Month: August 2020

The namesake of Jimmy Kimmel Live! was out on Tuesday night’s show, and his replacement was one of the break-out stars of the quarantine: Sarah Cooper, the author and comedian who’s become a celebrity for uploading videos to social media of her lip synching along to World War-confuser Donald J. Trump. It’s a very simple schtick, and she’s extremely good at it, using mannerisms to bring out sides of the president we haven’t seen before. While she did most of her opening monologue in her own voice, talking about her own life, there was no way she wouldn’t bust out the thing that’s made her a star.

Cooper spent most of her opening talking about herself, by herself, alone without a crowd. She spoke about her Jamaican family, overcoming stereotypes, and her stint working at Google. (“They didn’t know I was black,” she said. “I think they thought I was Indian because they kept promoting me.” She said her dad pointed out she is Indian, being of West Indian descent.)

But eventually Cooper got around to busting out her Trump talk, which she did via rope-a-dope: She said she asked her million-and-a-half followers to send in video questions for her, about her life. She wound up answering them in the voice of Trump, including treating one person to his infamous “What a stupid question” bit you’ll be seeing a lot over the next 80-some days.

You can watch Cooper’s monologue in the video above. The Trump bit starts around the 5:40 mark.

Last summer, Genius Media accused Google of allegedly plagiarizing the website’s song lyrics for their own benefit. Genius chief strategy officer Ben Gross told The Wall Street Journal that prior to the accusation, the company had “shown Google irrefutable evidence again and again that they are displaying lyrics copied from Genius.” How did they find out? According to the company, their lyric sheets are watermarked, featuring a combination of quotation marks that can be converted to Morse code. In response to the accusation, Google explained their process of obtaining song lyrics: “We pay music publishers for the right to display lyrics, since they manage the rights to these lyrics on behalf of the songwriters.”

The lawsuit Genius filed in December sought at least $50 million in damages from Google and LyricFind for “misappropriating content from Genius’s website,” which they used “for [Google’s] own financial benefit and Genius’s financial detriment.” More than a year after the initial accusation, a New York judge opted to dismiss Genius’ lawsuit, according to Variety.

The decision was based on the grounds that Genius does not own the copyright or rights to the original lyrics, with the judge saying the company is not in the position to sue Google for plagiarizing their lyrics. “The case law is clear that only the original copyright owner has exclusive rights to authorize derivative works,” the judge reportedly wrote in their decision. The judge also said Genius failed to “allege breach of contract claims that are qualitatively different from federal copyright claims.” As a result, the judge dismissed the lawsuit for “failure to state a claim” and denied the company’s motion to escalate the case to a state court.

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time — in the early aughts, circa his brief, largely CGI turn in The Mummy Returns — when it seemed far-fetched that Dwayne Johnson, once upon a time a popular wrestler mostly referred to as The Rock, would cross over into movies. But crossover he did, and at this point it’s hard to imagine blockbusters without him. In fact, he’s so big that Forbes named him the highest paid actor in the world for the second year running — a feat he’s achieved before that, too.

Who beat the sometime Luke Hobbs back in 2018? George Clooney, who made $239 million, albeit not from movies; much of that was his share of the $1 billion purchase of his booze line, Casamigos Tequila. Johnson came in second, with $124 million. (These lists compile total earnings, including non-acting gigs.)

But much has changed in the last two years. (Boy, have they.) Johnson is on top of the list, albeit with a smaller total: $87.5 million, about a third of that from the $23.5 million paycheck who received from Netflix for their forthcoming movie Red Notice. Last year, Johnson made about the same amount — some $89.4 million. Each year’s Forbes list tallies from June 1 of the previous year to June 1 of the next.

Johnson’s career finds him mixing franchises, such as the Fast and/or Furious series (including the spin-off Hobbs & Shaw) and the relatively new Jumanji, with solo one-offs, like Skyscraper and Rampage. He also appeared as himself in the wrestling bio-comedy Fighting with My Family.

