Lost Treasures of NFL Films-Episode 19: NFL Films Style

[Music] it's a pretty picture um you don't care where it came from i wasn't lost i was just misplaced they remembered our films more for john fasenda and our music than anything else [Music] third year man milk plum pitch is a peach of a pass to preston carpenter let's take a look shall we and as they say in tinseltown roll on when my father founded nfl films in 1962 it would have been difficult to record music at our location in philadelphia the place was so small we didn't have a space to hold three guys playing kazoos now i'm in music scoring studio a at our new production facility in mount laurel new jersey although we've moved into the future i can't help but look back to the early days when we didn't have a studio like this we didn't even have a style then how nfl films developed a unique identifiable signature style is what this show is all about now this isn't going to be one of those self-congratulatory affairs where we pat ourselves in the back during the first years of our history we were more deserving of a slap in the face before 1962 no one really made movies about pro football so our influences were news reels and those tv highlight shows that used to air on saturday afternoons scheduled somewhere between professional wrestling and roller derby the company that churned out most of these weekly nfl highlights was philadelphia based tell rob productions and telra epitomized the old style of football movies the old model was completely linear editing what's called john philip susan music and predictable awful scripts but don't count the steelers out in this ding dong dilly lynn shadnoy takes a screen pass from faint and hot puts it 51 yards down the sideline before going out of bounds on the new york 17. the colts start dishing up trouble in the second quarter lenny moore gets the ball and lightning land lights out like a frightened box in the forest fire the reading rocket roars non-stop to a 41-yard touchdown and baltimore is on top seven to nothing in the third period the redskins are hunting more scalps little chief lebaron calls for a pass in the pow-wow and when the fun's done walton is on the packer 48. by 1965 we were producing highlight films for every team in the nfl and our improvements upon the telra model were largely visual we shot games in color used more slow motion and we filmed the action and the bench shots from the ground level but when it came to the writing we just couldn't shake the telra influence third year man milk plum pitch is a peach of a pass to preston carpenter on the pittsburgh 20. milk plum pegs a peach of a pass to terry barr as the lions threaten [Applause] milt plum pegs a peach of a pass to terry barr for a first down on the bear four [Applause] in 1965 nfl game of the week gave us our first chance to showcase our talents on a regular basis here was a golden opportunity to pioneer a new more serious and analytical way of writing football highlights but even though we were working with polish narrators like jack whitaker the frantic production pace of this show created a number of technical obstacles that made good writing difficult the nfl game of the week we didn't write the games of the week but you can't really call them scripts because they weren't scripts these guys were reading the play by plays and then taking the play-by-play whatever was written on the play-by-plays and trying to embellish it the downfall of that is they did not have the technology to if you blew a line just go back and do the line again if you were 10 minutes 12 minutes into something you had to go all the way back it's just the way the technology worked and do it all over again eagle bomb squad captain ike kelly number 51 is knocked once so what they ended up doing a lot of times was these really terse little sentences why because they didn't want to make mistakes and go back and do the narration all over again you know we were young you know there's chuck thompson and jack whitaker three times and you were leery of telling them because they'd slap you down quick you know you say you know we need more out of you we need you know you got to stretch this line jack you might do it once and then he'd look at you or throw a pencil in the studio or talk about his train back to new york and then you'd retreat into your shell because you were scared to say something to these guys [Music] eagle center jim ringo limps off the field for a needed respite from the sunday wars the only time we really wrote something was if there was a very few cutaways like a guy on the bench then we would write a little line of script and insert it that he'd have to read for guard leon donahue it means needed rest from the sunday wars the warriors and the generals we thought this was pretty clever and pretty good but it was kind of feeble attempts at any kind of writing feeble attempts at writing were especially apparent in anything involving the redskins and cowboys scripts about these two teams used metaphors that suggested our writers were shooting blanks the dallas cowboys gallop into dc stadium where the washington defense is waiting to ambush the cowboys mount up as jim steiger gallops out of the end zone and stampedes through the washington wigwam that man brown is back in the scene romping through the reservation for 36 yards the redskins apply their war paint and jurgensen drums up heap big trouble for the giants and you had tom