For my first interview, I spoke with David Gavant, the Principal/Owner of MadCats Films. David has received many industry honors including 32 Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award from his college alma mater, The University of Georgia. For 17 years he was Executive Producer, Executive in Charge of Production and Vice President for MLB Productions - the video, film and digital production arm of Major League Baseball. Before David’s stint at MLB, he was at NBA Entertainment for 12 years as the Senior Director of Production and Creative Director for the division’s in-house advertising team. It was here that David led the group that produced the celebrated “I Love This Game” global brand campaign. David began his career as an intern at CNN Sports in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia,working in a variety of positions during his last two years of high school and throughout college.
I first asked David what initial inspiration led him to get into the sports industry:
“As a kid, I shared the dream that many of my friends had of wanting to be the next great baseball player, but I also loved movies and had a strong pull to be an actor or film director - you know the next Steven Spielberg”, Gavant said.
As luck would have it, shortly after his thirteenth birthday, David’s mom connected him with the Atlanta Models and Talent Agency, and to his surprise, without any acting training whatsoever, he landed a small role in the movie “Carny”. Even crazier was that he was cast to act in a scene opposite Jodie Foster, a major child star at the time who had been nominated for an Academy Award earlier that year for her supporting role role in “Taxi Driver”.
“When it came time to shoot this scene,” Gavant said, “my lack of acting experience made the process really intimidating. First, I didn’t realize the actual camera would be as big as a vending machine (this was when Hollywood was still using bulky film cameras unlike today’s equipment), and second that this huge camera would be placed literally right in front of my face. I remember getting through the takes, but each time hearing the Cinematographer tell the Director in the background, “there was eye movement”. Meaning, I kept looking into the camera when I delivered my lines because it was distracting to pretend like this huge piece of equipment wasn’t there. If only the Director had said, “hey kid, stop looking into the camera!”. It must have been an easy decision to cut me out of the movie. I immediately knew that my acting days were numbered, but what the Director, Cinematographer and the rest of the film crew were doing sure looked interesting”!
And, at that moment, David’s passion for production was born.
Next, David told me about the six years he worked at CNN, beginning at just 16 years old, when he was a junior in high school. Ted Turner had recently launched CNN in Atlanta and Dave’s mom came to the rescue once again when she blindly called the CNN Sports department and Executive Producer Rick Davis picked up.
“Are you hiring interns? My mom asked and Rick said yes. Cut to a week later and I’m in Mr. Davis’s office interviewing for a sports internship that would begin my journey”, Gavant said.
Through the remainder of high school and college, first at Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta and then at the University of Georgia in Athens, David worked at CNN every weekend and during every school and summer break. He began as an intern, then became a Game Highlights Editor before being promoted to the Weekend Morning Sports Cut-In Associate Producer.
“This experience basically developed into an apprenticeship that taught me about journalism and television production because CNN was a completely hands-on work environment.” Gavant said. “There were no restrictions on operating any equipment; and although I was still a teenager, I quickly discovered that I had some talent as an Editor and could contribute to our behind-the-scenes production crew who were constantly scrambling to get three fresh half-hour shows on the air every night. After a while my co-workers stopped seeing me as a high school kid and treated me like a valuable part of the team.”
David referred to his time at CNN as his version of film school and one of the most influential experiences in the process of becoming a successful Sports Producer. I asked if he received any specific advice at CNN that still carries with him to this day, to which he responded,
“Absolutely, you have to remember that you’re always working. Meaning, if something needs to be done, you jump in immediately and help the team because you never want to miss a deadline, especially in a live news environment. So, “teamwork” and “accountability”, two concepts that I have valued throughout my career, were first nurtured during my formative years at CNN Sports.”
I then shifted our conversation to the interview process. What were some of the best interviews that he ever conducted or has been a part of? Without hesitation, (and no surprise to me since I’m a huge baseball fan), David said it was his interview of Derek Jeter for the HBO Sports documentary “Derek Jeter: 3K”. This was the all-access film that followed the Yankees superstar during the pursuit of his 3000th hit, the milestone that automatically punches a player’s ticket into the Baseball Hall of Fame. David’s team at MLB Productions followed Jeter for the final six hits of his quest, which took longer than originally anticipated when Derek pulled his hamstring midway through filming. This pushed production from the original three-week timeline to six-weeks.
“Derek’s injury ended up being a blessing for us and the extra time really improved the storytelling for this documentary”, Gavant said. “Instead of the film being a retrospective filled with career highlights as it was originally envisioned, we quickly adapted the story to become more of a “fly-on-the-wall” look at Jeter’s life. This was only made possible because Derek gave our production teams incredible access during those additional weeks after his injury. For example, Derek left the big club and returned to the Yankees spring training facility in Tampa to rehab his injury. This enabled Jeter to reconnect with some of the coaches who had positively influenced him throughout his career, and the content we captured there was truly emotional at times and complete unexpected”.
The main interview with Derek occurred a few days after his 3000th hit game on July 9th, 2011, where he went five-for-five, including a home run to reach this huge milestone. The setting for the interview was at Jeter’s New York City apartment that had floor to ceiling windows overlooking the eastside and downtown New York City.
“It was a beautiful sight”, Gavant said, “but it posed a huge problem for us as we thought, how the heck were we going to light this? It was going to be a long multi-hour interview starting in the late afternoon and ending at night so the change in daylight was going to be challenging to manage later in post-production. It would look inconsistent when we mixed and matched different parts of the interview during the editing process going from light, to dark, to light again.”
