‘Celtics City’ director on working with Bill Simmons, Connor Schell: ‘We were surrounded by some of the most incredible minds’

The talent featured on the screen in the new HBO docuseries Celtics City is undeniable. The series covers an incredible amount of Boston Celtics’ history, from Red Auerbach’s arrival in 1950 through the team’s record 18th NBA title in 2024. And it features a massive amount of interviews with current and former Celtics, rivals, league executives, journalists, authors, fans, and more.

Celtics City is also notable for the talent behind the camera, though. That includes famed ex-ESPN 30 for 30 figures Bill Simmons and Connor Schell (both executive producers here) collaborating on their first project together since their days at the Worldwide Leader.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the prominent figures involved. The docuseries is a collaboration between Schell’s Words + Pictures, Simmons’ Ringer Films, and HBO Films, with Words + Pictures’ Aaron Cohen and Libby Geist and the Celtics’ Wyc Grousbeck and Rich Gotham also serving as executive producers. Sascha Gardner and Christina Lenis produced, and famed ex-ESPN writer Jackie MacMullan served as a consulting producer. And for HBO, Nancy Abraham, Lisa Heller, and Bentley Weiner served as executive producers, with Abtin Motia as a supervising producer.

The series has its ninth and final episode premiere this coming Monday (April 28) on HBO at 9 p.m. ET/PT, with all previous episodes currently available to stream on Max. On Friday, Celtics City director Lauren Stowell and co-executive producer/showrunner Gabe Honig spoke to Awful Announcing about the project. Stowell said the remarkable behind-the-scenes team here was key to pulling off this project.

“We were really fortunate that we had some great minds behind us, and supporting us,” she said. “We were surrounded by some of the most incredible minds in sports television documentary filmmaking.”

The value of Bill Simmons’ ‘incredible basketball mind’

Beyond his involvement in launching the 30 for 30 series of documentaries with Schell and others, Simmons has gone on to make other notable documentaries with Ringer Films. He’s also a passionate fan of the NBA and the Celtics in particular, as shown through his The Book of Basketball tome, his podcasting, and his writing. Stowell said Simmons’ insight and memory for Celtics’ moments in particular was a key resource for the team.

“With Bill specifically, he’s such an incredible basketball mind. Yes, he is a fan, and loves this team. But there were so many times that we would share a cut…there’s a shot of [Larry] Bird from the baseline in ‘81 after they beat the Sixers, and running off the floor, and he’s got his hand, and he fist pumps.

“We didn’t have it in. We were digging through the archives, but we didn’t have it. And so he sends us a YouTube video, he’s like ‘We need to get this shot in there. And we need to reach out to WEEI, and we need to get WBZ.’ Just having someone who knew every iconic moment, we would lean on him to just make sure that we weren’t missing anything.”

Honig said working with the legendary group behind this project had him relating to comments from former Celtics guard Dee Brown (drafted by Boston in the first round in 1990) in the documentary about the pressure of joining that team.

“It’s the only time in my life that I’ll ever say this, I could totally relate to what Dee Brown is saying at the top of Episode 7, when he’s like, ‘You feel this honor and the weight of expectations when you’re drafted. into that group.’ In that group with Connor and Bill, they’re responsible for some of the best documentaries.”

For Honig, that led to some pinch-me moments during the project.

“Yes, I work in sports documentaries, but I’m also a fan of sports documentaries. And they’ve created and produced some of my favorites. It was awesome, and intimidating, and all that wrapped in into one. And yeah, you want to crush it, and I think we did. It’s all the good things about having pressure.”

‘Will the Celtics allow us to tell the story?’

Of course, having team figures like Grousbeck (the key front-facing figure of the Celtics’ ownership group 2002 until the announced sale last month) and Gotham (the team president) in that executive producer list as well might raise some skepticism for some viewers. Many recent sports documentaries have had heavy team or subject involvement, and have been criticized for omissions or missed perspectives. Honig said that did cross his mind when Celtics City was proposed to him, but he received assurances the filmmakers would be able to tell the story they envisioned.

“It was the first thing after this idea was brought to my attention, my first question was ‘Will the NBA and will the Celtics allow us to tell the story the way that we want to tell it?’ And I was assured ‘Yes.’, Yeah, sometimes there is involvement which is detrimental to the storytelling, and sometimes there’s not. And we had great partners on this, and the Celtics knew that the only way that this could be good is to tell all of the stories. Their involvement and the NBA’s involvement did not at all hinder us in telling the story that we wanted to tell.”

Honig said that team involvement wound up being an incredible feature, especially when it came to finding former players and convincing them to participate.

“We worked intimately with with Rich Gotham and Wyc Grousbeck on this. Rich was very much involved throughout the entire thing. The reason why we’re able to tell the story the way we wanted to is trust, and that trust work both ways. And the Celtics were incredibly helpful. [VP of media services] Jeff Twiss at the Celtics was our, I kept calling him the skeleton key, unlocking all the contact info to all the Celtic legends and former players.”

‘No one was screening the questions’

Those connections didn’t come with stipulations or censorship either, as per Honig.

“Jeff wasn’t saying ‘Don’t talk about this, don’t talk about that.’ No one was screening the questions. We just trusted each other. And that took some work in pre-production, as any kind of new relationship does. And it all worked out: I couldn’t be happier with the relationship and what we were able to get on screen.”

