How ‘Winning Time’s’ Rollerblade-Wearing Cameraman Helped Capture More Than L.A. Lakers Gameplay On the Court
Season one of “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty” ended on an appropriately triumphant note with the Los Angeles Lakers’ victory over the Boston Celtics in the 1980 NBA Championships. Not only was Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly) vindicated after his tumultuous first year as franchise owner, but budding superstar Earvin “Magic” Johnson (Quincy Isaiah) and his seasoned counterpart Kareen Abdul-Jabbar (Solomon Hughes) put aside their differences to unite their teammates both on and off the court. For the acclaimed HBO series, repeating that success — dramatically, much less historically — would prove a more difficult challenge, and not just because in real life the Lakers wouldn’t win a second title for two years, and three more for a third.
After helming two episodes in Season One (including that nail-biting finale), Salli Richardson-Whitfield graduated to executive producer for Season Two. Looking forward not only at the complicated trajectory of the team but also the limitations of continuing to recreate famous plays from an historically well-documented ball club, she was armed with different goals for the show as she returned to the director’s chair three more times. “If you just want to see basketball, especially some of these iconic scenes, you could just go to YouTube,” Richardson-Whitfield tells Variety. “How do we really get into these men’s heads, and what are they thinking and feeling on that basketball court?”
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She and her fellow directors from Season One worked from the style established by director Adam McKay on the pilot, which used multiple film formats (35mm, 16mm, 8mm and various vintage video cameras) to achieve a period verisimilitude. Working with cinematographer Todd Banhazl, Richardson-Whitfield took that “inherently experimental” approach and pushed it further in season two, not just shaking up which formats were used but employing them in different ways. “Season one, the joy, was making it feel like it was archival footage,” says Banhazl. “As season two developed deeper into the eighties, we wanted to follow that with the format, so that hopefully the audience feels the romance of the seventies starts to go away, and the capitalist glamour of the eighties start coming in.”
After previously using television cameras only from the exact places where real ones were used during a game’s original broadcast, Banhazl had his cameramen deploy them to capture the emotion of the performers rather than just their actions with the ball. “We would have operators on the TV cameras be handheld on the court,” he says. “Adrien Brody looks like Pat Riley, especially on these old vintage television cameras, but the camera is doing something that a cinema camera would do. It’s really emotional.”
Fueling that emotion was the volatile timeline of the Lakers’ rise and fall after their 1980 win, which prevented “Winning Time” cocreators Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht from being able to map out ten more episodes around a single season of game play, yet still required a cohesive narrative trajectory. As Season Two expanded its timeline to cover the period between 1980 and ’84, Richardson-Whitfield pitched an ambitious sequence for its penultimate episode, “BEAT L.A.,” that would encapsulate the escalating rivalry between Magic and Larry Bird and set up their showdown in the 1984 championships. “We were trying to figure out how to have these two teams play each other across an entire playoff series,” Banhzal remembers. “Sally came up with idea that basically it could be like Bird and Magic were playing each other, even though they weren’t in the same game all the time.”
Adds Richardson-Whitfield, “It started with, ‘I feel like it should feel like this revolving circle as they collide,’ and then we just started building on that.”
As the series’ rollerblade-wearing camera operator, John Lyke was pivotal from early on in the show’s history in making the players look good as they traversed the court. Though he’d been granted the freedom in season one to follow the action intuitively, panning from one player to the next as they pass or shoot the ball, Lyke would have to be precise with his camerawork to ensure that all of the sequence’s pieces would fit together in the editing room. “Because it’s jumping between different games, if you made a change in shot two, that affected every single other shot,” Lyke says.
Lyke would end up filming the two teams playing a series of games against multiple opponents — and on different courts. Production designer Richard Toyon was responsible for sourcing interchangeable, NBA-approved floors for both the Lakers and Celtics so that Magic could make a free throw in one arena and Bird could intercept it in another, shot weeks apart and later seamlessly combined into a showstopping single take. “We used a real NBA court and we had a company that came in and built it,” Toyon says. “We owned a Celtics floor, so we could go back and forth between them.”
While his work with the courts was meant to draw viewers’ eyes to the players and the story they’re telling, Toyon’s research led him to include details that would lend authenticity to the differences between the teams, their venues and even their fans. “The signage in Los Angeles was much larger, much more corporate, and the stuff in Boston was much more homespun,” Toyon says. “And the costumes in Hollywood tended to be no sweaters and very glitzy. Then when you go to one of the Eastern venues, then there was a lot of plaid and flannel, and very heavy.”
Visual effects supervisor Ray McIntyre Jr. further indicates that pulling it off required as much practice and preparation as, say, a professional sports team hoping to earn another championship. “The A and B side of these takes, they’re not something you shoot and then you immediately shoot the other side and it’s all fresh in everybody’s memory,” says McIntyre. “Since we’d have to maybe add a CG basketball and stitch the CG Forum arena to the CG Boston Garden arena, I had to choose with Sally the hero take and then sit with the rollerblade operator, and we had noted his exact position, so on the B side of that pass we could show him where he had to be on the court surface.
“There’s 10 stitch transitions in that big sequence, it’s almost two minutes long, and that’s how they were all done.”
Banhazl credits Richardson-Whitfield for being a leader with the court vision to keep all of these challenges in mind and yet ensure that what’s on screen is not just technically precise but emotionally gripping. “Her superpower is working with the actors, so whatever needs to happen for the camera emotionally, that’s what we’re going to do,” he says. “She can hold in her mind what’s important about the script, how to make the actors feel comfortable, and also she’s aware of all the technical challenges that are going on. And when you have someone like that, then we can all collaborate to solve the problems together.”
It was on the same day as “What Is and What Should Never Be,” the Richardson-Whitfield-directed finale, that HBO cancelled “Winning Time,” an end that sadly dovetailed into the Lakers’ ignominious 1984 loss to the Celtics that concluded Season Two. As a filmmaker who’s perfected the redemption arc (at least on screen), Richardson-Whitfield isn’t ready to give up hope for the show’s future, but she says she’s proud of what her team achieved behind the cameras. “Anything can happen,” she says. “Whatever I dream of, whatever the writers dream of, we just do it and we believe it’s the right choice. We are leaving it all out there on the floor.”
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