As for Johnson’s closest competition, that would be Ryan Reynolds, with $71.5 million, having nabbed $20 million apiece for two Netflix ventures: Michael Bay’s Six Underground and — wouldn’t you know? — Red Notice, opposite Johnson, who got a slightly higher paycheck. Mark Wahlberg is third, with $58 million, Ben Affleck fourth, with $55 million, and Johnson’s occasional co-star Vin Diesel with $54 million.

The top ten is rounded out by Bollywood star Akshay Kumar at number 6 with $48.5 million; Lin-Manuel Miranda, making his Forbes debut at number 7 with $45.5 milion; Will Smith at 8 with $44.5 million; Adam Sandler at 9 with $41 million; and, last but certainly not least, the legendary Jackie Chan, with $40 million. Congrats, gentlemen — and of course, the ones making the most money in this industry are all men.

You can see Forbes’ entire list here.

On Tuesday, the Milwaukee Bucks entered the evening with very little to play for against the Washington Wizards. However, Giannis Antetokounmpo returned from a one-game absence, presumably to stay sharp as the playoffs loom. While the NBA MVP favorite stayed on the floor for ten minutes in the first half, Antetokounmpo’s night was cut short, not by a team decision to rest him, but by an official’s choice to eject him after he delivered a headbutt to Wizards big man Moe Wagner.

In the ten minutes before Antetokounmpo was ejected, he produced 12 points and nine rebounds. Obviously, those are strong numbers and, in terms of basketball, he looked more than fine. Still, this wasn’t ideal from Antetokounmpo, who didn’t even make it to halftime before garnering the Flagrant 2 and the ensuing automatic ejection.

Going back to Michigan, Wagner does have a reputation as something of an instigator and that could have been the case here. At the same time, it isn’t often that you see a superstar ejected for this kind of thing and, while the overall impact of Antetokounmpo’s early exit is quite low, it was a bit strange. Still, the Bucks have only one more game after Tuesday night — a tilt against Memphis that is gigantic for the Grizzlies in the Western Conference playoff race — and perhaps Antetokounmpo is simply ready for the playoffs to arrive.

Blackpink has spent much of the summer orchestrating their massive comeback, starting with their June single, “How You Like That.” That song arrived more than a year after their 2019 single, “Kill This Love,” and its video garnered over 25 million views in the first five hours alone, and nearly 100 million viewers in its first day. More than a month after the song’s release and performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the group returns with another highly-anticipated announcement.

For the last week, Blackpink has let fans throw out various names with whom they should collaborate on their next single. The group finally revealed that artist, and it’s no less than Selena Gomez. What’s more, the group confirmed in their Instagram post that the song with arrive on August 28.

The announcement comes after the group revealed their upcoming album will arrive on October 2 via YG Entertainment/Interscope Records. The promotion materials seem to hint that the album will be titled The Album, but the album’s pre-order pages list it as untitled. The project that should complete their comeback, and it will serve as the follow up to their 2018 album, Blackpink in Your Area.

You can check out their announcement in the Instagram post above.

HBO’s Lovecraft Country will blow your expectations away. I really didn’t want to begin a review like that because I realize how hyperbolic it sounds, but after watching the first five episodes, the other options I came up with to start this piece were “!?!” and “batsh*t insane.” That’s not too classy, nor was my slightly revised “batsh*t insane and careening off a cliff but totally worth the dive.” This show will mess with your mind, in a good way, while being both fantastic and fantastical. If your expectations were low, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. If they were high, then you’ll feel vindicated, but not in the way that you’d suspect. It’s overwhelming at times, and messy, mostly intentionally so — especially when between-episode transitions feel so disjointed and tonally jarring that there’s virtually an anthology effect — but it never stops entertaining.