toms and you had sagebrush and you had tumbleweeds you did all that stuff and you thought it was pretty clever now some random packer plays hits pounds past the browns max makes tracks for the goal line this time dowler is the prowler and jarring jim goes hiking through the vikings but green bay's star shines brighter by far as he orbits a 30-yard aerial to dowler in first period activity we had no sound to speak of at all and no interviews so if you're doing a 30-minute film you had to write wall-to-wall script you had no very few interesting close-ups that you could write to so we just we're kind of fanciful in our writing holly makes eagle fans jolly as he creases through the brown line and steps off 29 yards here he is galloping gail carrying the male marsh is harsh on the defenders as he circles to the washington three good blocks by whatoska and cadilla and the colt line crumbles logan tumbles and bull rumbles 50 yards for chicago's longest running play of 1964. when i hear those lines i don't particularly like to hear them anymore i mean and say well who wrote that line well you know either say well steve did it someone else did it you don't want to admit it because it was so bad we'd occasionally try to camouflage bad writing by using sound effects of a greased pig race the elusive ball pops into and out of one bosom after another [Music] roger shoals finally recovers the cleveland kickoff for a cleveland touchdown we wanted the scripts of our game recaps to be entertaining but also analytical and authoritative we attempted to combine the verbal with the visual by putting circles and arrows on certain plays to provide an inside look at what made the game tick but these optical effects weren't always quite as insightful as we had hoped gail sierra's got laid out and i had this brilliant idea as he was prone on the field it was a wide enough shot instead of just putting an arrow or a circle or just leaving the shot alone like i should have i thought wouldn't it be great to put a coffin around them so we had a coffin drawn and it was a pretty good-looking coffin by the way and then i think steve's dad saw it and just went ballistic i mean how could you put a coffin around the man and i felt very cowed and stupid at the time and then we had to take the coffin off we put a circle on it when sayers is laid to rest by a teammate's lethal block but still that didn't do any good either that was kind of ridiculous even putting a circle to it but i but a coffin uh were or one of those that was one of the things i did that i really want to forget uh and i hate when anyone brings it up in our 1965 highlight films our writers not only had to come up with the right words to describe the season they also had to script the united airlines commercials that were shoehorned into the storyline of each film jim brown leads the group toward the airplane coach blanton collier is next in line to board the united airlines jet mainliner i remember we had to edit the united airlines commercials in and we did write them big six foot eight john baker knows united comfort accommodates all sizes and the steelers will arrive refreshed and ready to play the cardinals the only thing we have to add was their taglines incidentally 13 out of 14 nfl teams fly united and by the way 13 out of the 14 teams in the nfl fly the friendly skies of united and remember 13 of 14 teams in the national football league fly with united airlines they call it pro football was a landmark production for us it starts with a whistle and ends with a gun 60 minutes of close in action from kick off it was the first film that contained the essential elements of our identifiable style the men who play it are the best there are disciplined professionals who perform on a stage 100 yards long the script for they call it pro football was terse and impressionistic it emphasized the drama of the game we stopped linear editing relying instead on quick tempo montages and we used bits and pieces of shots rather than entire plays the editor on this film was a freelancer named yoshi kishi and he revolutionized the way we thought about film structure and how to organize shots but what makes yoshi's lasting influence so incredible is that he didn't know anything about football and when we hired him he knew even less about nfl films before ed sabo called me up about this project i had never seen any nfl films had never seen a football game my understanding what nfl films were doing or what they had done was uh zero but ed called me up one day and said he'd like me to work on a project and i said sure because my attitude in life has always been if i haven't done it try it and i went down to philadelphia to begin work on they call it pro football when i first heard about yoshiokishi he was like an editing god and you know it was an experiment to bring someone in who knew very little about football to edit football if the subject matter was complex it was like brain surgery or not a human anatomy then more knowledge might have affected the handling of the material but in a case like this obviously it's it's a game and it's not very complicated you move 10 yards at a time until somebody stops you and the goal is to get the uh ball across the line and make a touchdown and this takes place in a certain amount of time which is limited it's one play after another and they're basically the same and uh you don't have to have much intellection to get to understand it this