Ed Sabol called his fledgling company Blair Motion Pictures named af ter his daughter , setting up shop above a Philadelphia delicatessen and doing some educational films during football's off-season. He fil med the championship game, again received praise and again lost money. Having proven himself, he now pestered Rozelle with the idea o f the NFL owning its own film company.
Rozelle, who possessed a backg round in public relations, recognized that the epic way Sabol capture d the NFL could be used to sell tickets, and he presented the idea to the club owners. His film company would become a house organ, renamed NFL Films, and he promised to produce a championship game film each year and a film for each team highlighting their past season.
The teams w ere already spending that much money to produce their own highlight f ilms and, by having a single production company involved, they could control quality. Turning a profit was not an important consideration, but not losing money was. As Sabol rode down the elevator following his successful pitch, the owner of the Baltimore Colts, Carroll Rosen bloom, told him, "Good luck on your new endeavor, but if you even com e back and ask for money, we'll close you down in a second.
S teve Sabol, aside from growing up a football fan, loved movies. As a youngster he was enamored with the award-winning television documenta ry series Victory at Sea, which chronicled World War II with a n innovative score by composer Richard Rodgers and became a key influ ence on NFL Films' style.
The younger Sabol also developed an eye fro m his mother, an art collector. He had been a disinterested college s tudent, however, as a varsity football player and art major at Colora do College who spent much of his free time watching movies. He return ed to Philadelphia and father and son quickly proved to be a good com bination.
The elder Sabol knew how to run a business and was an accom plished schmoozer, and his son was filled with ideas about how to bri ng the reality of the game to the screen. A Japanese editor who did not know football but did understand film language moved the company away from the tradition of showing a football play from beginning to end.
Instead, NFL Films began to break a play into parts, and as a re sult developed a montage approach that was given full expression in t he film They Call It Pro-Football, which also featured th e narration of John Facenda, a longtime Philadelphia news anchor whos e rich voice and commanding delivery elevated the material.
According to Business Journal of New Jersey, the film was uniq ue because it "wasn't written in complete sentences; it was written i n sentence fragments. The music wasn't march music; it was contempora ry. The whole concept was completely new, adding a sense of drama and glory. He provided a muscular soundtrack that became another hallmark of an NFL Films production. Spence continued to work for the company for many years despite living in Munich.
Acc ording to Steve Sabol, he would hum a few bars of what he was looking for over the phone and Spence would take it from there. With a few championship game films, dozens of team season summaries, and They Call It Pro-Football to its credit, NFL Films began f inding more ways to package all the film it shot. By this time the co mpany was spending a considerable amount of money on film because eve ry play was shot in slow motion.
People loved the slow-motion shots, and Ed Sabol, who came from the school of "the customer is always rig ht," decided to give the people what they wanted.
In the beginning it was shown late at night and other odd hours, b ut eventually moved into better time slots. Also in , NFL Films f ound a way to make use of some of the film that never made it into th e highlights, especially the more unusual plays, including the fumble s and mistakes.
The humorous result was called the Football Follie s, which a league official initially rejected because he thought it humiliated the players. But Rozelle decided to show the film to so me players to see what they thought. The Philadelphia Eagles players who viewed the film at training camp roared their delight. The Fol lies was released, and would one day become a video bestseller th at not only spawned Follies sequels but launched the bloopers genre that became a TV mainstay.
Other firsts in the s included t he use of graphics to explain strategy, the miking of the first coach the Philadelphia Eagles' Joe Kuharich , filming inside a locker roo m before a game, and the first use of mm telephoto lenses in spor ts. NFL Films had gained a solid enough reputation in the s to attrac t the attention of Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Leagues, which both approached the company about doing work for them. Ed Sabol, however, did not want to be stretched too thin, electing i nstead to continue to focus on football.
By the end of the decade pro fessional football had made great strides in popularity. The presence of NFL Films' cameras allowed for the preservation of video footage from many of the NFL's s era games in an era when sports telecasts were either broadcast live without any recording or whose films and tapes were destroyed and recycled for later use.
In comparison, other major leagues that lacked the film resources that the NFL had have archives missing all the way up through the s, with much of the time before that preserved only by Canadian television broadcasters. In addition to covering the National Football League, NFL Films has also ventured into other unrelated documentary films, such as documenting the Munich Olympics massacre for one of NBC 's Olympics telecasts, and serving as back-up film photography for other major events.
It also produced the video for Journey 's hit single " Faithfully ". This enables the film that is shot at each game to be rushed back to the Mt. Laurel facility and processed immediately so as to give the production team the maximum amount of time to produce its weekly shows.
The lab is open to the public for development needs. Clients include feature length and short films shot on location in Philadelphia as well as students at local universities. The current lab is the third incarnation. Laurel, NJ. That entire one-story building has since been razed and replaced with a modern 4 story office building. Laurel behind a 2-story glass wall.
This allows visitors to the offices to see the inner workings of the entire processing lab. Those on morning tours can often watch as employees develop film for use in weekly shows.
NFL Films Lab is also in charge of the archiving and maintenance of the vault. Containing over continuous years of football footage, the vault houses all of the film that NFL Films has shot or acquired from other sources in its entire history.
But the tour's highlight was stepping into Sabol's game room, which remains untouched, just as he left it. Artifacts worthy of the Hall of Fame , including an autographed Sammy Baugh helmet, stand in tribute to the lifelong love and commitment that Sabol had for the game.
To the right stood Sabol's office, also untouched, but we dared not enter. That's sacred ground. After the outdoors ceremony wrapped, with many a teary eye and the sun shining bright, NFL Films employees headed into the lobby for a reception and a chance to share stories about their late leader.
Football is better. Following some thoughts about retirement, LeSean McCoy's quest for the right situation on the right team continues two weeks ahead of clubs reporting for training camp. Another week of training camp is kicking off. The regular season is just around the corner, and NFL Network has you covered with wall-to-wall training camp coverage each day starting at 10 a.
Follow along here as we keep up with all the news, injuries and transactions of the day. Chandler Jones was one of the best talents in the NFL a season ago, but the Cardinals were still one of the worst defenses in the league? Will that change in ?
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