Award-winning filmmakers to document Dan Snyder's impact on Redskins – SportingNews.com
If you can’t own an NFL team, you can at least own a piece of a documentary about a man who does own an NFL team.
Mark Farkas and Judy Plavnick, award-winning producers from the Washington area, are collaborating on a documentary project about Dan Snyder, the widely maligned, lightning-rod owner of the local pro football franchise. To jump-start financing and spread the word, they’re conducting a crowd-funding campaign that runs through midnight ET Wednesday.
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Their aim in the documentary, titled “Under Our Skins: A Dave and Goliath Story”? Not what everybody assumes, they insist.
“We don’t want to present this as a Dan Snyder-bashing opportunity. It isn’t,” Plavnick told Sporting News this week. “We want it to be a critical assessment of what has transpired the last 16 years.”
Critical enough that the first paragraph of their Indiegogo site is a request for Snyder to give them an interview for the film: “Please talk with us and let folks know your side of the story.”
Farkas and Plavnick, it must be said, are among the “folks” who want to know, because both are long-time, unabashed Redskins fans — and, thanks largely to the rapid descent of a once-championship franchise on Snyder’s watch, incredibly disgruntled.
“I have two daughters. They were raised here, they both love football, and they don’t like this team,” said Farkas, a Peabody Award-winning executive producer at C-Span.
Plavnick, who’s won five Emmys and runs her own production company, said she recently gave up season tickets that had been in the family since the team moved into RFK Stadium in the early 1960s.
“It was like cutting off an arm,” she said of deciding it was no longer worth the expense for what she was getting in return.
Plavnick and Farkas have known each other since college. Having crossed paths regularly in their jobs, they share frustration over the Snyder years. The idea for a documentary emerged as they followed the defamation lawsuit Snyder filed in 2011 against sportswriter Dave McKenna over his notorious takedown of the team owner in the Washington City Paper. (The suit was eventually dropped.)
Ostensibly, that’s the focus of the film, and the trailer zeroes in on the conflict. But there’s much more ground before and after that incident that the two plan to cover, including the battle over the team’s name in recent years.
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“You could say there was no bad time to tell this story,” Plavnick said. “But what has happened in the last few years, it’s built to a crescendo, and it just seems like a good time to review it all.”
Aiming to debut the film by the start of the upcoming season, they kicked off the campaign on Jan. 26, symbolically the anniversary of the team’s last Super Bowl win in 1992. As of Tuesday afternoon, Farkas and Plavnick were about a quarter of the way to their $99,000 goal, but they said they’ve attracted investors in the film. Plus, the number of people willing to contribute as little as $5 has reinforced belief of a broad audience.
In fact, another fan’s breaking point is what gave Farkas and Plavnick the idea to crowd-fund the project. In 2013, area restaurateur David Chang tried to go on Kickstarter to raise $6 billion to buy the team from Snyder.
Kickstarter policy doesn’t allow such campaigns, but “I took note of that,” Farkas said, adding that the sheer volume of frustration emanating from longtime fans convinced him that the documentary time had come.
“People were saying, ‘What can we do?'” he said.
This is their answer. “For the cost of less than a beer at FedEx Field,” Plavnick said, “you can be part of this film.”
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