For Willie Ebersol, there’s a big difference between telling a story and telling somebody what happened. It’s an important perspective to have if you’re a documentary filmmaker, especially if you’ve been asked to add to ESPN’s “30 For 30” catalog.
The ESPN’s “30 For 30” series has grown and changed since it first broadcasted Kings Ransom in 2009. The series has expanded to the point where it has a podcast and three volumes of documentaries. The growth of the brand has allowed the series to tackle different sports stories in a variety of ways, even when the game itself is merely the backdrop to the real story.
Strike Team —the latest in the “30 For 30 Shorts” series — is one of those stories. Directed by Ebersol, the short is one of two features involving Washington’s NFL franchise that the network will premiere on the same night. September 12’s double feature starts at 8 p.m. with John Dorsey’s Year of the Scab, which tells the story of Washington’s 1987 squad during the NFL’s players strike.
After that airs, the 24-minute Strike Team captures a very different moment in team history from the same era. Ebersol’s team took lessons they learned from making a “30 For 30” about the rise and fall of the XFL and applied them to a different medium. Shorter, and with the football itself serving as the backdrop for one of the more interesting sting operations in American history, Strike Team is a documentary made of footage shot during the planning and execution of a clever US Marshals operation.
On December 15, 1985, Washington hosted the Cincinnati Bengals at RFK Stadium. Marshals lured hundreds of fugitives into their grasp using a contest where the criminals had “won” free tickets to the game, hoping they would show up to claim them and get arrested along the way.
The documentary is full of old footage from the planning, execution and aftermath of the sting. It also has some tremendous mustaches.
“It’s so rare for a documentary to actually place an audience inside an event from over 30 years ago,” director Willie Ebersol said. “But after discovering a treasure trove of never-before-seen footage, we were able to give viewers a front row seat to this fun and wild operation, from conception to execution, making sure to not miss a single epic 80’s mustache along the way.”
Ebersol spoke with Uproxx about directing the film and how he framed a police procedural in a “30 For 30” where the game itself isn’t nearly as interesting as what’s happening elsewhere that Sunday. He also shared an exclusive clip of the sting as it first unfolds, giving us a look at what we’ll see on September 12 when Strike Team premieres.
How did you come across this story and what made you decide it was worth making a documentary about it?
I read a story about at the end of 2015 on a 30th anniversary when a couple pieces ran. And I, like most people who hear this story, couldn’t believe it was real. I just thought that’s exaggerated or that’s just something that people say but not really what happened. A big part of that too is that it’s 30 years later. So a lot of these stings actually appear in pop culture, you know, it’s been in movies.
Al Pacino actually takes this sting, almost verbatim, and just copies it with Yankees tickets or Yankees baseball cards instead (in Sea of Love). So it just seemed like it should be on a movie and not real. And as I looked more into it and did more research I just couldn’t believe the kind of outrageousness of the whole thing. It’s really a rare instance of real life seeming like a movie.
So anyway, then as we started to look into it one of my producers, Fairouz El-Baz, who’s fantastic, really started trying to find us more and more of the source footage. And she stumbled upon 72 tapes, Betamax tapes, so 24 hours of footage from the film crew that had been embedded on this sting. Basically throughout the entire process, planning, set up, execution, and even the press conference afterward. Every step of the way this film crew is there. And all of a sudden it wasn’t just some kind of vague thing to me. It was this unbelievably, fully alive story. And we just realized that we could tell this story in a really unique way. By going to put the audience right in the shoes of the Marshall as the whole thing went down.
So actually, when you see the whole thing, we never cut to an interview, we never cut to, you know, an HD still frame to tell our story. Everything is either the original Beta or degraded b-roll, original Marshall’s photos, all that kinda stuff. So it actually is like an artifact from the 80s.
Not having any interviews or present-day footage is a bit out of character for a “30 For 30.” When you have that much material did it make those kind of interviews unnecessary?