Creator Misha Green, working with Matt Ruff’s 1950s-set dark-fantasy novel as source material, hit a home run here from the opening scene, in which the first African American baseball player pulverizes a monster. That’s the first clue that executive producers Jordan Peele (his “post-apocalyptic Jackie Robinson” line from Key & Peele unavoidably comes to mind here, as does his horror-visionary status) and J.J. Abrams (representing the sci-fi-geek contingent) are onboard. Even though that first scene is a dream, it sets up the viewer for every non-dream scene that follows. We meet Jonathan Majors as Atticus, a Black Korean War vet returning to Chicago after risking his life for a country that hates him. He’s diving through reality-based horrors of the trenches before encountering UFOs and dodging otherworldly creatures. The black-and-white visuals clash with technicolor gore. It’s difficult to tell which horrors present more danger, and yep, that’s exactly the vibe throughout every episode that follows.

Let’s get slightly more detailed here about expectations. I’m pretty sure that no matter how you imagined Lovecraft Country to be, you’ll soon find out that you could not have anticipated much of what goes down. Yes, you may have expected monsters, both literal and figurative, as well as fantastical and grounded in reality, and both are present in this series. There are monsters who stalk the woods and lurk in basements and pull the sheets off unsuspecting sleepers, and also, there’s an even larger, more insidious abomination in displays of systemic racism. The series’ treatment of white supremacy will remind people of Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen, which is a superior show by most standards. Still, Lovecraft Country makes a fine followup and the closest thing we’ll see to a second-season substitute.

There’s a distinct difference between the two shows, even though both put Black inequality and white cruelty on display while subverting genre conventions. Watchmen stands as an ambitious and accomplished series, for which Lindelof painstakingly painted his backdrop with the finest of details. Whereas Lovecraft Country hurls paint onto a canvas by the gallon and haphazardly whips the pulpy splatters into place with a palette knife. The end result in both cases is enjoyable, but I would counter that while Watchmen is clearly the better show, Lovecraft is the gutsier one. In fact, its ambition and audaciousness might make it the most daring TV show of the year.

We should get into this show’s plot a little bit, at least. The series picks up with Atticus returning to his Chicago home base after war. He receives a mysterious letter about his legacy and sets off on a road trip (but this ain’t Green Book) to Ardham, Massachusetts, which — real or unreal? — isn’t on the map. Along for the ride (and to perform rescues) is his childhood friend, Letitia (Jurnee Smollett). They both enjoyed sci-fi back in the day, although Atticus is the most bookish of the pair. His preference for fantasy literature is, tellingly enough, inseparable from his reality because two of his favorite novels happen to be A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs and At the Mountain of Madness from one Howard Phillips Lovecraft. At best, these authors’ works dabble in stereotypes, and at worst, they’re notoriously and blisteringly racist.

It’s a stark lesson. Not even through stories that many consider fantasy are these characters able to escape reality, since those otherworldly realms are propped up by white supremacy. And as we see during the season’s first half, both reality and out-of-this-world moments are filled to the brim with brutality. Throughout, Atticus and Letty encounter abusive, sneering cops who degrade them and seductive, snobby members of an ancient order with agendas. Whether they’re being chased by police in a sundown town or running from ungodly creatures burrowing up through forest floors, it’s all a frightening reinforcement that Black history and horror are often interchangeable terms.

It’s madness, all of it, while the performances are across-the-board fantastic. Granted, Majors’ (Da 5 Bloods) powerful take on the steady leading man is the least surprising thing about this show. The true revelation would be Smollett (who worked with Green in Underground and was the most impressive part of Birds Of Prey) as she confidently embodies a spitfire who shall not be stopped (by man, woman, or ghost). She wreaks havoc with a baseball bat at one turn, belts out a song at another, and she’s damn good, alongside convincing turns by Courtney B. Vance and Michael K. Williams as Atticus’ Uncle George and bad dad, respectively. Wunmi Mosaku (giving what can only be described as a layered performance, and we’ll come back to that one day) crushes it as Letty’s half-sister Ruby. On the unsettling side of humanity, look no further than the ultra-blonde Abbey Lee and Jordan Patrick Smith as a mysterious duo.

