In 1986, two recent college graduates in film from Southern Illinois University, Steve James and Fred (later Frederick) Marx, walked in the door. To them, Kartemquin was mecca. At the new, student-run Big Muddy Film Festival, Jerry Blumenthal had been an early presenter and judge alongside experimental filmmaker James Benning and Jim Jarmusch. He had shown Taylor Chain II and The Last Pullman Car. “I remember watching The Last Pullman Car and feeling, ‘Wow, this is really good!’” recalled James. “It lodged in my mind that Kartemquin was really interesting. And Jerry was very impressive—classic Jerry, thoughtful and funny and compelling.”

So they made an appointment. Quinn met them and looked at their proposal for a half-hour film about urban pickup basketball. He was impressed, not only with their passion and vision but with the fact that they had in hand a $2,000 Illinois Arts Council grant. “I could see that they understood how to write a proposal,” he recalled. James later recalled that he was thrilled with Quinn’s interest: “He said, ‘Sure, we won’t give you any money, but we’ll give you guidance.’ That was the Kartemquin way, then.” Kartemquin also gave the young men a place to work and write their proposals.

James and Marx decided to use the entire grant to buy videotapes. That was a big decision, which everyone made reluctantly. James in particular was in love with film. But on a frayed shoestring of a budget, video was the only option. Jim Morrissette was video’s major champion, seeing its enormous possibilities and confident he could overcome the technical weaknesses of video. He convinced the team to use double-system sound—recording the sound separately—which permitted more flexibility. And his meticulous oversight limited degradation in the still-agonizing linear editing process. When the film eventually and unexpectedly became a huge hit, the team would also have to convert the tape to 16mm for the Sundance Film Festival at a time when very few companies did that work; Peter Gilbert used his connections to find a place. Then, once the film won at Sundance, they had to blow it up to 35mm for theatrical release.

Now, the filmmakers needed to look for a cinematographer. They wanted someone who could shoot broadcast-quality video. In this, they directly confronted the fact that they were white men making a story about Black culture. This was territory James was uncomfortably familiar with. “I grew up in Virginia, in a racially fraught community,” he said. “I heard the n-word and saw Confederate flags a lot, but I was also playing basketball with a mostly Black team. In the summers I would work for my dad, who had a flooring and tile business. He had a Black employee who I would help. I was his helper and also the boss’s son. There was a lot to think about.”

Looking back decades, James said:

We couldn’t make Hoop Dreams now the way we did, and that’s all to the good. I also came to see the issue differently when I made No Crossover, about Allen Iverson. I thought I had had these basketball relationships with Black players; I also played one year as a college player. But they were never more than just teammates …. We had great rapport and camaraderie and talked trash and snapped towels at each other. But I was never in their home, they were never in my home. We didn’t have a real friendship. Maybe what I was seeking to get at in Hoop Dreams was learning more about their lives than I could possibly get as their teammate.

Quinn suggested that they ask Margaret Caples, head of the most important Black film organization in the city, for suggestions for a Black team member; he hoped they would get a Black cinematographer. And she provided some names. But the matches didn’t work, as Caples explained later: “We didn’t have filmmakers who could just drop everything, get their camera and go. We [Black people] don’t operate that way, because of the inequities and everything. You’ve got to have somebody backing you, and you’ve got to have that constant flow of income coming in.” Furthermore, she said, people like to work with people they know and have things in common with. Emerging Black filmmakers looked at Kartemquin and saw a white business. And at that, it was a business that underpaid even its full-timers.

Steve James agreed with Caples’s recollection. He had also reached out to a Black cameraman who worked at WTTW: “But it wasn’t practical, because he was not going to shoot for free for these strange white guys, and we had nothing to offer him [in the way of money]. Because of the structural issues of racism in the industry, there were few people of color who had reached competency and success, and you couldn’t ask those people to come work for nothing.”