is the prologue you see how i tried to capture the essence of what a game is very simple the ticking of the car showed that time's effect the various yard line markers to show that you have to go 100 yards for a touchdown and then the rest is automatic about what what is exciting about a game if you're not a uh a sports buff the idea on a general level on a common level is to create a metaphor out of the images now you have here you have here a guy who on one level is taking off he's becoming a bird therefore it's common sense the idea the concept the synthetic if you want to put it that way is birdman naturally you have birds and things that fly you have balloons and therefore they're all linked together and what happens is also that you have the cowgirls that those cowgirls are connected because they're flashing and they're birds i mean british police they're really literally birds and um the way they're flapping their um torsos they like the flapping of um of the birds when the man takes off in the jet uh i cut to a woman screaming [Music] now that was to show the humor of the event uh you can draw whatever impression you want of it i may have seen that as a kind of the woman is having an orgasm and the man taking off is like a kind of impregnation and so the cut follows so here's a here's the first part second part third part fourth part the joke and the completion of it and i wasn't concerned about real time and space i was not interested in recording but trying to excite people into seeing a football game throughout the 10 weeks that yoshi spent editing they call it pro football i was always there to help him with the fundamentals of football since he didn't know the game very well i had to explain the difference between a linebacker and a defensive back to point out that ken willard was a fullback not a wide receiver but while i was teaching yoshi about football i was getting an education about editing so we learned from each other during those many long discussions in the editing room i was introduced to steve sable and as far as i recall we never had any discussion at all about anything ed sable i thought when i met him he was a fine person and i don't recall ever seeing him or even speaking to him again until that last day when i said oh holo ed here's the film [Music] went out expectancy ed and steve and maybe one or two other production people but i found that the entire staff of nfl films had turned out to watch it around this tiny steam bag and i was even surprised not by the number of people but also that somebody i had never met ed's daughter blaire was there and i was completely taken aback because when you have a screening of a film you don't invite relatives in no matter how close as a person he was probably the most arrogant guy i had ever met i mean that was very off-putting because he was like the little mini-me god you know he strutted around and we were a bunch of bumpkins and we knew nothing uh we were idiots you know you know i just think you know he was a very talented prima donna most of the people you find in film production are either fools or knaves or simply people who don't know what they're doing haven't seen this for over well 35 years uh it comes as a surprise that it stands up so well i cut the film so that it would be one piece the version i saw last week had the commercial breaks in it this is commercial and those breaks is like it's like colitis interruptus or foreplay interrupters or something it breaks up the rhythm of the entire film so you don't really get the effect of it everybody learned from it you know he showed little tricks about editing that we never knew maybe we would have never known because we were just shooting football i think yoshio opened up our eyes about possibilities i think he made us see things that we might have never seen before and once we saw what he could do i think then we start it became a landmark about how we edited we took chances the hands of combat the hands of pros until recently we had completely lost touch with yoshi kishi and he had definitely lost touch with nfl films i haven't consciously looked for nfl films because i don't know where it is on the schedule anyway and i had no great interest but in the past week by happenstance whereas normally if i saw something on football i would just flick the channel to something else i saw something something like the best bloopers or the best humorous something which was done a couple days ago and i only watched it because of this shooting today what i saw of it i thought forgive me steve but i thought was dreadful the fringe of no man's land is patrolled by the linebackers the search and destroy men of the defense they call it pro football mark john fasenda's nfl films debut number 50 search and destroy number 58 search and destroy john's authoritative voice was a refreshing change from the way sports documentaries of the time were narrated and the response to john's narration was overwhelmingly positive although there was one dissenting opinion someone else could have done just as well he would not have been my first choice for the audience crowding the stands the drama begins with a slap of leather in the song of men in motion it comes across very strong and punchy which is okay considering that the reputation that sportszone has of being um hyperbole this one simple fact tipped the balance of the game in the cowboys favor john may have made a game seem more important