Chris Corbellini toiled for nearly seven years at NFL Films and produced many of the terrific “Hard Knocks” segments that have helped the HBO series stockpile sports Emmy awards. We asked our friend Chris to pen a remebrance of his former boss, Steve Sabol, who died earlier this week of brain cancer at the age of 69.
There’s no need to rehash all the accolades of NFL Films president Steve Sabol. In the rollicking, dark sea of cynical folks in the sports business, he was a light. Sabol’s family motto was “Let the film flow like water,” which meant spending some extra moolah if the project was worth it. How novel. Even now, despite a recession and that bottom-line corporate mentality of pro football, if the right producer asks, and if the shot was destined to look spectacular on the big screen, then the money to capture it would slip its way into the budget. Sabol painted, he wrote, he filmed, he inspired, he collected Emmys the way kids once collected marbles, and he took pride in saying his shop was the “anti-ESPN.”
He also appreciated a good dick joke.
Other people collect wines…
The second piece I ever produced for Sabol’s cherished fly-on-the-wall HBO series “Hard Knocks” involved a player and a urinal. In the summer of 2007 our subject, the Kansas City Chiefs, were desert-need-water-please desperate for a punt returner. So they brought in veteran Eddie Drummond for a tryout. First, naturally, the organization asked Drummond to submit to a drug test. Only Drummond couldn’t summon the means to do so.
A truly intrepid Films camera man, already there to film the former Pro Bowler because of the return man storyline, captured Drummond confessing as much, and then shot him guzzling four or five bottles of Poland Spring water , then followed him into the locker room bathroom … all the way to the intended destination.
Well now. Sabol believed that if you’ve got something “in your back pocket,” then build a storytelling moment around it. His senior staff of creatives hammered that home during my first month on the job. This wasn’t a back pocket thing was more of a between the front pockets thing it involved a ZIPPER, but I edited a sequence together anyway. I plopped in a slapstick song, cut a montage of Drummond drinking the water from different angles (I think he burped at one point … THAT was going in), then used one long tracking shot following the return man to the moment of truth. No line of script necessary.
A day later the famous filmmaker sat down in a spare chair to my left, less than two feet away in a t-shirt and shorts, now fixated on my Avid editing screen display. He had a knack for entering my office without me noticing at first (some people have all their weight in their feet, thundering about everywhere, Sabol seemed to walk on air) … did exactly that … and asked me what I had for him this week. One episode earlier I put together a montage of pure football mayhem, a traditional Films slo-mo close up on the spiral, sweat dripping from faces look-in during a full-contact scrimmage. This was North-South different. This was something I had never tried within those four walls in Mt. Laurel. Humor. Bathroom humor. Any kind of humor.
I tapped my Avid mouse, and the sequence unspooled digitally. When Drummond walked into the commode, Sabol actually leaned forward. I still see him leaning forward in my mind’s eye, as I write this. I took the shot all the way to the urinal, then cut away right before Drummond, uh, ACTED.
Sabol loved it.
“OH! I thought you were going to do it! I thought you were going to show EVERYTHING! Ha ha ha ha!”
A cherished note from Sabol to the author.
The sequence made the show, untouched. It’s not TV, it’s HBO. I’ll say this for the guy (because the television critics and NFL types rightly gushed about him enough elsewhere) – he had high-brow passions but wasn’t above low-brow goofiness. And football fans were better for it. RIP, Steve. You were the first and perhaps last artistic genius I will ever work for. My only regret in my six-plus years with you – which included a stretch as your script writer – is not saying goodbye on my last day. You looked one way, and I looked the other as we passed in the hall.
If I could go back, I’d say “We should have kept in Eddie Drummond peeing.”