I’m only scratching the surface because this show should be experienced when it comes to specifics, which all slide sideways with a heady cocktail of horror and sci-fi, but the show also delights in dancing around genres. Likewise, the soundtrack refuses to make up its mind while swerving from Rihanna to Marilyn Manson to Cardi B. while mixing in era-appropriate music like Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” and Nina Simone. Get ready, because from the sight of Letty scorching down the road to the call of Cthulhu-esque creatures, this show is no slow burn — it hits you in the face right out of the gate. It’s an astounding piece of television, but I think I’m going to stick with my initial reaction: Lovecraft Country is “batsh*t insane,” but in the greatest way.

HBO’s ‘Lovecraft Country’ premieres on Sunday August 16.

Luka Doncic has attracted a whole lot of eyeballs for what he’s done in the NBA’s Orlando bubble. He’s stuffing the stat sheet for a Dallas Mavericks team that has pretty consistently played in entertaining, high-scoring games, and while it’d be a surprise if they end up winning the championship this year, Doncic is emphatically showing that he can play a major role in turning the Mavs into a contender.

He’s also using the bubble as a chance to work on his leadership skills, which led to a wonderful story from Chris Haynes of TNT. Doncic put together a player outing while the Mavs were in the bubble. The whole team was there without one extremely big exception: Boban Marjanovic. Doncic responded by calling him repeatedly, at which point he learned that the big man is getting into the advertising game.

“Luka called him three or four straight times,” Haynes explained. “Boban finally answered, explaining that he was in the middle of shooting a State Farm commercial.”

Now, it is very nice that Doncic is taking on a leadership role like this and trying to be inclusive with all of his teammates, but the thought of Boban being in commercials is something I am quite excited about. He hits the sweet spot of being incredibly personable and super likable, and I am extremely excited for him to become America’s next great pitchman.

As the NBA’s seeding games wind down in Orlando, not every contest features two teams with incentive to operate at the highest possible level. On Tuesday evening, however, a nationally televised match-up spotlighted a pair of teams with plenty to play for, with Damian Lillard and the Portland Trail Blazers taking on Luka Doncic, Kristaps Porzingis, and the Dallas Mavericks. After 48 entertaining minutes and plenty of drama, Lillard and the Blazers picked up the victory by avoiding a buzzer-beater. As a result, Portland inched closer to a playoff berth.

The Mavs came out of the gates firing on the offensive end of the floor, executing well and utilizing Doncic’s shot-making.

Dallas took an eight-point lead in the first period and, while the Blazers showed immediate signs of fighting back, Porzingis established himself in a hurry. The talented big man produced 16 points in the first quarter; tying his career high in an opening period.

Near the end of the first quarter, though, Portland took control, concluding the period on a 17-3 run to assume the lead.

The Blazers stayed in front for the entire second quarter, thanks in part to the work of Lillard. In the first half, he put up 25 points on 10-for-15 shooting, dominating the action.

Lillard’s quality work helped the Blazers to take an eight-point lead into the locker room, but the Mavericks were ready as play resumed. Dallas hung around early in the second half and, late in the third period, the Mavericks scored ten straight points to reclaim the lead.

As the fourth quarter arrived, tensions were high on both sides, including technical fouls for Doncic, Carmelo Anthony, and Maxi Kleber in a short period of time. While the margin was tight, the Mavericks did open the quarter with a slow-developing 11-2 run, taking their largest lead since the opening minutes.

Almost on cue, Lillard responded and, with more than five minutes remaining, the All-NBA guard reached the 50-point mark for the second straight game.

