NFL Films’ 16mm Heroics:
The Movies of Champions
Original online essay, 1/28/97
As a U.S. Male who came of age in the ’70s, it seemed pro football was always with us, and so was its official biographer, NFL Films. In schools, at church teen retreats, on the lonely late-afternoon weekend TV slots now occupied by infomercials, NFL Films’ half-hour reels of grainy 16mm film were ubiquitous, with their pompous narration and brassy music scores.
So it’s surprising to learn that American football, a major college and high-school sport since the 1890s, was a decidedly secondary attraction as a pro sport, far less popular than baseball, until the ’60s. The pro game’s explosion had three main causes: TV coverage, the NFL-AFL merger, and the evangelizing artistry of NFL Films.
The early to mid ’60s was a golden age for sports documentaries, thanks largely to the introduction of lightweight 16mm cameras with advanced lenses and film stocks. The surfing film The Endless Summer was a hit in theaters; Warren Miller’s skiing films drew roadshow crowds across the northern U.S. and in Canada. Ed Sabol, a Philadelphia businessman with no pro filmmaking experience, sent in a blind bid to shoot the official filmed record of the 1962-63 NFL championship game. The next year, Sabol sent crews to every NFL game, editing the footage into a catalog of highlight reels. By 1965 Sabol convinced the league’s team owners to buy his company and keep him in charge of it. Ed’s son Steve Sabol, who in college was both a football player and an art major, soon became the studio’s creative czar. He still is.
From the start, Steve Sabol established a house style that would sell the game and the league, albeit by using the filmmaker’s art to bend the game’s story. Football is essentially a game of coaching and planning, with squads trying to either complete or stop fully choreographed five-second plays. But Steve Sabol’s guys presented instead a game of individual heroics.
“We emphasize the struggle of a game rather than the strategy,” Sabol explained in a recent phone interview. “We portray the game as a passion. When I was a [college] player, the game was only shown from the top, from cameras in the grandstands. I wanted to show the muscles bulging, the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. There are two spheres in sport; there’s one sphere where things are measured by seconds and inches and yards, then there’s the sphere where things are measured by heart and guts.
“When we started, our goal was to create an image for the game; to show sport at its most passionate and visceral level. But at the time we were just a bunch of young guys who loved to make movies and loved pro football and wanted to communicate that love to an audience.”
The first film released under the NFL Films name, They Call It Pro Football (commissioner Pete Rozelle called it the best sports movie he’d ever seen), started with a booming intro (written by Steve) that set the stage for three decades of histronics: “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun. Sixty minutes of close-in action from kickoff to touchdown… A call. The ball is snapped and the play continues. A drama of man on man and a race against the clock. It’s precision, persistance, power. The unleashed speed of the kickoff. The whistling feet of a great runner. The reckless fury of a goal-line stand. The crowning glory of a winning touchdown. The swelling roar of the crowd… This is pro football, the sport of our time.” (These and countless later, equally momentous lines were delivered with booming stoicism by ex-Philly newscaster John Facenda, who died in 1984 from the cigarettes that had given his voice its trademark gritty rasp.)
Facenda’s voice and the stirring martial music (first assembled from stock-music selections, since the ’70s taken from a library of original orchestral tracks) accompanied footage that used every known sports-film trick and many tricks NFL Films invented. A typical segment of a film might cut from overhead shots to field shots to cutaways of anxious fans to wired-for-sound coaches’ exhortations to reverse-angle replays to super slo-mo shots made with a mammoth 600-mm telephoto lens to tackle shots pumped up with highly exaggerated sound effects.
Even the studio’s “humor” reels were rough-hewn and overblown, with Mel Blanc giving the only unfunny performances of his career by means of trying-too-hard-to-be-wacky gag voices.
As the NFL grew in prestige and popularity (if not in intellectual respect), NFL Films became an institution within an institution. Between seasons it churned out a few films on other sports, commercial and industrial films, and even a few music videos (for Slayer and Bruce Springsteen). It was supposed to make a propaganda film saluting the US military’s work in the 1991 Gulf War, but the deal fell through. And it’s been called upon to replicate its style in movies about the sport (Semi-Tough, Brian’s Song, Black Sunday,Paper Lion, Everybody’s All-American) and in last year’s Nike commercials about pee-wee football.
While the league itself is in trouble on several fronts (greedy owners, unpopular team moves), NFL Films is as big as ever. Today’s NFL Films is a 200-employee outfit in its own office complex behind a New Jersey shopping mall, with its own film labs, editing suites, soundstages, and vaults (Sabol claims the only human event more thoroughly documented on film than NFL football is World War II). It sends at least two camera people and four support staff to every game. Everything but the in-studio narration segments is still shot on film, though some editing is now done on video with telecine color correction (I prefer the more mythic look of the older films, with more grain and washed-out colors). The footage they shoot is edited into weekly shows for ESPN and HBO (coaches’ and players’ cusswords are still bleeped on the HBO shows), annual highlight reels for each team, plus several home videos a year, occasional TNT specials, and the annual Road to the Super Bowl special. The 98-piece London Symphonic Orchestra records two sessions’ worth of background music for NFL Films every year.
The NFL Films look has influenced major filmmakers; Steve Sabol loves to tell how Sam Peckinpah publicly noted “the way we used the camera at different speeds, the editing and the intensity of the violence as an influence on how he did the end of The Wild Bunch.” But the thing’s really a universe of its own. By giving heroic treatment to players whose faces can’t even be seen on TV, it’s forged an audience intimacy the real game can’t provide. As Sabol calls it, “What we are is storytellers and mythmakers.”
(Some selected NFL Films video releases: Feel the Power, Idol Makers, NFL Throwbacks, NFL Talkin’ Follies, and The NFL’s Greatest Moments.)
