Filmmaker Andre Gaines on ‘the honor’ of making a Stuart Scott 30 for 30

In ESPN’s history, few SportsCenter anchors have become cultural icons. Stuart Scott persevered to become one of The Worldwide Leader in Sports’ most influential voices. He helped pave the way for a generation of journalists and television personalities before passing away after a long battle with cancer in January 2015 at the age of 49.

ESPN will recognize his contributions with the 30 for 30 documentary film Boo-Yah: A Portrait of Stuart Scott. It will premiere Dec. 10 at 9 p.m. ET on ESPN and the ESPN app. We recently caught up with director Andre Gaines to discuss his film and Scott’s impact.

Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Awful Announcing: What made you decide to direct this documentary?

Andre Gaines: “When ESPN called me about it, it wasn’t a why-not situation; it was a yes, please. I grew up on Stuart as a kid, and he’s a member of my lifelong fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha. I was a young journalism student at Northwestern University, trying to bring him to campus to speak there one year as an undergraduate. He was somebody that I thought was an incredible voice and a legend, a trailblazer, a pioneer, a cultural icon, all of those things. And for me, it was just an honor, not a burden or a challenge, but a proper challenge to bring his story to the screen.”

What was the biggest challenge in making this?

“The biggest challenge is one that regularly shows up, which is just the realities of having so much material that you have to make some hard decisions. As a filmmaker, both on the narrative side and documentary side, it’s the type of thing that there’s always more story to tell. But I feel like with this, we told the best story, and it was the best representation, I think, of Stuart’s journey, kind of from the time that he was an aspiring athlete and an amateur journalist before becoming a professional.”

How much source material did you have?

“We had hundreds and hundreds of hours of his personal archive where he recorded himself, family members, and home videos, things like that. Thousands of hours of his broadcast life from ESPN, and thousands of photos.”

Is it unusual to have access to that much material, in terms of home movies about a subject?

“It’s extremely rare to have this much video footage and photos, to have that large of an archive from any one individual, especially one who was tragically taken from us at such a young age of 49. It’s a very unusual thing. Most of the time, you’re scrambling to gather those materials. Most of the time what you come across, especially when it comes from these major public figures, is the stuff that is in the public, some things that folks have seen, some things that people haven’t totally seen but maybe they saw it, forgot it, but it’s like readily available from any one of the news sources or any one of the museums or archive houses and things of that nature.”

What was the hardest thing to leave on the cutting floor?

“I feel like every story that we wanted to get into the film, we managed to get into the film. There were definitely some interesting stories as it relates to internal competition at ESPN amongst the anchors, like in pickup basketball games and things like that, they were very competitive amongst each other, that we didn’t get a chance to really cover. But we did get a chance to tell the story about how intense a competitor Stuart was.”

What is something you learned about Stuart Scott that surprised you?

“How much Stuart was into theater. That he was this rare combination of a theater jock, theater kid. His mom would play Broadway showtunes in the house every Saturday when they were cleaning the house. The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Jesus Christ Superstar. These are all things that Stuart himself highlights in the film. She would play these, and then everybody would sing them. And Stuart, being the baby of the family, fell especially in love with them. It was something he shared with his mom. It helped inform me as the filmmaker, and I think it helped inform the fans as to where his performance skills come from.”

Did you have fun researching the origins of his catchphrase Boo-Yah?

“Everybody had a different story. Stuart’s gone on record even at the beginning of our film saying, ‘Yeah, I didn’t invent Boo-Yah, I just was the person who brought it to TV.’ It’s almost like Michael Jackson bringing the moonwalk to the public. He didn’t invent it. He saw some break dancers on the street and was like, ‘Oh wow. What’s that?’ He popularized it and made it something that’s now part of our pop-culture lexicon. That’s the very same thing with Boo-Yah. So yeah, that was a lot of fun.”

Can you elaborate on the connection between the rise of hip-hop music and the rise of Stuart Scott?

“The genre and Stuart grew up together. He was a fan of it in his private life, and what he did is bring that genre of music to the mainstream. That was not part of the mainstream at the time, and I think a lot of folks forget that. We took it for granted that everybody likes this music. Stuart taking the chance to introduce that to a mainstream audience was really bold. He was just being authentic and genuine, but once he got pushback from within the walls of ESPN, from the same executives that hired him to be this bold and, you know, gregarious, unique voice that he was, then he realized, ‘Oh, I am taking on a burden here,’ of which he was able to achieve with flying colors.”

Did you encounter any pushback from current ESPN management for including the criticism that Scott received from executives?

“We had ESPN’s support of this from the very beginning. We knew that there was a series of trials and difficulties that Stuart had experienced from the moment he got on ESPN2 all the way through the peak of his fame. Things that he had to deal with initially internally from ESPN, and then once he got really famous, externally from racism and discrimination in the public. And we wanted to put that on display. We didn’t want to name names. We didn’t want to point fingers. We didn’t want to do anything like that because it would have been easy to single folks out as opposed to it being kind of a systemic sort of thing. But they were very supportive from Day One, thankfully.”

What’s the one takeaway you hope people get from this documentary?

“I really hope that folks laugh, they cry, they come away inspired, they come away with a real understanding of what perseverance looks like. My god, cancer was really just the last battle that Stuart had endured in his life. As gifted an athlete as he was, as talented a journalist as he was, as talented an actor and writer that he was, he faced some incredible challenges through the course of his life, particularly with his eyesight, with his health, and definitely with racism. Just so many different challenges that he faced, but that he faced head-on, didn’t cower from, and persevered and pushed through.”