BookSpin Giveaway and Excerpt!

Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media
Travis Vogan
University of Illinois Press
Trade Paperback

With the kind support of University of Illinois Press, BookSpin has one trade paperback copy of Keepers of the Flame to give away.  To qualify, retweet my tweet about my giveaway of  KEEPERS OF THE FLAME.  My twitter is @Book_Dude

Excerpt:

From Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media by Travis Vogan. Copyright 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press. No part of this excerpt may be reprinted, reproduced, posted on another website or distributed by any means without the written permission of the University of Illinois Press.

Chapter 2 

More Movies than News 

How many people would go to see Jaws if they knew how it turned out in the end? Well, that’s what we’re dealing with all the time. The idea is to give a creative treatment to reality. 
—Steve Sabol 

To me [NFL Films] highlights were always like what [Jean-Luc] Godard says: “Every film has a beginning, middle, and end, but not always in that order.” 
—Steve Seidman, NFL Films Senior Producer 

Sportscaster Bob Costas once wryly commented that NFL Films productions had become more entertaining than the National Football League’s actual games. When asked about Costas’s statement Steve Sabol blithely replied, “They should be. . . . When you look at what we were doing—and we still do—is taking a game that requires 3 hours to play but only has 12 minutes of action. We take that 12 minutes and condense it and focus it and distill it and add music to it and sound effects and edit it. What we do should be more exciting.” NFL Films productions document and provide historical records of the league’s contests. In fact, NFL Films footage composes the only surviving moving image documentation of numerous National Football League games played during the subsidiary’s first decade, an era when many contests were not televised and when shortsighted networks would often tape over rather than archive their sports broadcasts. However, these productions document the league selectively to maintain the corporate image NFL Films builds. In the words of longtime NFL Films producer Phil Tuckett, the company’s documentaries “portray reality as we wish it was.” More accurately, NFL Films portrays reality the way the National Football League wants consumers to believe it is. 

NFL Films creates the league’s history by arranging exceptional moments into celebratory narratives. Greatest Moments in Dallas Cowboys History (1992) edits a series of noteworthy and thrilling instances into a story that argues for the franchise’s greatness. Era of Excellence: The 1980s (1989) functions similarly. It assembles a collection of outstanding snippets that index the 1980s NFL into a form that praises the league’s apparent excellence during that decade. Likewise, the syndicated television program NFL Game of the Week reflects on a recently completed NFL contest by organizing its most important and sensational plays to emphasize the featured game’s significance within the context of the week and season when it occurred. 

NFL Films’ documentaries suggest the league’s past is constituted by extraordinary moments—diving touchdown catches, punishing blocks, and graceful runs—that evidence the NFL’s unique excitement and epic importance. They use conventions such as slow motion, orchestral scores, and narration to make featured instances seem as riveting as possible and then organize them into Hollywood-inspired stories of heroes uniting to battle against physical, emotional, and technical adversity. As such, these documentaries privilege arranging filmed content into dramatic narratives over providing thorough or even accurate reports of the events they examine. If footage does not readily exhibit the inspirational and broadly appealing set of qualities NFL Films uses to characterize and sell the league, the company’s productions either ignore it or—like Big Game America’s treatment of Joe Namath and The New Breed’s depiction of Tim Rossovich—take measures to contain it within the branded history the subsidiary constructs and promotes. NFL Films productions thus embody and illuminate a tension that marks all nonfiction representation: they simultaneously document “actuality” and filter it through forms influenced by a host of rhetorical, ideological, institutional, and economic considerations.

The NFL Films highlight is the company’s oldest genre and most clearly exemplifies its dual efforts to document and exalt the National Football League. The highlight expanded upon—and contributed to the extinction of—a tradition of sports newsreels that were being phased out by the popularization of television during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Oriard describes these newsreels as “highlights in which every game is a big game, every play a great play, every crowd wildly cheering” and claims these productions were as committed to furnishing dramatic spectacles as they were to reporting on sporting events. Expanding upon the newsreels, NFL Films highlights privilege the construction of intense and moving spectacles over explaining how events unfolded. They always contain subject matter within partial narratives and even routinely abandon chronology to magnify featured content’s excitement. By 1981, franchise owner Art Modell would call these productions “the most valuable selling tool in all of pro football.” 

The NFL established NFL Films for the initial purpose of producing yearly team and championship game highlights. Shortly after the company’s development, and as a consequence of the success its earliest productions enjoyed, the highlight expanded into a series of subgenres made for various television programs and the home movie (and later home video) market. For instance, NFL Films began to create season review highlights (NFL ’65 [1965], Best of NFL ’66 [1966]) and productions that focus on individual positions (Receivers—Catch It if You Can [1966], Linebackers—Search and Destroy [1967]). It established syndicated weekly television programs like Game of the Week and This is the NFL that offer highlights of recently played games throughout the season. The company even created thematic highlight films, such as Bellringers (1967) and The Football Follies (1968), which weave together spine-chilling hits and uproarious blunders. 

Only a murky boundary separates the NFL Films highlight from the company’s other genres, most of which routinely include brief highlight sequences to illustrate and add excitement to the subjects they explore. For instance, Super Sunday: A History of the Super Bowl (1989) offers a detailed and linear account of the Super Bowl’s development into America’s most popular sporting event. Greatest Moments in Super Bowl History (1998) also chronicles the Super Bowl. It does so, however, through combining its most exhilarating moments into thematic segments that reinforce the characteristics NFL Films uses to define and market its parent organization. Both productions organize outstanding instances into celebratory narratives; however, Greatest Moments in Super Bowl History privileges showcasing these extraordinary fragments over meticulously outlining the event’s history. It even excludes several Super Bowls and transitions among time periods in the course of billing the yearly game as momentous and thrilling. Although there are differences between the highlight and NFL Films’ other genres—as well as variances among its subgenres—the logic that guides this form explains a goal that unites the company’s overall representational practices: to document the National Football League by arranging potentially stirring filmed moments into laudatory narratives that—despite the particularities that mark their content—build and buttress a stable mythology for it. 

NFL Films highlights differ in shape and purpose from the fast-paced, journalistic video highlights that now pervade television and online sports media. The company’s former editor-in-chief Bob Ryan dismisses television and Internet highlights as “news” in comparison to NFL Films’ more inventive “movies.” In contrast to mainstream highlights’ hurried recapitulation and reportage, Ryan suggests NFL Films’ highlights transform pro football games into artful and immersive cinematic experiences. Regardless of the aesthetic and ideological differences that separate NFL Films highlights from their more popular contemporary counterparts, these productions composed a starting point from which the genre morphed into what media historian Raymond Gamache calls “the dominant news frame in electronic sports journalism.” Beyond explaining NFL Films’ representational priorities and the factors that influence them, the company’s filmic highlights provide a way to trace the emergence of the contemporary highlight and to consider how this immensely popular form mediates sport’s meanings and uses.