“A festival, like a basketball team, is never the work of one person,” said Sky Sitney, artistic director of the Silverdocs Film Festival, as she opened the weeklong event on Monday night.
True, but one person can make both of those things a whole lot bigger. That’s why flashbulbs popped, red carpets rolled out, a band marched and police closed off streets in downtown Silver Spring, largely due to the presence of one man: LeBron James, whose high school team was the subject of the festival’s opening film, “More Than a Game” (he also ended up executive producing it).
And afterwards, he and his former teammates took to the stage for a Q&A with NPR’s Michele Norris.
When asked about the Hummer his mother purchased, which got him temporarily suspended from high school ball, he smiled and said, “They said it was 55 [thousand dollars]. It was about 65. Plus the rims, about 68. Plus the stereo, about 70.”
His high school coach, Dru Joyce, told how the team came in 9th place and 8th place, respectively, in successive years at the AAU national tournament. Then came hormones. “In 7th grade they didn’t place,” he said. “That’s when the girl thing started happening. … We’re losing. They were eager to get back to the hotel. All because of the girls in the pool.”
“How old are you at 7th grade?” James asked.
“Thirteen,” came the reply.
“OK,” he said with a nod, conceding the point.
But the theme of the night was the camaraderie that exists between the teammates, who’ve been friends since grade school. My house “was like a Chuck E. Cheese for kids,” said James. “We had all the video games. It added all those brothers and sisters I never had.”
And they still keep in close touch. “I feel like I see LeBron every day,” joked teammate Sian Cotton. “Because I do.”
And filmmaker Kristopher Belman explained what it was like to make the film. When, as seniors, the team trailed at halftime during the state championship, Belman said, “I was about ready to push the coach aside and give the halftime speech.”
The reason the film took so long to make, he said, was because for two years he kept having “the same meeting”: every producer just wanted to buy his footage of LeBron. That is, until LeBron himself, and producer Harvey Mason stepped in to let him tell the full story.
On hand in the theater: Mark Shriver, Clarence Page, Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett, Discovery’s David Zaslov, Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, PBS’s Gwen Ifill and State Comptroller Peter Franchot.
l. to r: Willie McGee, LeBron James, “Little” Dru Joyce III, Romeo Travis, Kristopher Belman, Sian Cotton, Dru Joyce II (Photo: Nick Coutts)
James takes a White House tour before the screening. (Photo: Carrie Devorah)