The lone Kartemquin staffer working on administrative tasks, Marcy McCall, had an idea. “You know who’d be perfect for you?” McCall said to James. “Peter Gilbert.” Gilbert, who now also owned his own Betacam as well as his 16mm camera, was also a basketball fanatic. She still treasures thinking of herself as the midwife of the team’s birth. Gilbert had just finished working on American Dream, a crash course in verité production. In that production, “We were always asking, how can we turn this interview into a scene?” he later recalled. Also, he was, like James and Marx, a Chicagoan with a fanatical passion for basketball. “The first phone call Peter and I had,” James recalled, “we didn’t stop talking for three hours, and most of it was about basketball.”

The new team shot for a week, thinking they would focus on one basketball court in Chicago and track different characters—young, adult, older—who used the court for a half-hour film. Again, the team tried to incorporate Black members, a plan that foundered on finances again. “We hired a Black assistant cameraman—Brian Pitts—but we didn’t really need one,” recalled James. (Pitts went on to a career working on leading Hollywood films.) “He had been a player at Northwestern. We found out about him through Peter Kuttner. But not only did we not need him, but on projects where there’s no money you gravitate toward people who are willing to work for nothing, and Peter also came with a video camera. We also hired a Black sound man for the first week too. But I could do that, and I’m free.”

In the course of that week, the entire project changed. They had sought out Isiah Thomas’s childhood court, and Thomas’s high school coach Gene Pingatore pointed them to an African American friend and colleague, “Big Earl” Smith. Smith took the team to various playgrounds around Chicago. At one of them, Smith singled out Arthur Agee. “This kid’s interesting,” he said. When Agee heard about the film, he was, in his own words, “gung ho,” although he had trouble convincing his mother he wasn’t making it all up. Smith made the introductions to the family and talked to Agee’s mother about enrolling him in Pingatore’s summer camp, which featured Isiah Thomas. At the summer camp, they met another boy, William Gates, who Pingatore thought might be the next Isiah Thomas. Suddenly, the movie was taking another direction, following the boys and not the playground court action.

With their week’s worth of shooting, the team crafted a sizzle reel and began fundraising in earnest. They also began cultivating a relationship with the families. “It was a long process to build trust with the families,” recalled Quinn. “The boys were there right away, but one of the mothers later said, ‘It took about a year before we really trusted you and felt we could share what was really going on.’” A turning point came when Agee, whose family couldn’t afford the school any more, left Pingatore’s program at St. Joseph’s. He was shocked to see the film team continue to follow him. The realization that the team was interested in him, not just his basketball success, solidified their relationship with the entire family.

They supported themselves with commercial work. James was also working as a production assistant on TV commercials, gradually becoming a production manager at Ebel Productions. His schedule was flexible enough to let him work on his own projects as well. In between paid jobs, the production team searched for grants fruitlessly for two years, working from a desk at Kartemquin. They turned to Quinn for advice, since Blumenthal was furiously finishing editing his passion project, Golub. Sometimes Quinn and Blumenthal threw them some Kartemquin work. “Kartemquin carried us,” recalled James. “They sustained the film through thick and thin, but mostly thin and thin.” The project was way ahead of its time; sports documentaries had yet to become hot items in the documentary film marketplace, although they had been a part of TV programming for decades. Hoop Dreams would ultimately break the sound barrier for the genre.

James also began to imbibe the Kartemquin mix of politics and aesthetics. While Quinn “waxed poetic,” in James’s words, about John Dewey, he couldn’t get James to read Dewey’s work. But James—someone who later became the face of Kartemquin’s “democracy through documentary” claim—came to admire both Quinn and Blumenthal’s approach intuitively:

They’re both guys whose politics are left, but they’re not reductionist. They have a sense of humor, of the complexity of the world we live in. That’s been infused in the films over the years. They’re not doctrinaire, or just tools for social change. The social change is infused in the films, and often very much in the civic engagement and outreach. But the films themselves center on the complexity of human beings. Gordon in his role as exec producer pushes in that direction. He’s not interested in simple answers. It’s people, against the larger backdrop of the world we live in, and how they try to influence that world. You think and you feel. And the films stay with you. They are not the fast food of cinema.