Yeah, so we used interview voice over a little bit, not much, but we never cut to the faces. I really noticed is as we were running this together was it took you out of the story into a different time frame and it didn’t feel necessary. A big part of this was that I was kind of, you know, so overwhelmed, in a good way, by all this footage. We had so much footage, we didn’t have to fall into the kinda standard documentary format where you go to archival footage and then you cut to like a really sharp super pristine sit down interview, and then back to archival. That rhythm is nice, and it’s the rhythm we know, but it also doesn’t really allow you to live in the moment.
We have them making the phone calls to confirm the reservations with the criminals and it’s all in the office with these Marshals doing the job and doing the phone calling and both decided to call them, it’s a real unprecedented level of access. A level of access that you may not even get today if you were making it today. And this is from 30 years ago, so it’s like a time capsule. And we wanted to kinda live inside that capsule.
So who exactly was filming all of this? Were these government records or was someone inside the Marshals capturing all this for posterity?
No, there was a news crew that was following them. Because the Marshals had done a few stings and the media had been very interested. Because the thing that’s so fascinating about the Marshals is that as an organization they don’t have a ton of money, especially in the 80s they were really struggling. And in the late 70’s they took over basically all of the FBI’s arrest warrants.
Like, they would go around and arrest everybody. And they didn’t get a budget increase. So they got all the cases, and no budget increase. So what they would do is, they would do these stings that were really, really cost effective, and really efficient that were good for them because you know, they’re arresting people. I think the average cost of arrest at the time is a little over $1,000 and the average cost of arrest from this event was a little over 100 dollars, like 170 dollars.
So basically for 1/10th the price, they were arresting people and saving a ton of money, but the other kind of thing they realized was these stings generated press and attention. So they could take that press and attention and get more funding. So in a weird way they were saving money and also you know, using it to enhance their standing.
And that’s what this sting really did, it really put the Marshals on a map in a major way. It’s a story that didn’t just play locally, it played nationally, internationally. You know this sting is replicated up all across the world, in Europe and I think Asia. So it had a big cultural footprint, but also it was just so great for the Marshals. It helped get them attention, helped get them more funding, which they desperately needed at the time.
I think some of the best “30 For 30s” use sports not as a focal point, but as a backdrop for something that’s a little bit larger than that. Did you kinda take that lens on this when you were looking at how to frame this properly?
Yeah, and so a big part of this is ESPN really wanting to do kinda ’30 For 30 crime.’ You know, getting into these tangential things that aren’t necessarily full on sports stories. And that was one of the most refreshing experiences about working on the documentary is that ESPN was so supportive of us telling the best version of the story. And so around the middle of the documentary there’s a big piece where everything kinda looks like it’s gonna fall part because, I don’t know if you remember but, it’s the year that Joe Theismann’s leg got crushed. He broke his leg.
And so he broke his leg two months before the operation, and they were terrified that everyone was just gonna think, ‘Oh, the Redskins aren’t gonna win anymore, so those tickets are useless.’ And, unbelievably the Redskins rallied and had a good, you know, had a decent standing in the game that they played. It was late December when they did this sting, that game still had playoff implications so the people we so excited about the team that there’s this real moment.
We felt like it was so good to work in this Joe Theismann angle, and ESPN said, ‘We love it and we think it’s great and it’s important but only if you need it. Like don’t feel obligated just cause it’s a football theme.’ And that was so great because we were able to just put in the moments that worked for our story without feeling like, you know, the need to just get into the tons of highlights and things like that. And make it feel like just a sports documentary when it’s kind of a police procedural.
You’ve worked with ESPN on documentaries before, right?
This actually our third, technically. The one my brother (Charlie Ebersol) directed, ‘This Was The XFL’ that was on in February, which was fantastic. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s a lot of fun. We had the same production team behind this. So same editor, you know, Charlie produced this one. Fairouz El-Baz is also EP on that one as well. We have a great team there.
And when I was 20 I followed Shaun White around and did a documentary on him called ‘Don’t Look Down.’ We followed him for 9 months after he won the Olympics, basically seeing how you kinda follow that up, and we did the 2007 season. Then we went to Africa, and then we did the X Games, and that aired on ESPN in 2009. And actually the funny thing is that I sold it to Conner (Schell), who went on to be the head of 30 for 30.
