American Cinematographer - October 1995 - 71

his

day job

as an overcoat

necessarily the action but the de¬

sales¬

tails: the cleat marks, the

Sabol bid $3,000 to shoot the

man,

1962 NFL

Championship game be¬

mud, the

the sun comes through the
portals of a stadium, flags blowing
against the sky. One of my fa¬

way

tween the New York Giants and

the Green

Bay Packers. After win¬
ning the rights, Sabol took to the

vorite moviemakers

Leni

was

Yankee Stadium sidelines himself

Riefenstahl, who shot the 1936

to direct the

Olympic film. She used the sky in
a
way that increased the grandeur
and the epic sense of the competi¬

camera

and shoot live
'

sound.

By 1964, Sabol had six
cameramen in his
employ, but the
National Football League was fast
becoming big business. Fearing
that his small company would be
swallowed up by the conglomer¬

tion. So I had

a

lot of

our camera¬

shooting from lower angles to
get parts of the sky and the clouds
men

films, and it had

our

a

big influence

him!" For confirmation, one
need only study that classic film's
balletic violence and plentiful
slow-motion gunplay.
on

To the
handled

never

layman who has

a

600mm lens carry¬

ing mere inches of depth of field, it
is impossible to describe the diffi¬
culty of maintaining perfect focus
on

a

In 1965,

ond, that film goes through the

NFL Films created

groundbreaking first feature,
"They Call it Pro Football."
Scripted by Steve Sabol, who had
recently graduated from college,
and narrated in the booming bari¬
tone of soon-to-be-legendary Phila¬
delphia newscaster John Facenda,
the first words spoken were, "It

camera

fast."
McElwee is

an

chine,

a position he held for two
before transferring into the
camera
department. Once there, he
spent years assisting a trio of NFL

Films cameramen, each of whom

into the frame. It just gave

the sport

gave McElwee different insights
into what it takes to be a "ground
man" - that somewhat mythical
NFL Films figure who takes to the
sidelines each week in search of the
elusive "glory shots" that will bur¬

the television networks formed the

was

public's impressions of the sport.
going

painter Paul Cezanne said that

Hollywood portrayed fiction, he
also found himself being inspired
by the larger-than-life images of
the big screen. "The ending of Duel
in the Sun, with Gregory Peck and
Jennifer Jones climbing up a moun¬
tain, really influenced me," Sabol
asserts. "[I liked] the way it was
done, with the details of just their
fingers digging into the rock and
the sweat coming down Gregory
Peck's face; I thought it would be
interesting to film football that
way, using a telephoto lens to
show the grit and the striving and
the lineplay, the same way that this
film showed the actors crawling up
this mountain through details."
By the same token, NFL
Films' distinctive style would
eventually be emulated by one of
the supreme mavens of film may¬

all art is selected detail. I felt that

hem in the 1960s. "[Director] Sam

"A lot of times when you're looking
through the eyepiece of the camera,

lot of

something will flash through the

things from us," beams Sabol. "Ap¬

frame," McElwee describes. "Ernie

aes¬

"I went back to

a

lot of the

great Renaissance painters who
used

technique called chiar¬
oscuro, which is a way of using
light to heighten certain dramatic
effects," Sabol explains. "There was
an 18th
Century painter named Di
Churico who painted the old Ro¬
man

a

Coliseum and other architec¬

ture, and the way he used to
his subjects influenced how
stadiums.

"The French
tic

was

frame
I shot

impressionis¬

something that I could do well
shooting not

as a cameraman

-

reflexes.

years

a more

thetic terms.

split-

NFL Films

revolutionary at a time when the
stolid, bird's-eye video images of

vaguely been thought of in

expert

pany for 27 years running. His first
was stacking film that had just
come out of the
processing ma¬

whistle and ends with

back to his art studies to re-conceptualize a sport whose behemoth¬
like combatants and testosteronefueled violence had never even

an

eye and
second

job

gun." NFL Films was on its way.
The dramatic, super-slowmotion images - captured from
ground level - and the rich tex¬

Steve Sabol found himself

both

"lifer," having worked for the com¬

a

were

Shooting such
action requires

camera

its

film

City

Chiefs'
defensive line.

camera¬

off! When you're shooting
slow-motion at 150 frames per sec¬

ture inherent in 16mm

Kansas

Hank McElwee says simply.
"And if you lose focus, turn the

$20,000. The company was then

a

a

hole in the

man

re-christened NFL Films.

starts with

Diego
Chargers
running back
bursts through

halfback with 4.3-second

tice," veteran NFL Films

buy Blair

Motion Pictures, with each of the
14 teams then in the league putting

up

A San

speed in the 40-yard dash. How is
it done? "Practice, practice, prac¬

ates, Sabol convinced NFL com¬
missioner Pete Rozelle to

parently, in an old issue of Cahiers
du Cinema, he wrote that before he
made The Wild Bunch he saw one of

epic, mythic feeling."
Since Sabol's stated

to

goal

portray football the way

Peckinpah actually got

October 1995

a

their way into football fans'
subconscious minds for a lifetime.
"From Steve Sabol, I learned

row

how to make

a

frame of film tell

a

story," McElwee recounts. "He
would say, 'You don't just shoot
the thing in the center of the frame,
you've gotta look all around the
sides. It's like drawing a painting.'
From

[cameraman] Howard Neef,

I learned

professionalism; Howard

gets behind the camera and he's like
mechanic. And from Ernie Ernst, I
learned how to have a good time."
Ernst was the only pho¬
a

tographer to capture Franco Har¬
legendary "Immaculate Recep¬
tion" in a 1972 AFC playoff game
between the Pittsburgh Steelers
ris'

and the Oakland Raiders, one of
NFL Films' most indelible moments.

American

Cinematographer

69
American Cinematographer - October 1995

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