With the help of a three-pointer by Anthony and a tip-in by Jusuf Nurkic, Portland knotted the score at 117-117 with five minutes to go and the stage was set for a wildly intriguing, pressure-packed stretch run. Both offenses continued to cook, with Doncic pouring in a three-point play (that included the sixth foul for Nurkic) and Lillard answered with a triple.

Then, Kleber and Anthony traded triples, keeping the score tied at 127-127 with two minutes left. Keeping the pace, Porzingis knocked down a three-pointer, setting the stage for a wild connection by Lillard to tie the game with a little help from the rim.

On the ensuing play, Porzingis fouled out on something of a controversial and, after a review to confirm that decision, Lillard found Whiteside for a dunk to take the lead. Doncic then answered by drawing a foul but, after he split his attempts, the Blazers led by one point with 40 seconds to go.

After a rare miss from Lillard, the Mavs had possession with a chance to take the lead, but Trey Burke committed a bizarre offensive foul to negate a bucket in the corner.

Forced to foul, Dallas put CJ McCollum on the free throw line with three seconds to go. The veteran guard, who struggled mightily in the game, buried both and the Mavericks had one more chance to tie the game. After a timeout, Dallas did execute a solid play to engineer a look for Tim Hardaway Jr. but, when it went begging, Portland escaped with a badly-need victory.

Lillard was the story of the night, finishing with 61 points on 17-for-32 from the floor, 9-for-17 from three-point range and a perfect 18-for-18 from the free throw line. For good measure, he added eight assists and five rebounds, while also making history with another 60-point effort.

From a team perspective, this was an enormous win for the Blazers, with Portland now assuming control of the No. 8 seed in the West. The Blazers can now clinch a spot in the play-in tournament with a win over the Nets on Thursday and, if they pick up that victory, Portland would hold a key advantage in forcing their opponent to beat them in back-to-back games.

It’s a strange time in pro wrestling, but then it’s a strange time everywhere. Unable to tour or have fans attend their shows, and with some roster members unavoidably missing, the various wrestling companies are doing their best to get people to tune in to what we all know is a lesser show than the ideal.

Then again, WWE was in an uncomfortable spot even before the COVID-19 pandemic. They made a hugely lucrative deal to move Smackdown to Fox TV last year, but ratings have consistently been a problem (and even more so since the pandemic began) and they’ve taken an ongoing PR hit for working with the Saudi Arabian government. On top of that, for the first time in decades, they have a solid competitor in the field of mainstream wrestling, with AEW finding a major audience since its launch last year.

WWE and their fans will be quick to point out that All Elite Wrestling isn’t much of a competitor, since they’re just finding their feet and stand no chance of getting as many eyes or as much money as WWE anytime soon. The real risk is that AEW might get more attention, more critical affection, and more general “buzz” than WWE regardless of who’s bringing in the most cash. In short, WWE fears that AEW might be cooler than them.

A problem with being #1 in your field, especially by such a huge margin, is that you don’t get to be the underdog. You can’t really be anti-establishment when you are the establishment. And of course WWE and the McMahon family unavoidably seem even more like part of the establishment for as long as WWE Hall-of-Famer and close McMahon friend Donald Trump is President.

As far as wrestling storylines go, you can come at this problem from a couple of directions. WWE has chosen at least two.

First, there’s Retribution, a mysterious faction in black hoodies and masks who show up at Raw and Smackdown and do stuff like throw two cinder blocks through the same window and cut the ring ropes with a chainsaw. The aesthetics of the whole angle resemble the right wing nightmare version of Antifa, and currently the faction is presented as scary and villainous in exactly the way you’d expect from a company with WWE’s politics doing their take on leftist activism.

I guarantee you, however, as soon as those masks come off and we see who’s in the faction, as soon as the leader of Retribution stars cutting his first promo, WWE will be trying to convince us that these people are cool, even if they’re still heels. They’ll be selling T-shirts on the company’s website while rebelling against the company on TV, just like The Shield and DX and NWO and so on and so forth.

