Lights, Camera, Dance
Aaand we're live!
By this time next month, Roger Federer will be back. And we will all hold his hand and travel through time, back to an era when his magic lit up our lives. If you were watching when Federer was the axis on which tennis spun, it's near impossible to see him as just another player on the court. Federer was the gold standard, the yardstick of excellence, a sonnet in motion.
He returns, immaculate as ever. Except, it's all a bit too neatly wrapped and none of it is real time. Federer's retirement remains intact. This time, he is the focus of a documentary titled 'Federer: Twelve Final Days'. Directed by Asif Kapadia, the film traces his journey from the moment he announced his retirement to the tear-streaked evening in London, when, dressed in the Europe blue at the Laver's Cup, he struck his final backhand as a professional tennis player.
The trailer starts with him asking the crew, "Ready?" He then delivers his retirement speech into a table mic, possibly for the voice-over to go behind a montage on his social media channels. The 37-second teaser also carves out room to showcase Federer in his off-court avatar. There's a fleeting glimpse of him lifting his young son on his shoulder, another of him leaning on a table, staring blankly at the floor, perhaps pondering life post-tennis or waiting for the director to say, "cut".
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Do you remember 2006? It was a different world. Our social media was limited to messengers and kitschy websites where one could exchange virtual stickers. Twitter was a fledgling; Facebook had just spread its wings. The majority of our television programming was spun from fiction. Shows like Big Brother were still on the fringes. Celebrities were like distant stars: bright, but elusive, their accessibility confined to the occasional interview when they were in a chatty mood.
Sometime that year, a conversation between Kris Jenner and producer Ryan Seacrest altered the course of reality TV forever. 'Keeping Up with the Kardashians' was ideated, then taken to production, and by October 2007, it was on TV.
The intellectual elite and critics were dismissive. It was merely a wealthy family living out their privileged lives in their gilded bubbles. But the public ate it up like it was a slice of freshly-baked cheesecake from Magnolia Bakery. And their appetite has only grown since. 'Keeping Up' ran till 2021, shipping out 20 seasons of life-updates from that one family. India has its own version, capturing the lives of four 'Bollywood Housewives', which aired its first season during the bored autumn of 2020.
Last year, Netflix released 'Beckham', a documentary-series featuring interviews with David Beckham and a bunch of his old teammates. It runs the tape back to look through his illustrious playing career, and paint a fresh picture of him as the footballer, the celebrity, the lover, the husband, the father. Sprinkled generously on top is an assortment of candid moments that the camera just happens to capture: Beckham cooking, ribbing with his kids about their social media following, and prodding Victoria to be honest about her inherited wealth.
Federer’s film, or documentary, whatever you wish to call it, is set to release amidst a packed summer. Amazon has already rolled out the third season of ‘The Test’, a series that tours with the Australian men’s cricket team, both on and off the pitch, spanning an entire year of cricket. Running parallel to ‘The Test’ is ‘99’, a documentary that revisits Manchester United’s remarkable 1998-99 season, where they clinched the league, the domestic cup, and the continental competition. Netflix is also gearing up to release ‘Senna’, a six-part series about Ayrton Senna.
If you were to search for sports documentaries on your preferred streaming platform, the results would resemble the home screen of a food delivery app. You’d need to scroll at least a couple of times to grasp the sheer breadth of it.
And jostling for your attention this summer, alongside Federer, Australia, and Manchester United, will be some actual, mundane sporting events, like the Men’s T20 World Cup, French Open, Wimbledon, European Championships (Euros), and later, the Olympics.
For a couple of years, Netflix had cameras stationed at the French Open and Wimbledon too, but their series ‘Break Point’ has since been shelved. ‘Break Point’ was their attempt to do for tennis what they had accomplished with Formula 1 in ‘Drive to Survive’.
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In 2017, Liberty Media, under the leadership of CEO John C Malone, handed over a staggering $4.6 billion to Bernie Ecclestone, the then czar of F1, to acquire the sport. Malone saw a diamond in the rough, a sport with untapped potential that Ecclestone was neglecting. The first order of business was to show Ecclestone the door, and replace him with television executive Chase Carey.
Why limit oneself to a sport when one could have a sport and an entertainment product rolled into one? Race weekends transformed into grand parties. Tracks morphed into bustling complexes, teeming with beverage stations, games, and merchandise kiosks. Carey then turned his gaze towards F1’s digital presence. Television and media companies were courted. The vision was clear - a viewer at home should get more from F1 than a discourse on the tyre strategy Kimi Raikkonen is employing for lap 30 at Monaco.
Soon after the chequered flag was waved, race highlights started popping up on YouTube. More cameras were installed, capturing more angles, and then some more. Drive to Survive was the long-drawn result of recurring discussions and a targeted plan.
Netflix unveiled the first season of ‘Drive to Survive’ in March 2019. Back then, Formula 1’s ratings on ESPN were minuscule, barely touching half a million viewers per race. ESPN was shelling out $5 million annually for television rights. Fast forward to 2023, and ESPN inked an annual deal with F1 worth a whopping $75 million - $90 million. The credit unanimously goes to the Netflix series. As Zak Brown, the man running McLaren Racing, puts it, “We’re in the entertainment business. We recognise the importance of the show to our fan base.”