So what did you take away from those experiences in just how to approach this sort of unique style? This is a piece that’s solidly set in the past, so is it a different kind of challenge?
Yeah, it’s a great question. You know, all my documentary had been previously living in the moment, you know, being with it. I followed Shawn, I went with him to work in Africa, we were at the school. You know it’s been my experience, even when we’re doing NBC News show, my experience is always that we were doing things in the moment and that would be the story. So getting to tell a story from the past was amazing because what we really got to do was we really, play with the format in the storytelling style.
A big portion of this was really about us trying to capture those 80s moments. So we actually had the title sequence that’s modeled after the A-Team. And we have fun kind of references to things like Magnum PI in our opening sequence, and we have a shot that we like to think of as being a call back to Miami Vice. So we were able to really have a lot of fun and be very playful with the format of everything.
But also the kind of treasure trove of footage that we happened upon was so unbelievably vast that we were able to almost feel like we were there in the moment.
You tried to stay true to that 80s vibe in how it is shot as well. The broadcast version will be in HD but you edited it in box format, right?
Yeah, I mean airing on TV it has to be 16×9, but you know, the cut that we love is — yeah, we shot the whole thing … we edited the whole thing in its original format because it was all shot on Beta. So all of it in that great square format, which I think really helps sell, no not sell, that’s the wrong word. The box format I think really helps capture the time and place.
You know you get to see the images as they were. And it’s funny, you know, as we would do it we would just kind of see things on the lens, or the footage has these, kind of, unbelievable noise and blurs and things like that, that really are irreplicable. Something that we could never, ever recreate, so in a way there we were able to just use the raw footage and it shows off an effect that we could never create on our own. It’s just really cool. It really is kind of amazing.
I love when we put all of the post production work together, they would ask us ‘Oh, do you have a cleaner take of this line?’ And we would be like, ‘No, that is the 1985 Beta, that is the cleanest take you’re gonna get.’ So it was fun to get to really live in that moment. It was a really good time, and I hope that’s what people take away from it is that, you know, this is really just a really refreshingly light and fun documentary and I think people really could, you know, have a good time with it.
The story itself sounds like an episode of The Dollop, a US history podcast where a stand-up comedian tells a true story to another comedian who has never heard of it. History is full weird moments like this, but how rewarding was it to get to tell a story like this?
That’s the other thing that’s so funny about this documentary, or the story rather, is that one of the things that I’ve really learned as I work on it, is that it’s a great example of storytelling. Because whenever I tell someone the story and they ask me what my documentary’s about, I always say, ‘In 1985 there’s this new cable channel that was launching in Washington D.C. and when this cable channel launched they decided to have a big giveaway to give people Redskins tickets. And so they sent out tickets. 100 people showed up, it was a huge event, there was a big screen, there was a guy in a chicken suit, there were cheerleaders giving hugs, there was a huge deal and they brought everyone upstairs 10 by 10, closed the doors and said, by the way you’re all under arrest.’ And people are always, you know, kind of blown away. What? I thought I was hearing something totally different.
And to me it’s just such a testament to great storytelling, which is that like, you know, you think you’re going one way with it and then you end up in a totally different direction. And that’s because if you tell a story that, you know, you say ‘It’s a documentary about the biggest years US Marshals sting in 1985.’ It sounds interesting but it doesn’t have the storytelling of all the twists and turns that it has. It doesn’t do it justice. And so it’s really fun being in that world and playing with that storytelling sandbox. When we get to, you know, really kind of withhold information and then deliver information the way that enhances the storytelling.
Is there anything else people should look out for in the documentary?
We couldn’t be more thrilled for people to see it because I think it’s just such a moment in time, you know? And one of the jokes that we have is that we don’t miss a single 80s mustache. There are some epic, epic mustaches and hair styles. I mean we could just do a documentary on that, on hair and mustaches from the sting.
