NFL Films is scoring high - NFL Films Inc

Nation's Business, Sept, 1988 by Glen Macnow

NFL Films Is Scoring High

Back in 1976, the National Football League decided that Tokyo would be a great place for an NFL exhibition game. After all, a weekly program of football highlights--shot by the folks at NFL Films, Inc.--had long ranked among Japan's most popular TV shows.

Imagine how the Japanese would go for the real thing, league officials figured.

Imagine, indeed. Early in the game's second quarter, players heard a hissing noise--the Oriental equivalent of booing--from the stands, and it grew louder as the game progressed. Only after the game was over did the players learn why the fans had protested: The live action, slowed by huddles, timeouts and penalties, didn't match the unrelieved excitement the Japanese viewers expected as a result of watching the weekly highlight programs.

Never mind the real thing, Japanese fans were saying. We want out NFL Films version.

For more than 25 years, the people at NFL Films have been influencing the way the rest of us watch football. Their cinematic portrayal of the sport--a reverential, sentimental, often somber drama of colliding linemen, scrambling quarterbacks, quick receivers and scremaing coaches--has furthered the marriage of football and television. "They may have done more to promote professional football than anything other than the games themselves," says Val Pinchbeck, the league's director of broadcasting.

Along the way, NFL Films has grown from three people laboring above a Philadelphia delicatessen to a staff of 140 working in one of the East Coast's most technically advanced laboratories. The company produces eight weekly cable television shows, plus regular segments for three major commercial networks and 10 one-hour specials a year. (The company's activities do not include live coverage of NFL games, which is handled by the networks that buy the rights for such coverage.)

This year, NFL Films' customized, $80,000 cameras will shoot about 500 miles of film--more than enough to stretch from the company's $21 million headquarters in the Philadelphia suburb of Mount Laurel, N.J., to the NFL Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

NFL Films is second only to the U.S Army in the amount of movie film it buys from Eastman Kodak, and it is one of the few production houses still using only film for shooting. Although film costs more than the videotape commonly used in TV news and feature programs, film produces images with greater cinematic texture and richness, according to Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films.

"Videotape is for journalism," says Sabol. "We are storytellers, historians. Film has a romance to it. If you saw 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' in videotape, it wouldn't have the same feel."

Many of the company's films, of course, are released in videotape versions for distribution to consumers with VCRs, much as Hollywood films are also made available on videotape.

Four of the five top-selling sports videos of all time were made by NFL Films. The latest version of the hilarious blooper collection, "Football Follies," is in 600,000 American households, largely because Sports Illustrated offered it as a subscription premium.

This year the firm will produce highlight films for all 28 NFL clubs, several Super Bowl films, a rather esoteric "Get the Feeling" series for sale through Sports Illustrated (with titles such as "Finesse" and "Power"), plus a dozen or so additional titles based on whatever subjects strike the fancy of Sabol and his creative assistants.

The company also shoots commercials, promotional tapes and rock videos; it has done work for Bruce Springsteen, Cindy Lauper and the rock group Journey. About 20 percent of NFL Films' work is unrelated to the NFL, Sabol says, "but the NFL is our bread and butter. We will never stray from that."

The 35 Emmy Awards that the company has won for achievements in television are displayed in Sabol's office. His desk is strewn with football cards and art books, and on one wall is an autographed photo of the late coach Vince Lombardi, now remembered in the Hall of Fame, who wrote: "To Steve, a real schmuck if ever I met one. Vince."

Walking the halls of his empire in Reebok athletic shoes, Sabol, 45, says that the story of the creation of NFL Films is "too corny to be believable." In 1962, Sabol's father, Ed Sabol, decided to link his future with that of the NFL. The senior Sabol, a retired overcoat manufacturer then in his 40s, pulled his old Bell & Howell movie camera from the closet and offered NZL Commissioner Pete Rozelle a then-outlandish fee of $5,000 for the movie rights to that year's championship game.

The elder Sabol had no filmmaking experience beyond shooting his son's prep-school games. But he knew that most football films--usually shot by one cameraman posted high in the stands at the 50-yard line--failed to capture the intensity of the action.

So "Big Ed," as he has long been known, hired free-lance cameramen to try something different in filming the championship game between the New York Giants and the Green Bay Packers. He ordered one cameraman to shoot in a way that would produce slow-motion footage, another to shoot only the players on the benches. He wrote a short script and set the film to music patterned on the theme of "Peter Gunn," a television hit of the time.