Courier-Post 12/1/05: NFL Films feature
Feature story
Published 12/1/05
Courier-Post newspaper
Hed: They call it NFL Films
Subhed: But it’s more – it’s the soul of the league
By AARON BRACY
MOUNT LAUREL – It is called the Vault, but it really should be known as The Soul.
The Vault, as it is identified by the nameplate on its door, is a mere speck within the 200,000-square-foot pantheon that sits on the sprawling, 26-acre empire that is the NFL Films campus. But that tiny room, which houses more than 100 million feet of football film, is the spiritual and emotional force behind the NFL.
If the body of the NFL is the playing fields on Sunday and the mind is the league offices in New York, the soul – what has separated and elevated the NFL to the premier sport in America – lives inside a 20-by-40 foot rectangle padded with one-foot thick cement walls and guarded with a security card entry.
Among the more than 50,000 cans of film inside The Vault are footage from every NFL game ever played, and the NFL Films highlights, interviews and feature stories that have become such a part of Americana.
“Our greatest contribution to the sport has been the mythology,” Steve Sabol, 63, president and co-founder of NFL Films, said recently from his office. “Baseball has a mythology, but it’s a written mythology. We’ve given the game a visual mythology.
“The Holy Roller, The Ice Bowl, The Miracle of the Meadowlands, The Drive, The Catch. How do people remember them? It’s through our films.”
Ah, film. The word itself is like an exhale in a yoga session.
As if its name wasn’t enough of a giveaway, NFL Films has shot exclusively in film – almost entirely in 16 millimeter – since its inception in 1962.
“Film has grain, it has history and it has substance. There’s a feeling there,” Sabol said. “Videotape is like Formica, it’s shallow, has no texture and no soul to it. We’re storytellers and film is the proper medium for that.”
The Genesis
Film is how the unbelievable story of NFL Films began.
It started when Sabol’s father, Ed, was given a windup 16-millimeter Bell & Howell movie camera as a wedding gift. He became obsessed with it and filmed everything he came across.
Ed Sabol enjoyed filming football so much that he approached then-commissioner Pete Rozelle in 1962 for the rights to the NFL championship game between the Packers and the Giants. The story goes that after a three-martini lunch, Ed Sabol – whose only prior football experience was filming his son’s pee-wee contests – was granted the rights to the game for $3,000.
“One of my dad’s famous sayings is, ‘Never underestimate the power of a martini when presenting a business plan,’” Steve Sabol said. “It could never happen again. There’s no way some retired overcoat salesman could walk into the commissioner’s office and say, ‘I want to buy the rights to film the championship game.’”
The Sabols shot that championship game in 1962 and continued happily, yet unceremoniously filming NFL games for two more years.
It wasn’t until 1965 with the debut of They Call It Pro Football – the first film narrated by the legendary John Facenda – that NFL Films arrived. That film laid the groundwork for everything that followed, according to Steve Sabol.
“That’s what I call the Citizen Kane,” he said. “Everything we do today – the follies, the wiring the players, the music, the staying on the quarterback after he throws the ball, the reverse-angle replays, the slow-mo, all that stuff – began with that one film.”
The evolution
From that point, the Sabols and NFL Films took off.
With the pictures accompanied by up-tempo orchestra music and the powerful voice of Facenda, the football games became mere canvases for the Sabols’ works of art.
“We distilled the game down to the essence of what it is, the passion, the teamwork, the physical nature of the sport and we presented it in a theatrical format,” Steve Sabol said. “I think people look at football in dramaturgical terms, the way players are dressed, the way the game is man-on-man, man against the elements, man against the clock.
“Even the fan who looks at it in the simplest of ways has a visceral feeling for what the game is, and I think we tapped into that visceral feeling with the music, with Facenda and all those elements came together and formed a style perfect for the sport.”
This perfect style resulted in a metamorphic growth of NFL Films.
Since 1962, the company has filmed nearly 9,000 NFL games. It annually produces more than 4,000 hours of television programming, including more than 1,100 hours of original programming, while using more than 1,000 miles of 16-millimeter film.
The present
There is no slowing down now.
The launch of NFL Network on Nov. 3, 2003 only added to the demands of NFL Films. Ninety percent of all NFL Network programming comes from NFL Films’ Mount Laurel campus.
While the business, the setting, his office and his title – not to mention his bank account – have ballooned, Steve Sabol’s role really isn’t much different from the early days.
Just as then, he considers himself an artist who makes movies about football.
And, as then, he’s still intimately involved in production and shaping the films in the style he and his father first envisioned in 1962.
On a recent Thursday morning, for example, Sabol was one of seven in a production studio putting the finishing touches on NFL Network’s Game of the Week, which happened to be the Monday night showdown between the Eagles and Cowboys.
Among Sabol’s changes to the script was altering a line that mentioned the Eagles’ record without Terrell Owens in the lineup to a simple statement that the Eagles had lost their last two.
This was an important alteration because Sabol correctly pointed out that two of the Eagles’ losses without Owens were last season in meaningless regular-season games at the end of the year when Eagles coach Andy Reid chose to rest his starters for the playoffs.
“My title is president,” Sabol said, “but I’m more of a creative director and you have to be involved in all of the cinematography – the writing, the music, the editing, that’s what I’m good at.”
For 43 years, Steve Sabol has combined his two loves of football and film into a movie-making business that has filled a Vault and nourished a soul.
The soul of the NFL.