The Kartemquin connections finally began to work. The Minneapolis public TV station, KTCA, impressed with Golub, reached out to ask Kartemquin what they were working on. KTCA was also ahead of its time in imagining documentaries as not only entertaining but also lucrative. Soon, the team was in negotiations with KTCA for a contract. The producers were desperate, and KTCA’s executives knew it. So KTCA drove a brutal bargain: 50 percent equity in the film in return for a $70,000 grant KTCA got from CPB. This would turn out to be an extraordinary windfall for KTCA. Quinn sat in meetings for two solid days arguing about the contract, and ultimately lost. But they had saved the project. The public TV money gave the project a financial foundation for the first time.

KTCA had more luck raising money for a documentary that it could pitch as purely educational: a stay-in-school documentary, Higher Goals (1992). It featured, among others, William Gates and another high schooler, Kim Williams (who later was a WNBA star), and basketball star Isiah Thomas. As well, Saturday Night Live comic Tim Meadows played a basketball-fanatic kid who needs to be talked into staying in school. Toyota Motor Sales provided $256,000, and the Minnesota Timberwolves, the pro basketball team, added $40,000. At half an hour, it was widely shown on public TV station, and predictably, it was embraced by public TV stations nationally. It wasn’t made in the Deweyan mode; it was a classic uplift, bootstrapping, message film. It wouldn’t disturb the comfort of public TV’s privileged membership. Higher Goals may have been nothing like Hoop Dreams, but it was essential to keeping Hoop Dreams alive.

Another Kartemquin connection put Hoop Dreams over the top at another crisis point. When the MacArthur Foundation was preparing to host a meeting of the private foundations’ association, the Council on Foundations, Woodward “Woody” Wickham proposed that rather than a physical tour of funded projects, the foundation fund a locally produced film about them. He chose Kartemquin to make it.

Wickham is a legend among media funders. A Michigan doctor’s son and Harvard graduate, he had a profound understanding of privilege. He had spent a sobering time in his early twenties in Mexico, absorbing an understanding of US imperial realities. In all his work, he unpretentiously leveraged his power and privilege to create opportunities for others. His sharp wit—he had been editor-in-chief of the Harvard Lampoon—was wrapped in generosity. At a time of network broadcast TV, he perceived commercial media as a cultural force maintaining inequality. Over the course of his tenure at the MacArthur Foundation, between 1990 and 2003, he fostered countless audiovisual projects to expand expression and capacity. He hired female programming officers who shared his vision, including Patricia Boero (a Latin American), Alyce Myatt (a Black American) and Elspeth Revere, an idealistic and public-minded white graduate of the University of Chicago. His projects included not only many documentaries but also funding to public broadcasting and funding to media arts centers across the nation, where young people got training in video expression. For years he and I served together on the ITVS board, where he became board chair. His wisdom on complex political problems in media was extraordinary.

Wickham approached Kartemquin to make Grassroots Chicago (1991), a half-hour film profiling several Chicago nonprofits in a verité style. Quinn gave the project to James, for a simple reason: “He had a family; he needed the money.” Quinn shot the film, with help from Morrissette, and Blumenthal handled sound. James was director, writer and coeditor with Susanne Suffredin.

James had a dream for leveraging Grassroots Chicago. “I told Peter and Fred, ‘I have a master plan. I’m gonna do a great job on this film, and then get them interested in funding Hoop Dreams.’” It worked; Wickham found in James a rising star. “I went to breakfast with him and he asked if it would ever be in theaters,” James recalled. “I said—it’s funny now—‘No, that’ll never happen, it’s on video.’ But he loved the project. Later we got a call that was typical Woody. He says, ‘I think I left my flannel shirt at Kartemquin,’ and I said, ‘OK, I think it’s here.’ ‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘Oh, and by the way, one other thing, MacArthur has decided to award you a quarter of a million dollars for Hoop Dreams.’ ”

The film grew to be massive and unwieldy, and Fred Marx was losing his grip on the editing. James’s and Marx’s relationship was frayed to the breaking point. Finally Quinn stepped in, inviting them both over to his house, where he was down with the flu. Using the mentorship skills for which he became justly known, he worked with the two angry men to prioritize making the film. They finally came to an agreement. James would take over the editing of the project, and they would continue to share credit. James would continue to work with Bill Haugse, who had been a second editor, to reshape and cut the story. Quinn sat in the editing room with them. James credits Quinn with teaching him how to edit.

