Alright once I moved beyond the fact that dude got his sister killed… I could actually watch the film without screaming at Tariq for being a busta, lol. Actually, his name is Torren in the film Amateur, but talk about a kid who played his role a bit too well in Power, sheesh.
Amateur is an amazing film with a backstory to match. It’s such a well written, shallow dive into the world of athletic brand sponsorships, amateur and professional sports that I honestly don’t know where to start. What’s even more important here is that the director and writer of the film did such a good job I just knew the film was written by a former player or coach. In actuality the film is written by a guy who utilized every aspect of community building to launch his movie and successfully gain entry into a very difficult world to get into: film production. This moves us too far ahead and there is so much to breakdown here. The first thing you need to do is to watch the trailer:
Having coached a remarkable player with a learning disability I know how difficult it is to coach with patience and care. Winning will hardly ever be the ultimate goal when kids have lives that are challenging. Challenging is an understatement in many regards. In this film Ryan Koo takes on a few gigantic monsters.
- Torren (played very well by Michael Rainey Jr.) has “dyscalculia, a condition in which a person has trouble perceiving and processing math and equations. Someone with number dyslexia may transpose numbers or confuse symbols such as + or X.”
- He does have both parents in the home, but his father is a former football player who is dealing with dementia due to CTE (Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a neurodegenerative disease found in people who have had multiple head injuries.)
- Due to the problems with CTE Torren’s mom has to carry the burden of finances for the family at times. Which leads to the family having to move often.
These are the few problems I can give away without giving away too much of the story. Torren is a gifted 8th grade point guard living in the world of the internet and social media. My last year of coaching full time was 2004. The internet wasn’t as powerful as it is today. YouTube has shaped sports in a way that television can’t. As a matter of fact YouTube and social media have changed sports so much that viewership is down in all major sports. Kids now watch games and sports as highlight packages (Blame ESPN). They don’t even watch an entire game in many instances. That’s relegated to older people. What YouTube has done in many instances is create high school athletes who are even bigger stars than Kobe or Kevin Garnett were when they jumped straight from high school to the pros. LeBron was the beginning of the shift. Cameras were everywhere around LBJ. He was built on ESPN. ESPN also took the concept of Hoop Dreams, a documentary on two players out of Chicago filmed over years of the two kids lives, and created the television show Chicago Hoops which turned Luther Head and Eddie Curry into semi-household names. Chicago Hoops featured other players, but that show, unlike the machine around LeBron, was very niche. The only people who actually remember that show were diehard hoop fans. That has all changed now.
Guys with cameras have built businesses on the back of high school athletes. I should know. I built a website after I finished coaching named Center Court Basketball that helped kids get scholarships. The difference between me and others? I hosted all of my videos locally on my site. I didn’t have any ads on the site. I cut myself out of considerable money, but the site worked. I didn’t want to exploit players; I wanted them to get scholarships. There is something completely different now and it’s unfortunate. There are entire YouTube channels dedicated to high school players. Those channels are monetized and the kids don’t get a dime from the money generated by the ad revenue or sponsorships. The film Amateur brings the question of fame and high school players to our attention in a very compelling way. It could be the story of Zion Williamson who has committed to play basketball at Duke this upcoming year.
In the post above I wrote about how Zion was potentially a better endorser of adidas than James Harden. I also discussed how he and his mother are dealing with the fame of being a media sensation. What I didn’t write about is that YouTube videos make money and lots of it. Zion doesn’t have his own YouTube channel. If he did I would have to think that there would be a difficulty in getting him enrolled in college. The sheer number of views of Zion videos would place him in the hierarchy of YouTubers meaning he could be a millionaire just from his YouTube channel. This would more than likely make him ineligible to play. In Amateur the boundaries that are crossed and the problems that drive the story are due to the constant access kids give people to their daily lives via livestream and social media. The solution of the story leans heavily towards another article I wrote a few years back:
Should America Start Paying The Elite Amateur Athletes Like In Europe?
Grassroots Marketing and No Film School
I don’t want to be vague here, but I don’t want to giveaway the meat of the film. I do recommend watching it if you’ve wondered how some stories form in high school basketball for elite athletes. There is another aspect of this film that is interesting and allows for a quick dive into marketing and business. The writer and director Ryan Koo initially created a film named “Man Child”. It was the precursor of Amateur. Koo was able to pull off a successful Kickstarter campaign. What I find interesting is that the film was not sponsored by a brand. The film utilized a fictitious brand to create the backdrop of corruption that takes place behind the scenes in high level amateur athletics. I have to assume that no brand wanted to be a part of this film especially with the current NCAA investigation into pay to play problems at the college level. This section isn’t about the film so much as it is about marketing and the long game. If you follow this site you know I’ve been making a push for brands to reach out to blogs/writers to help build the marketing strategies for their companies. In today’s society everyone looks to the quick way of funding or building momentum via social media and influencers.
Ryan Koo spent an inordinate amount of time building his website: https://nofilmschool.com while working on Man-Child. His work in establishing a strong foundation led to his decision to launch his short film Amateur on his own website. the entire process leading up to Amateur on Netflix began in 2011. It took 7 years to get to this point, but in the process Koo created a foundation that was able to sustain his indie film decisions and help to create a network for other filmmakers. It’s an incredible story of playing the long game vs gunning for the fast temporary play.
Amateur isn’t the greatest film of all time, but it is one of the best basketball movies I’ve ever seen. I place it in the pantheon with the documentary Hoop Dreams. It’s an important film which in all honesty parallels the story of Brandon Jennings and the creation of Under Armour as a real player in the basketball world. You should check it out.
Source: https://filmmakermagazine.com/68806-ryan-koo-on-amateur-feature-fundraising-and-the-kickstarter-long-game/#.Wx1aie4vyM8
