He Uses Rose-Colored Filter to Catch Olympics on Film

The first thing you notice when you enter Bud Greenspan’s office on East 57th is that he has no computer. You soon discover that he doesn’t know the difference between a portable and a cellular phone and has no notion of how to use either. When he decides to show you a preview of his latest film, he summons an assistant to operate the VCR.

He calls himself a traditionalist, which, in regard to technology, means he has little interest in anything invented after the typewriter. Philosophically, it means he still values honor, glory and the resilience of the human spirit.

Members of the U.S. Congress met with International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch in Washington on Wednesday and heard about what is wrong with the Olympics. I met with Greenspan this week and heard about what is right with them.

If you’ve ever been to an Olympics, you’ve no doubt seen Greenspan because he seems to be at all the venues all the time. You would recognize him by his bald head and the eyeglasses he wears on top of it.

But even if you don’t know him or his name, you’ve probably seen one of his films-- “Wilma,” “Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin,” “16 Days of Glory”--or his “Olympiad” series. He is already working on the official film for the 2000 Summer Games next September in Sydney, Australia.

He is not likely to include much, if anything, in that one about the bribery scandal that has absorbed the IOC for the last year, just as he included but scant mention in previous films about boycotts and anabolic steroids.

His approach to the Olympics would not be appropriate for the mainstream media. But although he is no journalist, and proud of it, he is one of the best reporters I know.

He finds the stories at the Olympics that we miss--the bloodied and almost crippled Tanzanian marathon runner who wouldn’t quit because his country sent him “not to start the race but to finish,” the friendship between Turkish and Greek weightlifters despite the hostility between their countries, Inger Miller wiping away the tears resulting from her fourth place in the 200 meters in Atlanta after her father reminded her “you are fourth best on a planet of 5 billion people.”

“I choose to concentrate 100% of my time on the 90% of the Olympics that is good,” Greenspan said.

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Greenspan’s career as a filmmaker began when his career in the opera stalled. That happens in the opera if you can’t sing. The director of the Metropolitan Opera told Greenspan that he would be fired if he so much as moved his lips.

But while appearing in various productions as an extra, he became friends with another “spear carrier,” John Davis, the heavyweight weightlifting gold medalist in 1948 in London. Four years later, Greenspan accompanied Davis to Helsinki and produced a film of him successfully defending his title. The cost was $5,000.

The U.S. State Department, seeking information about successful African Americans to counter Soviet documentaries during the Korean War about racism in the United States, learned of Greenspan’s film on Davis and offered him $35,000.

“I thought, ‘This is a good business,’ ” Greenspan said.

It wasn’t only the money that inspired him. He was also inspired by the Olympics--the history, tradition, pageantry and, above all else, the valiant efforts of athletes as they seized the moments for which they had trained a lifetime.

He is particularly moved by the stories of athletes overcoming adversity--Jesse Owens and the burden he carried for his race against the Nazi myth of Aryan supremacy, Wilma Rudolph and the leg brace she wore as a child through bouts with pneumonia and scarlet fever, Dan Jansen and his falls.

As someone who had a speech impediment during childhood, Greenspan can relate. Other children at school laughed at him. His sister hated it when he introduced her because, instead of Sissy, he said, “Thithy.” But, through perseverance and elocution lessons, he was broadcasting regularly over the radio by the time he was 16.

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Romanticist that he is, Greenspan is not so enamored of the five rings that he doesn’t see the tarnish.

“For many years, I felt that the Olympics were on a plateau by themselves,” he said. “Today, they have been downgraded to a level with the Super Bowl, the World Series, the Triple Crown races. It will never get back to the level it was because the mystique is gone. The bubble has burst.”

Greenspan likes Samaranch and considers him a friend but was as skeptical as virtually everyone else when the IOC president declared that the so-called reforms adopted by the organization last weekend in Switzerland had “solved” the crisis.

“I’m still trying to figure out what they did in Lausanne,” Greenspan said.

As for IOC members in general, he called them “fuddy-duddies who should be scrutinized because they really are strange people.”

But the Olympics, he said, are not about them.

“They are about the athletes,” he said. “You want to know about a true crime committed by the IOC? In 1988, after Ben Johnson was stripped of his gold medal, Calvin Smith, who had finished fourth in the 100 meters, was bumped up to third. He was handed his medal in the bowels of the stadium, with no television coverage, no photographs, no fanfare.

“He told me later that he won an Olympic medal and didn’t even have pictures to show his children. But the IOC didn’t want to draw any more attention to the situation. That was a case of them putting their self interests ahead of the athlete’s.

“That should never happen. The thing that has saved the Olympics in every crisis is the athlete. It will be the same in this one. Once the flame is lit, the nonsense disappears.”

I’ve never figured out how someone who wears his glasses on top of his head can see so clearly.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at his e-mail address: randy.harvey@latimes.com.