Sports and Hollywood Collide

In 1998, Hollywood produced a film titled An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. It details a hapless director named Alan Smithee, who wishes to disown a film he has directed but finds out he cannot, due to the fact that his name is the same as the pseudonym used for orphaned films. This realization sets off a chain of events that become ever more ridiculous, with Smithee stealing the film he has made and threatening to burn it.

The movie was an epic flop: it grossed a total of 45,779 dollars, despite having an estimated budget of 10 million. A cursory examination of its premise reveals the reasons for the movie’s failure: the casual moviegoer would probably not have known the Alan Smithee reference beforehand, and many jokes that may have been funny to thespians barely registered with a general audience.

10 million is still a lot of money by any measure—someone with enough experience and power had to have thought the venture worthy enough to undertake. What then, could have caused such an error in judgment? My personal theory is that the decision makers let their narrow worldview get to them. Having spent most of their adult lives in Hollywood, most of the people the producers knew probably found the inside humor to be funny. How could the world be any other way?

I cite Hollywood here only as an example. An incomplete worldview is something that affects us all. Whoever we are, we are likely to have more friends and acquaintances who agree with us than ones who don’t, reinforcing our preexisting views about the world. Sports journalists are no exception. Writers such as Bill Simmons got their big break because readers were tired of the old guard, the bespectacled haughty newspaper men who prided themselves on having exclusive access, and not on providing the coverage that readers wanted. As the gatekeepers to the world of professional sports, how could such writers be wrong about what should be covered?

I myself was guilty of this tunneled worldview just two days ago. As our Columbia Lions were locked in mortal combat with Princeton on Saturday, I scoffed at the people leaving at halftime. How could you be leaving? The score is 25-23! This could be the last time Columbia beats a Killer P in years! Sure enough, the second half turned out to be as much of a dogfight as the first­—the game was not decided until a Mack Montgomery steal with less than 40 seconds left to go.

One could deduce from that observation all sorts of conclusions—that Columbia athletics will never matter, or that the students at this school are ill-suited to be sports fans. But would such statements really be accurate? As a Spectator writer, I am surrounded by people who are like-minded in their passion for Ivy League sports. Otherwise, why would one dedicate so much of his or her time to a niche conference? But niches are called such for a reason—it is hard for the average student to care that much about teams with players who will almost all go pro in something non-athletics related. The game is a chance for people to be loud, laugh at other people who are loud, and generally have a good time. If that time ends at halftime because that person needs to go write an essay, who am I to judge?