than it was because he read lines with a dramatic directness before john our films were narrated by play-by-play announcers like chris schenkel and chuck thompson having tried two power plays tittle sets up the bears he hopes for this but phil king and the ball get a quick divorce schwartz announced announcer voices were always good for covering games live they weren't particularly good at reading scripts and bucky's still a rather precocious and exuberant young man john could make anything seem good this is the face of the tiger the other thing that happened was we wrote less script and this the action of the tiger and the less script meant that the lines stood out more and of course john's voice stood out the most something somber in the skies something somber in the eyes of the men before john fasenda became the legendary voice of nfl films he was the most watched news broadcaster in philadelphia john's nightly newscast was such a fixture that in 1957 it was used as a central plot point in a feature film called the burglar needless to say the film's publicity was built around the way jane mansfield was built not the way john read the news i discovered him in a saloon and the reason i knew who he was was because he was a newscaster and every time i went in there this man john fasenda was there and he loved to talk football i couldn't believe it's all he talked about football football football he loved football so he said john you know i i like your voice how would you like to narrate one of our films she said oh i'll do it for nothing just just let me try it bob i don't know about you i'm disappointed with the first half i thought he would not have what you call the theatrical temperament or the screaming or the carrying on the sender was such a nice man while he was doing the narration and as they say in tinseltown rollam the autumn wind is a pirate blustering in from sea with a rollicking song he sweeps along swaggering boisterously while john fasenda's way with words made our audiences think sam spence's music made them feel if you look at this play what we're trying to get is a seal here and a seal here and try to run this play in the alley jim taylor number 31 is a full back they call it pro football demonstrated that sam spence's thunderous percussion and snarling brass often said more than a line of script could express it was obvious that sam's compositions represented a radical departure from the football music of the time it would be nice to say that we immediately realized the dramatic potential of music but our 1963 championship film demonstrates that we were kind of clueless here was chicago's george hallas a towering figure in nfl history winning his first championship since 1946. well listen to the music we thought would be the perfect accompaniment to this inspiring moment in nfl history this was a tune to consume beer and pretzels bought and when we started producing team highlight films we continued to be partial to polk it took us a while but it began to dawn on us that polkas and college marches were outmoded and inappropriate for the sport we were covering and we decided that we had to make a big push on music and i always wanted a big band i didn't want any plinky plink planks three or four piece orchestra i wanted lots of brass and drums brass and drums that to me was sports we found a fella who was doing music for some television shows he was teaching music at the university of southern california his name was sam spence and he was getting ready to go to germany uh because they gave him a good deal over there to do background music for for television shows once my dad had found out that musicians and recording sessions were less expensive in germany than they were here in the states and once we heard the first pieces that sam composed for us we knew the days of polka's and john philip souza type marches were over sam became our house composer and a vital element in our growth as filmmakers sam and his wife friedl live in munich germany that's where he's done all of his composing and conducting for nfl films and that's where he created a sound that was totally new to sports films sam's music wasn't newsreel music it was film score music and it was dramatic and it was emotional and it wasn't boilerplate background it wasn't wallpaper it was there to invest the emotion in the images you were seeing scoring is just a matter of blood sweat and tears you know writing music is like writing a letter a lot of people ask me how in the world do you write music and i tell them when you when you write a letter how do you write a letter you get an idea in your head and you get an image of what you want to say and then you write it down i hear these things and see the the image of football and write the music accordingly piccolo i like a good piccolo the most important thing in music i believe is melody and a melody has to stick in the ear you know they have a wonderful word in in german called orworm you know a piece of music has to be like an ear worm that digs into your ear and doesn't give you any peace one time i figured out i figured boom i i've done about the equivalent of 70 symphonies 50 60 70 symphonies beethoven only did nine where would i have been without my wife too she was always sitting in the booth writing down the numbers and you might want to splice take number three to take number two at this spot that thought so i would hear something he could not hear then