documentary update
“In the midst of ‘its so over’, I found there was, within me, an invincible ‘were so back’.”
It’s been quite some time if you think about it. I made a joke about someone’s alma mater on twitter and the guy chirped me back with (I’m paraphrasing here) “You’re a bum and you didn’t capitalize on the hype from Divine Providence when you could have” (or something to that effect). And he’s absolutely right. The time elapsed between the doc and now was necessary.
When I planned on doing eleven of these docs about my favorite college basketball conference in the world, I was really happy when the first one got roughly 20K views in the first week it came out. My thought was, great, seems like people would really like more of these. And then, of course, there was a tiny little fiasco and the whole thing went supernova. Which was very fun, don’t get me wrong, even if it overshadowed the entire documentary in a lot of ways. And while it was incredible to see the first doc explode like that, it sort of spelled out doom for the entire series for multiple reasons.
That’s right, Big East Films is dead, forever and ever, and is never coming back, ever.
I mean, for starters, they nuked both the Twitter/X and the Youtube. When I created the page, my thought was “there are lots of pages with the conference’s name in the handles and it wouldn’t be an issue if I put the conference’s name in there, not like I’m making any money off of this.”
The conference, in explicit, written legal terms, disagreed. And that’s all I want to spell out about that. But, if you’re wondering: yes.
I’m a big fan of rollouts. I think if you’re going to commit to doing something like a documentary that requires extensive planning and commitment, you have to go all the way. It’s really, really tough to do that without a consistent platform dedicated to the thing you’re producing. I have a regular ass day job. I have a life (in the offseason). That wasn’t a problem for DP because I fucking love making these docs, but after the backlash from a bunch of different sides on the last one, the barrier for me to fight and claw and do the rest of the series that I planned to do is just simply too high at the moment. I’m not going to make a 75 minute St. John’s documentary with sock puppets and marionettes narrated by my local mailman. I happily paid $410 for a guy off fiver to narrate Divine Providence because he was fucking awesome at what he did and he made the doc at least 3x as good by just being there. If the process isn’t fun, then what’s the point? I don’t need more hurdles to clear in my life, I already root for DePaul Basketball.
The bad news: the series is dead. There will not be #TenMore. There will not be a sequel to Divine Providence.
Which means a few things.
First, want to give a quick shoutout to everyone in Providence that liked the doc. They went to bat for me during the shitshow and that means a lot to me. Even bigger shoutout if you saw DP before the shitshow happened, that’s worthy of a medal. Shoutout to whoever made the letterboxd, some really good critical reviews in there that I really enjoyed reading, both the good and the bad. Shoutout to whoever made the shirts, I also forget who.
Secondly, I sort of have to now apologize to Georgetown fans, who got hosed a little bit in the doc. The idea to make Georgetown the villain in the doc was conscious, it was an attempt to portray the PC point of view, and in this story, Georgetown is absolutely the evil boogeyman. But it goes deeper than that, because it was supposed to be the start of an 11-episode arc where Georgetown was sort of the villain in a lot of the other school’s docs, because they kind of have been over the course of the conference’s history. The last doc was going to belong to Georgetown, one of the most storied programs in the entire conference, and the entire thing was going to be “you understand Hoya Paranoia from the previous docs, well here it is in action”. I have absolutely no idea how nobody has done the Hoya Paranoia doc from a major production company, talk about an absolute layup.
With that being said, here’s my loose notes from what the other docs would have been*
*Important note: A lot of these notes are super, super general and loosely put together. Because of my nonexistent budget and shortage of time, what I figured would happen is that I wouldn’t find the themes and message of the doc until i actually cut it together. This is not a linear process. Part of the fun of doing these docs is the research, I love doing the deep dives and coming out with a through-line that connects everything: that’s the doc.
XAVIER: “Untitled Crosstown Shootout Doc” yeah, this one stings. Crosstown shootout, duh. No idea what the title would have been. It’s just such a cool rivalry with so much hostility, would have been really cool to do the doc like it was a war movie or something. There is a silver lining here, however: a little birdy told me that someone, somewhere is making this doc. And I spoke with them and they’re cool with me saying this, they are indeed cool. So there you go. (If nothing ever comes of this i was joking and you didn’t hear it from me)
DEPAUL: “DeFall” This is really the only one I could probably see coming to fruition at some point, but I still consider it enough of a long shot that I can divulge info about it. It was going to be called (tentatively) DeFall, and it was sort of going to be a two-part doc that alternates between the rise of DePaul in the late 70s/early 80s and how close they got to immortality, juxtaposed against the nonstop losing and anguish and apathy of the 21st century version of the program…and of course, asking the question, what happened? Who happened? If those teams in the 80s won just a few more games, does this program ever fall off? If Michael Jordan was never a Bull, is DePaul still the hottest ticket in Chicago? It would have ended on a happy note with the glimmer of hope of Chris Holtmann and the rebuilding of a beloved program
CREIGHTON: “Manifest Destiny” This is another one I’m really bummed I couldn’t get to. Here’s this little program in the middle of a prairie way out in the west, how the hell are they making deep tournament runs every year? How the hell did they find Dana Altman and Greg McDermott? Who’s the AD who built all of this, and how did they do it? What does all of this success mean to the (often misunderstood) City of Omaha? Are there parallels between Creighton’s basketball program and the United States’ belief in manifest destiny? Maybe not, but it would have been fun to try and claim that it’s so. If Ethan Wragge was at at The Alamo, would it have gone down like that?