And then there’s Raw Underground. Hosted by Shane McMahon, Underground presents itself as an unauthorized, virtually lawless underground fight club, which seems to be held in the Performance Center basement. With people in street clothes fighting on a ropeless ring, it’s an attempt to be the opposite of everything Raw is, but on Raw.

Right now Raw Underground doesn’t really work that well, because they’ve never explained anything about it, and none of the fights seem to mean anything or lead anywhere. If they give it a little more structure and maybe a belt to fight for, it could actually be a fun addition to Raw. What it can never be, though, is underground. It’s hard to even seem that way, when the face of the whole thing is Shane McMahon, a born-into-wealth mogul of international cable TV whose theme song goes “Money money money, here comes the money!”

WWE would like fans to believe there’s a way to challenge the status quo of pro wrestling by watching WWE, as if they aren’t that status quo. And that’s really nothing new. Pro wrestling has always marketed itself with feelings and idea that aren’t exactly rooted in honesty. So there’s no reason to feel bad if you’re getting a kick out of Raw Underground, or if you’re into where Retribution is going (which might be more apt to happen when they have matches, or at least faces). It’s fine to enjoy that thing you enjoy, but along the way let’s try and keep our eyes open about what’s actually happening.

Though I didn’t know his name until recently, Greg Whiteley has been responsible for countless hours of my Netflix binging. Thirsty for something that would fill the Hard Knocks-sized hole in my television needs, I stumbled first upon QB1 (a documentary series about high school quarterbacks) and eventually a show Whiteley directs, Last Chance U, a series following a junior college football program.

There were colorful characters trying to fight their way into a Division I scholarship, school faculty desperately trying to get players to attend class and stay eligible, and an overweight loudmouth of a coach who seemed either like an unlikely mentor or an abusive tyrant, depending on the day. That goes for both coach Buddy Stephens of EMCC in Scooba, Mississippi in seasons one and two, and coach Jason Brown of ICC in Independence, Kansas in seasons three and four. Stephens was a Bible-thumping good ol’ boy and Brown a foul-mouthed, angry white boy ex-QB from Compton, but spiritually they were similar. Dare I say it, the show was even more addictive than Hard Knocks, the series that led me to it in the first place.

After that was Cheer, an arguably even more addictive series about a cheerleading team, also produced and directed by Greg Whiteley. Now Last Chance U is back with season five, following coach John Beam and the Laney College Eagles of Oakland, another team that is somehow both the exact opposite of previous Last Chance U teams and exactly the same. They’ve traded small towns in the south and Midwest for a gentrifying Oakland, dorms for commuters, fat white coaches for a skinny half-Korean one, and yet it’s still the same emotional ride, with a coach whose depiction alternates between “great guy helping the youth succeed” and “insufferable wet blanket asshole.”

As always, shooting it seems like a massive undertaking. I spoke to Greg Whiteley this week about how the sausage gets made, how colleges should treat their student-athletes, and the mixed emotions of being a football fan knowing what we know in 2020.

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In terms of which characters you focus on, is that something that you decide on before the season?

We usually make it in the first two or three days that we’re there. There are two or three people, four or five people that will pop during that first week of practices. There’s some pretty big debates that will happen in the hotel lobby at night over who those four or five players should be. Usually, at the end of the first week, there are about 10 people that are kind of on your list, but in my mind, there’s always a top five. Strangely in the five seasons that we’ve been doing that show, those top five have typically been the five that we end up focusing on.

How many hours a day are you shooting your main characters?

Well, we can’t go past a 12-hour shoot day and that includes travel time. I don’t know. Do the math. If you got two crews doing 12 hours, you’re not spending all 12 hours with one single person or it’s rare that you would ever do that. You’re doing your best you can to be in contact with the people that you are focusing on and learning their schedule. Somebody might be getting a haircut one day. Somebody might be going to a job interview. The other one might have an important final that they’re taking. The other one might be a meeting with Coach Beam to discuss their future. We are constantly looking for what are different events that are going to move this particular person’s story forward.