i would say stop once more we're feeling you know the way we all came to know the music was through these images of the national football league so now in everyone's subconscious they're linked forever i have a passion for all kinds of music but sam spence is certainly my favorite it's just provided endless listening pleasure since i was eight years old cinderella super bowl i like everybody at school i used to play that for it was a great sort of russian catchy team heroic mission i forgot to mention that which never made it to vinyl and that great ending to the drums march to the trenches is very good um sunday with seoul da that's it i'm not singing anymore although i could sing about 400 other ones that i like very much the raiders theme of course everybody knows battleground latin fire game plan for sudden death rainbows to the end zone the over the hill gang which everybody knows and i have to hum that one my wife certainly knows uh all about sam's music now and appreciates it very much holmes tunes and says i like this one and this one it's part of our life [Music] it makes me feel good like in two and a half minutes it could turn a rainy day into a bright sunny day sometimes for me andy horowitz has probably met sam in person more times than i have i'd see sam on his occasional visits to the states and getting to know him convinced me that his music provides a portrait of his personality diverse buoyant optimistic and warm-hearted but my 35-year relationship with sam has primarily developed over the telephone i never once went to germany for a recording session several months before the beginning of each football season i'd call sam and describe as vividly as i could the kind of music i wanted for our upcoming films then for inspiration i'd send sam a tape filled mostly with movie soundtracks but also an occasional jazz or rock instrumental the result was that every year i found that sam not only brought to life the feelings i expressed over the phone he also gave life to feelings i couldn't express or articulate he'd write back and forth and send tape tape saying this is a piece of music that i like and and if we can do something like this like that and we we were on the same wavelength oh yeah the magnificent 11. big western the biggest influences on me were of course all the hollywood big hollywood composers you know nicholas rocha and and uh dimitri chompkin all these guys were doing great things you know and i was just flabbergasted i don't particularly care for the uh the rock and roll type of stuff with the hippie stuff i still like the big sound solid music like steve often says the victory at sea type of music the palms of your hands will thicken the skin of your cheek will tan you'll grow ragged and weary and wet but you must do the best you can the music made a big impression on on a lot of the people they remembered our films more for john fasenda and our music i haven't done anything else ed sable is a tremendous guy he had a way of dealing with people that made you feel you're part of his family you know and he'd talk over any of his problems with you and one time he said sam he says i'm worried i'm worried i can't get steve to take a look at the administrative side of of nfl he's only interested in the artistic side sitting at the table cutting films and i just can't can't drag him away i have these meetings with the with the owners of the clubs and they they said hey i thought you were going to bring your son along what is he some kind of a that you're not that you're hiding in from us and i said and the administrative side of things will come as long as steve is interested in the artistic side winds whisper of high hopes [Music] from brassy big band tunes to familiar folk melodies to broad sweeping symphonic pieces the rhythms of his music emphasize the rhythms inherit pro football to me the exciting thing about music is being able to work in many directions and that's why the nfl music has been always my favorite my favorite occupation when we went to germany to interview sam for lost treasures we decided it would be a great idea if sam composed some new music just for the show so sam and i started working together just like we did in the old days over the telephone hello sam spence hey you recognize this voice hey steve good to hear from you you got your baton ready oh that'll be great that'll be terrific this is like nasa sending john glenn back into space oh boy we're looking i think it at basically five different pieces but i'm gonna start out we want to start out with a first piece and uh i wanted to call it a working title would be game day game day maybe we should call it game day and we need a a sound that conveys that that sort of breath stealing intensity that throbbing heartbeat that you've experienced in a locker room before the game the players are sitting on their stools they're concentrating some guys are reading the bible some guys are asleep some guys are just staring at the ceiling but we need a sort of throbbing sound that builds the tension then we're gonna follow them out on the tunnel of course this is to me this is a fast ball right down the middle of the plate for you i'm gonna have an eight foot diameter uh grind casa bass drum for you it's something you can feel in your chest you know you not only hear it in your ears you feel it in your chest the second piece we start out super slow motion we're in the line you see that this is a laborious