Jazz Journey: A 50-Year History in Documentary Film

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4 Sports) – Telling the story of 50 years of the Utah Jazz franchise is a big job. Rashaad Floyd spent three months wondering how he was going to do it.

“How do we put this together?” said Floyd, director of the new documentary, Noteworthy: 50 seasons of Jazz basketball. “What are the stories we tell? Who’s still around to tell those stories, and how much footage do we have to support it? I’m a storyteller. I’m a filmmaker. And, you know, quickly the imagination started running wild, and the vision to create a real cinematic film came about in that moment. As you know, a documentary is only as good as its storytellers. So my job as the director was to really get our individuals and our interviewees to tell the story with honesty, with emotion, with passion, and with details that can really connect the dots.”

From the early days in New Orleans, to the move to Salt Lake City, to the glory days of the NBA Finals with John Stockton and Karl Malone, to the playoff runs with Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert, it is all documented on film now.

Quincy Lewis, a former Jazz player, who is now the director of Jazz alumni, had the task of rounding up people to be interviewed.

“I had the lucky part,” Lewis said. “So for me, it was all about reconnecting with all of the alumni and getting them to come back.”

It didn’t take them long to realize this was a big, big project.

“We came up with a 45 minute documentary is how it started,” Floyd said. “Then quickly as we started putting together a storyboard and a timeline, 45 minutes got us through two decades and we had five to cover.”

Floyd was trying to tell three stories at once. The history of the franchise, the present and where the team is heading.

“We had the linear story through the decades,” Floyd said. “We had the present, and we had the future. Then how do we weave them together? Because if we just told the story through the decades and then we get to the present and we talk to the future, it gets a little boring. To see John [Stockton] shed tears, Karl [Malone] to shed tears. Gail Miller to shed tears. I think it was a moment of them reflecting on how special this franchise is, how special this community is. The history of the Jazz is, it’s already written, but it hasn’t been told. Our job was to put the pictures on the page, so we’ve weaved together those three different verticals. Story through the decades, story of the present and the story of the future. We weave them together, which is extremely difficult to do.”

But eventually it all came together and fans will be able to watch the final product Saturday night in the premier screening at the Delta Center, where most of the film takes place.

“I can see it how all those different decades and all the personalities and all the things they were good at,” Lewis said. “How it transcends, I can see so much of it now, and that’s been that’s been the best part of my opportunity to be a part of this.”

“Ultimately, when you’re telling a story that has so much rich history to it, it was our job to make sure that we’re weaving through those decades,” Floyd said. “But we’re also telling people something that they know about right now while going back and paying tribute to the past.”

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Source: ABC4