Behind All the Glitz, Greenspan Gets Stories

He is here, as always, with the familiar eyeglasses perched on forehead and the pipe in hand. And when Bud Greenspan slides those glasses down into place, he has an Olympic vision like no one else.

If these 1988 Winter Games could be viewed in TV terms as Bud Greenspan vs. ABC Sports, the 60-year-old master sports film producer would be a runaway winner over the self-proclaimed network of the Olympics.

ABC Sports is high tech; Greenspan is high brow. ABC Sports often strangles stories; Greenspan simply tells stories. For all of ABC Sports’ cameras and cables, it sometimes spoils the most provocative moments. It’s a Glitz Blitz. Greenspan cuts to the climactic scenes with stark simplicity.

Greenspan, as he did at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, is writing, producing and directing the official film of these Games. The two-hour film, which will premiere in March 1989 on The Disney Channel, will reflect Greenspan’s international outlook and his remarkable, understated cinematic style.

Greenspan admittedly has a couple of advantages over ABC--the benefit of hindsight, of being able to pick his stories a month after the competition ends--but he thinks his eye for drama could be and should be applied to the network’s daily coverage.

“Network TV coverage is a product of the electronic revolution, and there are no writers,” Greenspan said. “There are no creative persons in the field. They’re tracking stories from the (production) truck. It sounds egomaniacal, but they’re not in my league. I think that I’m the best. They’re not equipped to tell stories.

“They spend so much money inventing some gadgetry, I guess it would be sacrilegious not to use it. But they get lost in the technology. . . . The unfortunate part is the networks’ belief that the attention span of people is such that they have to go, ‘Here, here, here,’ just like that.”

The ABC-Greenspan contrast could readily be seen last Sunday night in the compelling story of U.S. speed skater Dan Jansen. Jansen’s sister died early that morning and, in the moments before his race, ABC’s Gary Bender and Eric Heiden engaged in wall-to-wall chatter about Jansen’s emotions and mental preparation. And when Jansen fell early in the race, they shouted immediately about the “bad break” for the American.

All the talk choked away some of the natural tension.

If Greenspan were filming live, he said, he might’ve put a camera on Jansen and followed him closely for about a minute before the race. When the race began, he would show Jansen and his opponent in a wide shot, then zeroed in on Jansen for a good while after the fall--all of this with barely a word from any announcer. If the drama is naturally there, silence enhances it.

“I think the big mistake is the disservice the networks do to the audience,” Greenspan said. “If you saw a dog hit by a car, everyone--the police officer, the mailman, the child, the mobster--can feel it because we all have had a dog. You don’t have to tell us that this is emotional or this is a big moment. We all have emotions; the networks should give us those moments for ourselves.”

Greenspan is here searching for those moments, aided by 16 cameras (ABC uses 22 on the downhill alone) and a staff of 100. The Canadian government requires that 95% of his staff be Canadian, so he breaks in new cameramen, for instance, with seminars to orient them to the Greenspan way and to “give them a re-education from the TV coverage they’re used to.”

Every day, Greenspan picks a spot where he thinks there might be a compelling story. He’s often wrong--”about 80% of what we think we’re going to do we don’t do”--but he has the luxury of making adjustments later.

After the Games end Feb. 28, Greenspan will take two weeks off, then spend three weeks of looking at film from 12 to 15 hours a day. He’ll select the stories he wants by April 1 and finish by July 1.

He likes to subtitle his work, “What You Didn’t See at the Olympics.”

“I like to humanize the different countries,” he said. “Recently, I was talking to (an East German newspaper columnist) and I said, ‘You guys seem like automatons. Isn’t there anything we can do to humanize you people?’ He told me that on the last night of the Games, they give a dinner for the team--but the only people allowed to go are those who did not win medals, to reward them for giving so much.

“I’ll be there to film that. Here are the East Germans, who we only think in terms of a single-minded pursuit for medals, and this might be a new insight that helps humanize them.”