Today, Drive to Survive is the most-watched Netflix series in 33 countries. It has revolutionised the landscape of access content in sports. As long as the cameras were rolling and the subject in focus had any sort of appeal, it was "content".
During the initial Covid lockdowns, several athletes, presumably bored at home, splurged on headphones, microphones, gaming gear, and started streaming on Twitch. Most of them simply played video games and didn’t bother with any insights, but fans thronged in thousands. It’s wild that no one has yet created a spinoff on athletes with a gaming addiction, titled Itch to Twitch. If someone does, well, you know where to send the royalties.
Members of the globally-popular band BTS often go live on YouTube, savouring ramen, grooving to music, or just chilling. I hear one of them even recommended RRR as a must-watch during one of those streams. Sachin Tendulkar is on YouTube too. His videos are SEO-optimised, from the title to the description and the hashtags.
These days, autobiographies get written before an athlete even matures. Paul Pogba, Antoine Griezmann, and Sergio Ramos commissioned documentaries, unsolicited. Everyone’s competing. Some of us don't have the luxury of turning our lives into content, so we have to do weird things like learning filmmaking or playing musical instruments. Tough gig.
A common theme that is found on social profiles of these celebrities, and is parroted often, is that this social presence is bringing fans closer. Which is, well, both accurate and not. A video of Tendulkar sampling a bag of vada pav to check for the right amount of spice is charming, but we all know there’s a camera strategically placed to capture this moment. Perhaps Sachin is a philosopher in disguise. He poses a question we often encounter on Instagram and dating apps: plandid or candid?
Taking one last trip back in time, to Estadio Santiago Bernabéu in Madrid in the year 2005. Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno placed seventeen cameras all over the gantry, but they weren't interested in catching anything about Real Madrid's game against Villarreal. Their lenses were trained on one subject, and one alone: Zinedine Zidane.
In ‘Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait’, Zidane is portrayed more as a living work of art than an athlete. The cameras capture the spark in his eyes when a ball is passed to him, and his frustration when his touch isn’t quite right. You can see the sweat patches on his white shirt, the fabric clinging to his back as the night wears on, and tufts of grass stuck to his knees and cleats. At times, the silence is so profound that you feel like you can hear him breathe as he glides between patches of grass. Footballers have this knack of moving even when they’re resting. Active recovery, so to speak. Zidane was a midfielder. At the highest level of the game, a midfielder doesn't have the time to pause. Not to think, not to breathe. You’d think breathlessness would be a common sight. Not with our man. Zidane strolls. It’s a remarkable film. Inclusive, because it strips away the context of the game and presents this graceful man as an exhibit to the audience; and esoteric, because the more you’ve played football, the more you appreciate what’s unfolding.
Experiments as absurd as this, or Gary Smith’s piece on Andre Agassi, were the closest we could get to our idols. But that’s changing. A mere interview or an autobiography doesn’t cut it anymore when a camera crew can capture them living their lives in 4K. A few years ago, a friend of mine had the opportunity to work with Shah Rukh Khan. Once she was done, I remember asking her, “What’s he like?” We don’t need to ask such questions anymore. Netflix has the meal ready before we're even hungry.
Is it good? Well, that depends. Humanising Federer is a wonderful thing. It dissolves the barriers between us and him. Once we see him scratching the tip of his nose, the halo around the person thins. If I were to meet him in person, I'd never call out, "Yo, Rog!" Of course not. But the more we see him being normal - he's exceptional at being just that - the more comfortable some of us will feel while saying hello to him at an airport.
The flip side is our insatiable curiosity. The very reason why access is more valuable to the seekers than to the givers. In a sense, we’ve all become part of the paparazzi. Armed with high-quality cameras in our handheld devices, we’re primed to snap a photo at the first sight of a celebrity. What happens when we find Federer within a handshake's reach? Is he an opportunity?
Asif Kapadia is a masterful director. His movies on Ayrton Senna and Diego Maradona are amongst my favourites. I have no doubt that he'll do justice to Roger Federer, the tennis player and the person. But he is an outlier in a rather weird space.
Just last week, Rohit Sharma expressed his frustration about how IPL cricketers can’t catch a break from cameras and content creators. On the eve of the Mumbai Indians’ match against the Kolkata Knight Riders, Sharma was having a chat with his old friend Abhishek Nayar. Some of that conversation was private.
I shouldn’t have known, but the KKR content creator shadowed them on the field and uploaded the video with the entire, muffled audio. It was promptly deleted, but on Twitter, a mistake only needs to leave a faint trace. People downloaded it and spread it all over the internet. During a later game, he asked the Star Sports crew to switch off the mic while he was conversing with his teammates. They didn’t, and aired the conversation on their prime-time show.
Okay, I lied. The Zidane trip wasn't the last rewind. I have one more, just as a keepsake for the week. In the summer of 2007, while most of India was still bleeding from a disastrous ODI World Cup, Greg Chappell, then coach of the India men's team, walked into a hostile press conference while muttering into his lapel mic. He was shooting for his documentary 'Guru Greg', and the reporters heard every word.
If it can be on camera, it is content, right?