Then when you’re filming them in class, is it up to the teacher?

It’s always up to the teacher. When we get an idea of who our main subjects are going to be, we’ll get their schedules, then we’ll go and meet with those teachers. A football schedule is so demanding that a lot of times there’s a few select classes that the coaches really want players to take because it takes into account team meeting times, lifting times and all that stuff. Invariably, there’s a handful of teachers that ended up being teachers for all of the athletes with some exceptions, but we just always go and meet with those teachers. Sometimes the teacher is just not interested, they don’t want us in the classroom. We always respect that.

How do you choose which teams that you want to feature in the series?

Well, it’s sort of a combination of who will have us and who will let us come and give us the kind of access that we need to do this show. We’re also looking at things like, where have we been before? How is this place different? When we meet the coach, do you get the impression that they’re excited about doing the show? Because it’s a lot to ask of that coach to open up their program to us. Occasionally, we’ll meet with a coach and we can sense that there’s some hesitancy. I’ve learned the hard way to go where people want you to be and you’ll have a better show.

How do you think the season is different from the past few? Were there any new challenges for you?

We’ve never been someplace where there was no student housing, no central place where all the players live. Which was always a great advantage because after practice, we always knew where to find players, particularly in towns like Scooba and Independence where there wasn’t much to do. Oakland, we had to really be in close contact with everybody that we were following to know where they were going to be when they weren’t practicing football. That was a unique challenge.

Where are they all coming from?

I would say most were coming from what I would consider far away, sometimes as far away as two hours by commute each way. A lot of that was a function of… Back in the day in the ’70s and ’80s, everybody that was going to Laney Community College lived probably relatively within walking distance of Laney. That’s not true anymore. The cost of living has risen so much in the city of Oakland that the types of kids that are going and playing football at Laney are typically living, like I said, one to two hours away.

What were the things that you found compelling about shooting in Oakland?

Well, Oakland has such a rich history in sports and it has such a rich social justice history, which in our series those two themes seem to intersect a lot, so it was really was a good fit.

You say you choose who you’re going to feature on these a lot by the coaches. I feel like I always have a similar arc with the coaches, where I start out liking them. Then three or four episodes in I start thinking, oh man, I hate this guy. What kind of personality do you think that job requires and what types of people does it attract?

I think your experience probably mimics the experience of what players go through. I think a football season, it’s hard. I think football is a difficult sport, both physically and mentally. You’re asking a lot of an athlete in order to be able to do what you need that athlete do to put your team in the best position to win. As a result, there’s this culture of football that has developed where coaches will say and do things to players that you would never see a human being do in other academic spheres. You don’t see an English teacher yelling at someone in the same way a football coach yells at a player. Even in most other sports you don’t see that that kind of intensity.

I think it’s important to remember that these coaches, they grew up playing football. They’re a product of that culture themselves. Most of these players have played it most of their lives. This is not something that comes as a complete surprise to them. I think sometimes coaches will reach a level of intensity that even they themselves would admit crosses the line. Players were probably surprised by that. We were surprised by that because none of us were college football players that are making the show, but I’ve learned to be careful to not to judge these people too harshly. I try to shoot it with a cold eye and try to explain the context for why a coach or a player is behaving the way that they are in a way that an audience can empathize with. I feel like we try to be fair to this main subject who’s trusted us to tell their story.

When you’re there with them in those really intense moments, is it ever intimidating trying to get that shot?

Wherever we’ve gone and whoever is going to be on camera with us, we explain what we’re doing. We aren’t going to back away whenever there is a heated moment. That’s part of the show. If you’ve seen the show, they understand that. No. I’m not intimidated. I just sort of take that as part of my job.

There haven’t been moments where maybe you’re filming and they yell at you to leave or tell you to get out of there or something?