uh earthbound it's almost i sense you're like a lumbering waltz and this is the waltz of the goliaths for the first part and you see our photography the the snot spraying the sweat flying the butt cheeks rippling all the clots of dirt the slow motion i could hear it already i could hear it already we go with this for about 35 seconds and then after that we come out of this sort of chaos with this emerging sound of what i would call a clear strategy this is where one team suddenly begins to make the game its own that's a feeling that when that begins to happen that should that should raise the hair on the back of every football fan because they know they'll know exactly what that means and in the tape that i sent you the one thing that i don't want and you'll hear are these kazoos for some reason they ruined this this march with these these stupid kazoos but i'm sure as soon as you'll you hear them you'll know that they won't work for us we want real instruments [Music] sam was back in the bavaria music studio where he had conducted much of his great nfl films music and many of the same musicians who had played on those classic tunes were on hand for this special reunion [Music] sam composed six new pieces for this show and he hasn't slowed down a bit with his trademark speed and efficiency he recorded them all in a single day these are the two marches first steve was suggesting we do these two numbers together as one piece but we can use them you know in the in the library much better if they have a separation look at all those notes [Laughter] i believe you wrote every one of them i can't believe it it's the swirling right violins and piccolos surely woodwinds you know and the ostinato on the base and the reason i came to munich it's because a little place like munich has five full-time symphony orchestras yeah what what city in america has five full-time symphony orchestras you know none of them let alone a little place like munich you know right going to that recording session was for myself was like stepping into a time machine you know what would it be like to go back and see sam spence in action in a recording studio walking into the room and meeting musicians that were the same musicians who had played it the first time around it yeah well he is like like a jesus for us because a beautiful composer beautiful arranger and everything is right it's really so at a high level it is different from the music we have in europe because first we don't have this kind of music on the other football games they don't use it and uh wow he says that is the way they want it in america so we have to believe it that we played it and in the beginning we have to ask are you sure sam about yeah he says play that way it must be strong and go football is for us soccer yeah we did a lot of film music also with him here one of the most famous thing is the film car napping you know the story about the car and we need especially deep uh timpani's kettle drums you know because to get those big guys on the line you know women hit each other you you can't have your tiffany's too high you got to have really nice and low where you're going to lay into them you know and uh otherwise ogron casa steve steve loves gran casa boy that is a beautiful bass drum gone casa oh man that is beautiful this is the boss's favorite sound of all this you feel that deep down in your chest you know [Music] foreign [Music] dry fertile walls with concentration [Music] maybe there's a bit a mistake in the note yeah can we play everybody butt percussion uh a little slower from bar 60 from bar 60 without without play playback there was a mistake there was a mistake it's after the dump tag you've got to start at the same place for us to know when to come in die here i'm sorry [Music] [Music] so waltz of the goliaths is vintage sam spence and it provides the perfect complement to some of our vintage camera work forty years ago pro football was a different game but the passion the conscience and the soul of the sport remain the same in his music sam has always been able to capture and distill that essence of the game and that's why his music is timeless and that's why it's still relevant eins fight drive fear [Music] nfl films began to mature when we realized that the story of a game or season rather than the outcome is what made for compelling viewing we grew up when we focused on the personality of a player rather than his statistics and from there it became a matter of how to portray these ideas on film and that's when we developed our own unique style sam spence john fasenda and yoshi kishi each one of them made a lasting contribution on this play thomas shows his versatility by shooting down the sidelines on the eagles and then shooting up and down up and down up and down blitz is big in pittsburgh eager john campbell convinces sonny jergensen to do the monster mash fans who flock to dc stadium always enjoy the pregame and the halftime pageantry presented by the management the annual christmas spectacular is highlighted by a space age santa claus [Music] the redskins cavort as curvaceous go go girls [Music] incidentally 13 out of 14 nfl teams fly united the airline of champions and um cut it from it i don't want you to waste film

Channel: Grey Beard

Views: 5,804

Rating: 4.942029 out of 5

Keywords: NFL Films, Steve Sabol, Ed Sabol

Id: uDK2mq2QeZs

Length: 46min 51sec (2811 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 25 2020