Through a strategic approach, the production team decided to use the change of lighting to their advantage, by approaching the interview so that the questions followed the storyline chronologically - beginning in daylight and ending after sundown.
“We got lucky”, Gavant said. “It worked and actually looked like we had planned to do this all along. Derek’s soundbites start in daylight at the beginning of his career and ended at night with the lights of New York City aglow in the background as he walked out of Yankee Stadium at the end of the documentary”.
Jeter wasn’t the only all-star athlete that David has worked with. Continuing on the topic of interviews, he brought up perhaps the wackiest one he was a part of – during the production of “Michael Jordan: Come Fly With Me”, which he produced, directed, edited and co-wrote during the NBA’s 1987-88 season.
During the previous offseason, Jordan was constantly criticized for playing only one side of the floor - the offensive side.
“I remember during production I interviewed his incredible father, the late James Jordan, in Wilmington, N.C.”, Gavant said, “and even he joined into this chorus of criticism by telling his son that “he’d score 35 points a night too if he took 50 shots a game”.
Not one for backing down from a competitive challenge, Jordan lead the NBA in scoring again that season, but he also defied critics by winning the Defensive Player of the Year Award as well, and this served to forever shut down critics who said he couldn’t play defense. “This award was given during the offseason and Michael was having a charity bowling event in Chicago at the time he was announced as the winner.” Gavant said. “This was not an ideal place to conduct an interview with the sound of bowling balls thundering down alleys and hitting pins over and over.” The video crew was led by the great Cinematographer/Cameraman Barry Winik, who took the 6' 6” superstar into a small janitor’s closet in the bowling alley that the crew had quickly cleaned out and hung a dark tarp as a backdrop to give the interview a professional look.
“A couple of soundbites from this interview ended up in “Come Fly With Me”, and if you listen closely under the audio mix you might hear a few bowling pins being knocked down in the background”, Gavant said.
I continued our interview asking David which athletes left him the most starstruck, if any?
“Over time, you become less and less starstruck,” Gavant said. “The advice that I was given at NBA Entertainment that I continue to follow today came from Leah Wilcox, who ran the player/talent relations department. She said the players are your co-workers and you wouldn’t ask the person in the next cubicle for their autograph or be intimidated by them, would you? The players have a job to do for the NBA just like you do!”
With that said, there were a couple of times when David just wasn’t able to abide by Leah’s guidelines. The first occurred when he was still a teenage intern at CNN Sports.
“Midway through one of the 11:00PM CNN Sports shows, New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner suddenly fired team Manager Billy Martin for the third time .” Gavant said. “Debi Segura was one of the on-air anchors that night and she spoke to George so often that she had his direct phone number (remember this was well before the days of ubiquitous cell phones). During a commercial break Debi called me over to the set, handed me a piece of paper with George’s phone number on it, and instructs me to call him and say it’s her asking to confirm the firing so we can come back from commercial with this breaking news. I remember telling Debi, “please don’t make me do this, I’m too scared to call George Steinbrenner!”
What followed was Debi using several hilarious analogies, basically telling David, “his poop smells the same as your poop, now go call him”. The teenaged David calmed down enough to call Mr. Steinbrenner for the story and this notion that we’re all human no matter how famous helped him to never be starstruck again…well, almost.
“I’ve had two sports heroes in my life. The first was Hank Aaron who I’ve had the honor of meeting several times during my tenure at Major League Baseball and the second is three-time Tour de France winner Greg Lemond”, Gavant said. “I was a competitive criterium cyclist in my twenties and I was consuming as much cycling content as I could find. Of course, Greg Lemond was “the guy” in the professional cycling world at the time, and after he retired, he tried becoming an analyst for NBC Sports. By chance I found out that Greg was going to be doing voiceover work for the cycling portion of an Ironman TV special at Betelgeuse Productions in New York City, So, I immediately booked the graphics room located right next to the audio suite for the same time slot.” David was such a fan that months prior to this encounter, he had begged his sister Debbie, a well-known artist, to create a one-of-a-kind Lemond-centric piece of artwork, and so his plan was to sneak the finished work into the audio room to have Lemond sign it.
”Greg was a great cyclist, but it was clear he didn’t enjoy being a sports commentator then”, Gavant said. “I thought I was going to have to sneak into the audio room to talk to him, but when he saw my sister’s artwork as he walked past the graphics room, he stopped in and ended up camping out with me for the next three-hours talking cycling in between his audio takes. I don’t know who was happier - me, having the chance to spend time with one of my sports heroes discussing his career and specific moments during the Tour de France stages, or Greg because he really didn’t want to be stuck in a recording booth that afternoon!”
Finally, I concluded the interview by asking David his opinion about how much of a role “competitiveness” plays in the sports broadcasting industry. He said that having the ambition to be the best is an excellent motivational tool, as long as it isn’t blind ambition.
“Most of the CEO’s that I’ve had to opportunity to work with and learn from have wanted to beat their industry competitors just as much as a professional athlete wants to win,” Gavant said. “This passion or “ultra-competitiveness” definitely creates an atmosphere that is unique because it challenges you to constantly push yourself to produce the very best work you can on each and every project that you work on. Plus, you get to watch sports all day, so this industry never feels like a typical nine-to-five job.”