Oh, yeah. That’s happened.

Do you just respect that when it happens?

Yeah. We do. I try and go and talk to the coaches. The coaches that we’ve filmed have been really great about it. I would say more so in seasons one and two. I can’t ever remember a moment in seasons three or four or even five, but there were a couple of times in which a coach did not want us there. We always respected that, but it always prompted a conversation later saying, listen, this is what you signed up for. You’ve got to tell me, what are we doing wrong as a film crew? Are we somehow in the way? Can we change things so that you can allow us to be here that isn’t going to compromise your job? I felt like in every instance we had those conversations, it was really productive. Moving forward, we were able to get the moment that we felt like we needed to get to properly tell the story.

I also watched Cheer, another show you did. How do you compare shooting the two shows?

Football is different because there seems to be an easy chapter marker each week when you have a game. For us, the structure of the show was you have this main character. If something really good or really bad happens to them in this game, we could spend a lot of time on that episode going into that person’s story. With Cheer, there is one contest at the end. We felt like we had to do a lot more explaining to the audience just what cheer is because I don’t think your general population understood competitive cheerleading in the same way that your typical audience would understand football. That was fun. That was fun to expend some time explaining that because it’s an interesting story. The history is interesting. I didn’t know it before I started it. It was challenging to figure out, well, what’s the format of that show? But there was also a lot of similarities. They’re both very intense, very dedicated, focused, and top athletes. When you’re filming intense people who have a lot at stake, that’s a good recipe for compelling viewing.

Has doing Last Chance U affected your feelings about football? Do you find yourself liking it any more or less after having been around it so much?

I feel much stronger than I did before I began making the show that something had to be done at the collegiate level to… How should I put this? Here’s maybe the most efficient way I could put it: I think historically there is an exchange that’s being offered between a student-athlete and its institution. The exchange is, we will give you an education. We’ll educate you and you’ll play football for us. In return, you get that education for free. You can look at education as having some very long-term benefits. I think the sport of football in particular… You can maybe even argue basketball as well. It has grown. It’s grown in such a way that the demands of that sport are such that I think the educational component of it has been compromised. What the university is offering back to these kids is not the same deal it once was. You can’t be a normal college student like I was and take advantage of all a university has to offer and still be competitive as a football player. The demands of that activity are so severe. People know this. People that are now showing up with their scholarship in hand to play at a Power Five school say, they’re there largely to major in football. Given that, I think somebody’s got to do something to make that trade equitable. If an institution is making money off of the sacrifice and efforts of a young student-athlete, they need to be compensated for it.

On that note, how much does this COVID stuff bum you out? We talk a lot about staying safe and everything, but I also think about all these athletes that are maybe missing out on these huge opportunities right now not being out there.

Yeah. Because I’ve seen up close how difficult it is to pursue that dream of one day playing in the NFL, that you could even make it all the way to a Power Five Division I school and still your odds of making it on a game day NFL roster are so slim that I hope… During COVID-19 frankly, I just hope that there’s a reevaluation of the whole thing. I think there are all kinds of things that we should rethink and that’s one of them.

Just how much effort we put into getting to that level?

Yeah. College football is this extremely popular thing. It’s popular on the backs of a demographic of people who are making a sacrifice that in some cases is severe, both from a physical sacrifice and a mental sacrifice. I think we’ve got to rethink how we’re compensating those people for making that sacrifice.

Do you struggle with that as a viewer? I know I do, as much as I love the entertainment of it.

Yeah. I feel conflicted. I’ve grown up a Seattle Seahawks fan. I think I’m just sort of hard-wired to look forward to a season and to watch a Seahawks game when it’s offered on Sunday. It’s been such a part of my life for so long, but I do feel conflicted that I never had considered how much more sacrifice those players are making to provide me entertainment. It has given me pause.

‘Last Chance U’ season five is now available on Netflix. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.