ALONG FOR THE RIDE
‘Winning Time’ used a rollerblade-wearing operator to capture key game scenes
Season 1 of HBO’S “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 Kareem Abdul-jabbar (Solomon Hughes) put aside their differences to unite their teammates both on and off the court.
Repeating that success would prove a more difficult challenge, given the team’s record the subsequent season and how well documented it was during that era.
“If you just want to see basketball, especially some of these iconic scenes, you could just go to Youtube,” Salli Richardson-whitfield, a director on the first season who graduated to executive producer for the second, tells Variety. “How do we really get into these men’s heads, and what are they thinking and feeling on that basketball court?”
She and her fellow directors from the first season worked from the style established by director Adam Mckay on the pilot, which used multiple film formats to achieve period verisimilitude. Working with cinematographer Todd Banhazl, Richardson-whitfield pushed the look further, shaking up formats and how they were used.
“Season 1, the joy was making it feel like it was archival footage,” says Banhazl. “As Season 2 developed deeper into the ’80s, we wanted to follow that with the format, so that hopefully the audience feels the romance of the ’70s start to go away, and the capitalist glamour of the ’80s start coming in.”
As Season 2 expanded its timeline to cover the period between 1980 and 1984, Richardson-whitfield pitched an ambitious sequence for its penultimate episode that would encapsulate the escalating rivalry between Johnson 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,” Banhazl remembers. “Salli came up with the 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.”
As the rollerblade-wearing camera operator, John Lyke needed to ensure that all the 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 ended up filming the teams playing a series of games against multiple opponents and on different courts — one representing the Boston Garden, the other the L.A. Forum. Seamlessly combining the shots required as much practice and preparation as, say, a professional sports team hoping to earn another championship.
“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 Salli 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,” points out visual effects supervisor Ray Mcintyre Jr.
“There’s 10 stitch transitions in that big sequence. It’s almost two minutes long, and that’s how they were all done.”
HBO ended up canceling “Winning Time” the same day that the Richardson-whitfield-directed finale aired, an end that sadly dovetailed into the Lakers’ ignominious 1984 loss to the Celtics that concluded Season 2. 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 says she’s proud of what her team achieved behind the cameras: “Anything can happen. 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.”