In an age when so much of sports documentary has become stylized PR, the story of an online school that turned out to be fake is a high mark for the genre
In August 2021, two high school football teams met in the Pro Football Hall of Fame stadium in Canton, Ohio, for a much-hyped matchup shown live on ESPN. When it quickly became a 58-0 blowout, suspicion descended most heavily on the losing side – an outfit called Bishop Sycamore purporting to be a faith-based school that actually turned out to be fake. The scandal rocked the sports world, lit up social media and had Hollywood producers rushing to unpick the sordid affair. Travon Free, the veteran comedian and TV writer, was already workshopping titles. “So the Bishop Sycamore movie is definitely gonna be called ‘BS’ right?,” he tweeted.
That film, BS High, premieres Thursday on HBO and has Free co-directing with Martin Desmond Roe. BS High marks their first collaboration since their Academy Award-winning short Two Distant Strangers. But where that film was a fiction, this 97-minute doc is stranger than. It features extensive interviews with many of the people at the center of the scandal – not least the players, whose experiences had mostly been captured in dribs and drabs on social media and in the press. The biggest get by far is Bishop Sycamore coach Roy Johnson – “the sine qua non of what you needed to tell this story properly,” Roe says. Johnson’s fan fealty to Michael Strahan, the NFL great turned BS High executive producer, was what ultimately motivated him to talk. Much of what he says is shocking.
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