MARQUETTE: “Untitled Al McGuire Doc” Incoming DePaul sacrilege: I was always partial to Al McGuire over Ray Meyer. Blasphemous, I know, but the more I read about McGuire, the more enthralled with him I become. just unlimited aura, and landed Marquette their only national title in program history while doing everything his way (and he beat Dean Smith’s ass in the process). Would have been my attempt to try and replicate that old documentary feel, like something you’d find on NFL Films or in the trailers before a Friedkin movie or something. If you haven’t heard the Al McGuire beach ball story before, just google it.
VILLANOVA: “Main Line Kingdom” This one would probably have been the most straightforward sports documentary of the entire series. Villanova was not only dominant in the 2010’s, they did it with their own brand of basketball that also somehow perfectly represented their own school. Would have contained lots of classical music, slow motion, HD footage of good ball movement and taking charges set to Wagner and Bach and Chopin like an orchestra concert with a visual aid. Not sure who I could have gotten for this thing but hopefully someone who understood exactly what Nova was looking for when they got all these guys together to absolutely decimate teams.
BUTLER: “Two Years in the 21st Century” I still don’t understand how they did it. A lesser-known school from a lesser-known conference, with Brad Stevens and Gordon Hayward at the helm, and they go to back to back national title games - and lose both. Just those two years changed the school forever. Butler basketball’s history has a crystal clear “before and after” moment, what was it like for not only both of those eras, but in the middle of one of the craziest runs in the sport’s history? Would have loved to find out.
ST. JOHN’S: “Untitled St. John’s Doc” It’s funny, because when I first got the idea to do these, Pitino wasn’t as St. John’s. The story was a lot different. And then Vice did their whole documentary about him at SJU, and there goes that idea. So I figured, this far out, a story would come to me about the program or I’d hunt for one that hasn’t been done before. St. John’s is an integral part of the conference’s history, and there’s some down time and scandal in there, but where do you go with any of that? One thing you can turn to is NYC. Here’s a program in the best basketball city in the world, that plays half their games at the mecca of basketball. You might think I’m going somewhere with that, but I’m not. That’s about as far as I was willing to plan it out. But it really could have gone in any number of directions had it been slated to exist.
SETON HALL: “Untitled Myles Powell Doc” I think the obvious doc for SHU would be 1989, but I feel like that’s too straightforward and a story that I know next to nothing about. Changing pace from the rest of the docs, I think a doc that’s centered around a player would be cool. The Powell vs. Markus Howard debates were a lot of fun. Powell was electric, him and guys like Angel Delgado and Mamu had South Orange humming for those last few years of the 2010’s and that could have been fun to revisit.
UCONN: “The Basketball Capital of the World” (Alternative title: Gold Blooded) It’s good filmmaking practice to withhold the UConn doc until the end of the line. There was a UConn fan once upon a time who told me tto never tell UConn fans anything because they can’t keep a secret. There’s just too much with UConn, it is an empire of college basketball for both the men’s and the women’s teams. Loose idea was going to go all out and make a massive 3 episode, 3 hour doc chronicling everything from the 80’s with Calhoun and Geno to the Ollie/AAC days and back to Dan Hurley who would have basically been portrayed as Jason Vorhees or some other unstoppable, maniacal horror villain who comes in and sort of just kills everybody.
GEORGETOWN: “Hoya Paranoia” And then it all comes down to Georgetown. John Thompson, College Basketball Iconoclast, vs. the world. Dominating the 80s both on the court and off, building a lasting cultural impact, helping to not only put the big east on the map but to give the big east the national spotlight. Again, somebody is gonna make this doc some day, I’m sure of it.
If all of these docs got made, I wouldn’t have minded pivoting to shorter-length docs. Had rough notes somewhere about making a “Coaches” series and a “Villains” series. But it’s all dead.
The good news: something is cooking.
Really not at liberty to say anything about it, but there will be another doc, likely before the year is out. I can’t say what it will be, but the scope will be a bit bigger. Will have to shy away from the conference because they hate me. Which sucks because I assume most of you reading this are Big East fans. But I really do think you’ll like the next oNe, It’s going to have a Lot more time to be fine-tuned and thought out and edited and will hopefully feature some pretty good names. But, again, in it’s current state, it doesn’t exist. So who knows. But I think it will be even crazier than the first one if all goes according to plan. I hope you’re all there when it comes out.
Until next time, kids. Thanks for reading.
-BDD