Stowell said working with the team and league here also carried some concerns for her initially, especially with the plan of relating Celtics’ history to specific moments in national and Boston history around race and civil rights. But she said the team and the NBA didn’t push back on that.

“You just don’t know. You have a vision, we’re in pre-production, we’re creating these outlines, we’re thematically mapping out the way that we want to tell it. The moments, even with Boston, that was a specific challenge of ‘If we want to explore the busing crisis and the busing mandate in the 1970s and juxtapose that with the ‘76 triple-overtime thriller, are they going to be okay with those two incidents being kind of intertwined?’

“And to Gabe’s point, there wasn’t this pushback of ‘We have to neutralize this,’ or ‘No, there’s no possible way we’re going to be able to combine those two thoughts together.’ You never know what you’re going to get. And I think, for the most part, everything in the vision that we had was achieved, and there were very few barriers to what we were able to explore.”

Combining on and off-court history

The lack of pushback on combining Celtics’ history and wider history was crucial for Stowell, as she said that was the key part of what excited her about this project.

“For me personally, what appealed to me the most about this was the opportunity to tell a story that had history, nuance. We’re talking 70-plus years from Red Auerbach taking the job in 1950 to Banner 18, where we ended up, not knowing that in the beginning, but where we landed.

“It was just being able to weave those two worlds together. That’s the world of the Celtics and the incredible success and tragedy that they’ve endured in those 70 years, but also Boston as a city, how it has evolved, how it has changed, what it has meant to the players, to the organization. It’s what the city means, what the fans mean to the team, what the team means to the fans. Those were things that for me personally as a storyteller were rich with opportunity. And our team was just thrilled for the opportunity to dive into all of that nuance.”

Including coverage of key civil rights moments nationally and locally around the time periods covered certainly isn’t something seen in every sports documentary. But Stowell said it was vital to Celtics City considering how involved the team was in some of that history. That includes the discrimination Bill Russell faced as first a Black player in Boston and then the first Black head coach in the NBA (and in modern major professional sports) when he became a player-coach in 1966, as well as continual racial discrimination and discussion in Boston during some of the Celtics’ highest heights. Stowell said some dark and ugly moments early on were worth spotlighting to illustrate how things progressed from there.

“We wanted this to be a human story,” Stowell said. “We knew that, especially when you’re looking at history, just speaking specifically about the history of Boston and America through that 70 years, it’s complicated. It’s ugly at times. There’s also a lot of progress and beauty, and we knew that we would also be able to come out the other end and see some of that in this current day.”

The heartbreak of Len Bias and Reggie Lewis, and the value of opponents’ perspectives

Beyond non-sports history, other dark moments come in the discussions of the aforementioned tragedies. Celtics City focuses not just on the team’s titles, but also their moments of heartbreak. Those include the death of Len Bias two days after the team selected him second overall in the 1986 draft, and the death of Reggie Lewis after a collapse during an offseason workout in 1993. Stowell said being able to dive into those moments and how they affected the team was just as crucial as coverage of the championships.

“Even with the organization itself, the tragedy that they endured, I don’t even know if I would have wanted to tell the story if we couldn’t tell it fully and completely, really understanding the down years. The tragedy again. Len Bias and Reggie Lewis, how do you tell the story without trying to understand what that meant to the organization and to the city? It’s that loss, how it was felt, how it reverberated, and how it impacts even the organization today on a human level, but also just from an organization level.”

In addition to those specific moments of Celtics’ tragedy, Celtics City stands out from many team-centric documentaries for the amount of focus it puts on their opponents. There are a wide range of former players, coaches, and executives from rivals interviewed, and Stowell said that was vital to telling this story.

“I don’t think you can understand greatness or dynasty without understanding what they were up against, those who went to battle with them through all of these year and what these rivalries meant. Obviously, the Lakers rivalry with Jerry West and James Worthy, they’re just such standout interviews in this this series.

“We’re so grateful that we were able to get Jerry before he passed. And I just think viscerally you can see it. It’s in his body language, it’s in his face. In the room that day when we interviewed him, you could feel that heartbreak and that longing, he wanted for so long to beat the Celtics. And then you see James Worthy and there’s this, I wouldn’t call it vitriol, but there is this passion. But there’s also respect and reverence.”

Honig called that expression from Worthy “respectful disdain,” and Stowell said that was amazing to see.

“It’s so beautiful in sports. I love it. It’s a very human and natural thing.”

Getting participation from rivals for a series that’s even called Celtics City wasn’t assured, but Honig said the filmmakers emphasized that they weren’t just telling the story through green-tinted lenses.

“The human experience isn’t just all good. And it’s also just not all bad. One of the things that we also tried to do when we were trying to convince people to sit for an interview is assure everybody that we wanted to tell a 360-degree story here.

“You don’t really, truly understand the nature of the subject until you get all sides of it, the good and the bad. You want to sit down with all the Celtic heroes, and you also want to get a perspective from the opponents and understand everyone’s role in history. And where Boston was in the 1950s and where it is now. And I think that all plays out in the nine hours.”

There are a lot of threads to weave in there, even in a nine-episode series. But Honig said the richness of the potential stories here made this a compelling project for him to be part of.

“When you’re asked to join a project like this, and you look at it all laid out, the triumph, the tragedy, it’s one of the Tiffany franchises in all of North American sports, it’s a great privilege and honor to be able to help tell that story. And then you add on this layer of being able to tell the complicated nature of the team and the town. It had really all the recipes. As a storyteller, you couldn’t ask for a better story to tell.”