“It was like an ongoing master class in storytelling,” James recalled. “One of his great strengths, even up to today, is thinking how you get into and out of scenes. He was good at internal structure.” Quinn, for his part, said that James came with superb editing instincts. It was James who decided the last line of the film would be college athlete and devoted dad William talking to his little daughter: “People say to me, ‘Don’t forget me when you make it.’ I want to say to them, ‘Don’t forget me if I don’t.’”

They had their disagreements, though, which reflected Quinn’s enduring concern for respect to subjects. “We got into a big argument,” James remembered, “because he didn’t want Arthur talking about how he hates school. Arthur says in the film, ‘If it closed, I wouldn’t be holding up a picket sign saying, “Open the School.”’ I said, ‘It’s funny.’ But Gordon didn’t want it in. He would bring it up again and again—he’s a dogged guy. I think he was worried about reflecting badly on Arthur. I thought it was revealing of Arthur’s personality.” The scene stayed in.

The film’s narrative throughline was the struggle of two Black American families to seize rare opportunities, to negotiate with an alien and often hostile white environment, and to find education and success in the process. It was a grassroots story of Black American agency in the face of systems that consistently deny it. The two boys Kartemquin followed, filming over five years, both managed to get higher education opportunities through their sports prowess. One starts a family in high school, and neither ends up in professional sports. But they survive the everyday cruelties of American racism and poverty, and their families, who support them in myriad ways throughout, share their pride. Viewers have been invited into the intimate process of growing up Black in Chicago, hoping against hope that the improbable vehicle of basketball can become a way to counterbalance the disenfranchisement that fills frame after frame of the film. Viewers have also been invited into families that fight every day for their dignity and the chance for its next generation to negotiate a way into the ordinary dignity that white, middle-class kids take for granted.

Even before the film was finished, in 1993, Wickham worked to ensure that his promise to the MacArthur board—that this would be the most important film on public TV that year—would come true. He convened a meeting of PBS, CPB, KTCA, and nonprofits, as well as film distribution professionals, to brainstorm how they could help make this film more than a passing PBS special. Their planning meshed with the work of the producers’ representatives Iltis & Sikich and a distributor, Fine Line Pictures. The big hurdle for public broadcasting was permitting the film to have a theatrical release first; that deal became an important example for later documentaries with public broadcasting funding. The film went to Sundance and took the documentary audience award. John Iltis conducted a heated bidding war for the film, which raised its price dramatically. Lawyer John Sloss negotiated a “cash corridor” that benefited Kartemquin, and which James credited with saving the film financially. Quinn recalled the importance of the producers’ reps: “If not for Iltis and Sikich, we would have been eaten alive. I had no experience with an environment like that. I’d have probably wanted to take the first offer with money.” The film went on to make substantial revenues in theatrical release, very unusual for documentaries. Public broadcasters then leveraged that publicity for the broadcast.

Once the film was sold, Quinn recognized the need, as did the directors, to meet with the families and work out an unprecedented deal to profit share. Sloss was aghast; it was unheard of. Furthermore, the number of people involved was huge. But ultimately, everyone who spoke in the film received a payment proportional to their screentime. William and Arthur, the two boys profiled, received payouts equal to the filmmakers. The filmmakers knew William and Arthur would face pressure to share their own money with family, so they also allocated a half-share of what the filmmakers and the boys got for each of the families. The participants or their descendants or estates were still receiving checks as of 2023.

Reprinted from Kartemquin Films: Documentaries on the Frontlines of Democracy by Patricia Aufderheide, courtesy of University of California Press. Copyright 2024. 30% discount for Filmmaker readers using UCPSAVE30 at checkout.