Lady hear me tonight6/19/2023 “We have to be more than athletes just to, you know, make money,” says the defender Madison Hammond. How could it not feel intrusive when women athletes are already sharing so much of themselves as a matter of course. So it figures Angel City players would be suspicious when Nelson’s camera crew approach from a low angle. Sportswomen, on the other hand, don’t have nearly as much practice or protection in similarly vulnerable moments, let alone a Last Chance U-type project to offer some guidance on how to relax around a film production that’s designed to style them as larger than life. It’s the kind of exchange you’d never see in sports docs about men, who disrobe as easily as they lay bare their darkest professional fears in front of viewers. “Why are we talking into camera?” Amy shoots back nervously. “Again?” she exclaims, swiveling around to the fly on the wall. At one point in the first episode Uhrman is at the team office in Santa Monica kibitzing with her twin sister Amy Longhi (a marketing consultant for the team) about Amy’s habit of ignoring her car’s fuel gauge. Members of the team still come off guarded and vigilant. But the effort didn’t score the hoped-for points. Nelson made a point of assembling a production team that was as female and inclusive as Angel FC. “When Sydney Leroux was traded from Orlando, I scrambled from Culver City to catch her arriving at LAX with her kids.” “I had my camera in the garage at the ready, batteries always charged,” she says. Many times a story would continue unfolding after production had exhausted its allotted filming time, forcing Nelson to grab a go-bag and get the footage herself. “It was incredibly challenging having to figure out which storylines we were going to follow,” Nelson says. Where HBO’s Hard Knocks has small armies of people to embed with key characters and permission to hide cameras around NFL team facilities, Nelson filmed Angel City with a 40-person crew, squeezing that number like an accordion while haggling with the team over shooting opportunities so it goes when your subject team doesn’t have its own training complex. But it comes at the expense of Angel FC’s ability to make roster upgrades throughout the season and really bites them hard when a slew of injuries wipe out their offensive lines.Įqually daunting was the job of capturing all this drama. The idea is to provide a sense of security within a league that was capricious about on-field shake ups before assenting to a collective bargaining agreement. And they add to the degree of difficulty by not making any trades or roster cuts unless by player request. “She does a really good job of asking ‘Why is this happening?’ and then putting in the work behind it to change things,” says Julie Foudy, the former US National Team captain turned Angel City investor.Īll the while Angel City is bidding to finish with a winning record in its launch season – a near impossible feat for an expansion team. Much of the reason for optimism comes down to Portman, a soccer naif too bold and blunt to let the game’s entrenched biases and business practices stunt her ambition. The story is as much about them trying to prove pro women’s soccer can carve out a viable niche in the entertainment-saturated LA market as it is about whether there’s even profit to be had within a league experiment on its third draft, the NWSL being the first to make it past year three. Angel City FC was born in the wake of the Time’s Up movement from a majority female ownership that includes the actor-activist Natalie Portman, the venture capitalist Kara Nortman and the Hollywood exec Julie Uhrman. “It was a delicate dance, trying to find that balance of being respectful while also getting the story right.” “It was really important for us to assure them that we appreciate the need for that protection,” says Nelson, who came to this project from a Secrets of Playboy miniseries that unmasked Hugh Hefner as a predator and sadist. The series embeds with the team over the course of the 2022 season, as the National Women’s Soccer League was reeling from an internal investigation that implicated five coaches and a general manager in a toxic workplace scandal marked by verbal abuse, racist remarks and sexual misconduct. In so many ways director Arlene Nelson is breaking the mold with Angel City, a three-part HBO Sports doc that goes inside the same-named LA franchise pushing for change on and off the pitch.
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