September 7, 2007
The Films That Are How We Know Football: An Interview with Steve Sabol (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 12:15 PM EST NFL Films may not be, as the late New York Giants general manager Wellington Mara once put it, “the heart and soul of the NFL,” but it is where the heart and soul of the National Football League reside. Founded in the early 1960s by Ed Sabol, an overcoat salesman from Philadelphia who began his film career with a Bell & Howell camera he was given as a wedding gift, the company has been run by his son Steve since Ed’s retirement in 1974. Two years after Ed Sabol filmed his first NFL game, his company, Blair Productions, officially changed names when the league’s 14 teams each put up $20,000 to finance NFL Films.
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The NFL Films complex in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, cost more than $50 million to build, covers nearly 200,000 square feet, and houses uncounted thousands of miles of film of every NFL game in every season going back more than 40 years. It’s more than just a handsome showcase for over 90 Emmys; the facility features a state-of-the-art theater and motion picture and television production and postproduction studios. The corridors are a virtual history of football in sport and popular culture, replete with such iconography as the program from the first Army-Navy game in 1893 and all 22 New Yorker covers devoted to football. There are posters of football movies both famous (Jim Thorpe—All American, with Burt Lancaster) and obscure (Two Minutes to Play, with Herman Brix), and Steve Sabol’s own multimedia collages juxtapose such unlikely images as Vince Lombardi, the actress Debra Winger, and the sixteenth-century French essayist Montaigne. In addition to recording NFL games, compiling highlight films, and creating specials on legendary coaches, players, and teams, NFL Films handles projects as diverse as the football sequences from films like Rudy and Jerry Maguire and Bruce Springsteen’s MTV concert. Steve Sabol fielded our questions in a brief lull before the flurry of the 2007 season. The interview is appearing in two parts. I’m not the first one to say this, but I think most fans’ memories of the NFL come from NFL Films. I think we don’t so much remember seeing Bart Starr’s quarterback sneak against Dallas in the 1967 Ice Bowl or Dwight Clark’s catch against the Cowboys in the 1982 championship game so much as we remember seeing the replays on an NFL Films program—in slow motion, with John Facenda’s baritone providing the context. Or am I overstating the case? Well, I’d like to think that you aren’t. George Halas, who is usually credited as the founder of the league, once wrote us a letter saying “the history of pro football will forever be preserved on film and not by the written word à la baseball.” I certainly think it’s true that the history of pro football is a visual one. Before ESPN, most baseball fans knew the great moments of their game by reading about them. I think it’s fair to say that football fans have images in their minds of the NFL’s great moments, and those images come from their depiction by NFL Films. You’re coming up on an anniversary, aren’t you? Wasn’t the first game your father ever filmed the December 30, 1962, championship game between the Green Bay Packers and the New York Giants? My father bid $3,000 for the rights to film that game. He had six cameras; a couple of them froze. The game was played at Yankee Stadium, and I was there, helping my dad. I have two vivid memories from that game. One, the bitter cold and sweeping winds through Yankee Stadium, and second, the impact when the players hit that frozen, rock hard turf. I remember Jim Taylor, the great Green Bay running back, getting stitches in his lip. I remember Ray Nitschke, the Packers’ all-pro linebacker, sitting on the bench with a hood pulled over his head and blood frozen on his chin. How did that film set the tone for what your father and then the two of you would do later? My father had a genius for beaming right in on the heart of a game. He could see that Jim Taylor and the Giants’ great linebacker, Sam Huff, hated each other and went out of their way to kick and gouge every time they came together. He knew when to zoom in when a player struggled to pull himself up after a vicious hit on that frozen turf. He focused on the contrast between the Packers’ coach, Vince Lombardi, who always seemed to be on the verge of exploding, and Giants’ coach, Allie Sherman, who was much more of a cerebral type. We were lucky to have that for a first game [won by the Packers, 16–7] because there were so many legendary players—Taylor, Huff, Paul Hornung, Bart Starr, Nitschke, Frank Gifford, Y. A. Tittle. I think there were more Hall of Famers playing on the field that day than in any other game in NFL history.
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