with “how does one become a scapegoat?”

For ESPN to outsource an anniversary celebration verges on heresy. In the past, such programs have been jubilees, focusing inevitably on ESPN with its personalities front and center. The programming that ushered in the 25th anniversary went on for months. But this time, ESPN restricted its in-house back patting to a special 90-minute “SportsCenter” and has left the rest to the filmmakers, who will introduce their films and participate in interviews on ESPN’s television, radio and online programs.

“We started this with the proposition that we didn’t want to do anything too celebratory,” Skipper said. “There’s a sense that we’ve done enough of that. “

Simmons said, “It goes to the resentment of ESPN because we’re too involved” in fans’ lives.

In 2007, the idea of using documentaries to look back at three decades gained quick acceptance. “We thought, why not take some great filmmakers who are passionate about sports and give them an opportunity to work their magic?” said Keith Clinkscales, a senior vice president at ESPN who is also an executive producer of the series.

In a memo, Simmons recalled, he wrote: “I know we love celebrating ourselves, but there is a better way of doing it. It’s with good content that we’re not clubbing people over the head with.”

His original concept was to split the documentaries into 10 athletes, 10 teams and 10 events or issues. “I thought something clearly marked and clearly identified would be the best way to get a response,” he said, offering a large bureaucracy a bureaucratic structure that he felt it would easily understand. But Connor Schell, another executive producer, rejected the idea in favor of the surviving looser format with widely ranging subjects.

Thirty documentaries could not take in everything on ESPN’s wish list, like one about the lives of Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, and others about the 1992 Olympic Dream Team, the failed existence of the Los Angeles Clippers (with Billy Crystal directing) or the 2004 Yankees-Red Sox American League Championship Series. But one idea that began with a focus on one event on June 17, 1994, expanded into something bigger.

“We were spitballing,” Simmons said, “and I remembered the O.J. car chase happened the same day as Game 5 of the Rockets-Knicks finals,” which led him and others to learn that on that same day, the Rangers celebrated winning the Stanley Cup, Arnold Palmer bid farewell to United States Open play and the World Cup began. “And we sold the idea to Brett Morgen, who made ‘The Kid Stays in the Picture,’ ” Simmons said.

Author
Steve James

Director
Steve James

Tags: Film, American, 2009