A Sad Anniversary

September 6 is the one-year anniversary of the death of Dr. and Coach Catana Starks, the leader we profiled in our film From the Rough, released theatrically in 2014 and available today on Amazon Prime, YouTube, I-Tunes, and Hulu. DVDs are available directly from me as the film's Producer, as well as Amazon.

For those unfamiliar with the film, Coach Starks was the first black woman (and, probably, the first woman of color) to coach a men's Division I college athletic team. She was the men's golf coach at Tennessee State University between 1987 and 2006. She also was a trailblazer in recruiting non-black athletes, initially from outside the US, into a historically black college. In 2005, her team set an all-time record for the lowest score in. the National Collegiate Minority Golf Championship, a record that still stands 16 years later.

At the time, she was criticized for not being satisfied with recruiting solely from an exceptionally limited pool of American-born black golfers. She found it difficult to recruit competitive black golfers because there was a declining pool. Many black golfers had received training and practice from caddy jobs. Highly qualified black golfers were actively recruited by colleges and universities with much larger budgets for their golf teams, as well as golf courses provided to them by wealthy alumni. TSU had very little money to support a men's golf team and could not compete with them for talent.

The journey from story development to theatrical release was brutal, but we were rewarded with a high quality film. Taraji P. Henson played the coach and led a cast that did an outstanding job. Amazon customers who rated and/or reviewed the film have given it a rating of 4.6 out of 5, which has to put it in the top 5-10% of all films.

I would compliment everyone who made that possible, although we had to fight through so many obstacles to get to the finish line. But the first and most important catalyst was our son Mike Critelli, who crafted a high-quality screenplay and stayed with the project until close to the theatrical release in April, 2014.

This project was life-changing for me and, to some degree, my entire family. As I reflect on the film, these are some of the less obvious insights I took from it.

When producing a film based on or inspired by a true story, there is always a tension between what works for the film audience and what is true to the person or people portrayed in it. A 93-minute film about anyone has to be selective in what it presents and what it chooses not to present.

Trying to build a story line about her advanced degree (she had a PhD in Human Performance and Sports Science), her full-time teaching load, her parenting and her community advocacy was too much to accomplish in a 93-minute film. But I regret that there was not a way to honor her great work in everything she touched..I am proud that we stayed true to what Coach Starks told us she wanted presented about herself in the film.

Our journey on this film started in December, 2004, when I learned about Coach Starks from one of her golfers, who had graduated and was coaching my second son James at chess. Over the last 16 years and 9 months, the journey changed all our lives. I learned and grew deeply from the experience.

• My first insight, in doing preliminary research on women college coaches, was that they lost significant ground because of an unintended consequence of Title IX, the transformative 1972 law that dictated equal opportunity for women's sports. Women's teams became better funded, as were their coaching positions. As a result, men competed for, and secured, many of the jobs coaching women's athletic teams. Most likely, Coach Starks secured her position because it was an add-on to a full teaching load. As a result, she coached for very little incremental money for a financially strapped school. Her resourcefulness in doing more with less was admirable, but she should have been better supported.
• The people I approached in Hollywood trying to get the film financed and distributed understood very little about people of color or the challenges of women in the broader world. This surprised me. Network TV producers were quite successful in the 1970's and 1980's portraying middle-class and aspirational black men and women, in shows like The Jeffersons, Julia, or Room 222, or in Harold Sylvester's role as Griff in Married with Children. Moreover, many films portrayed middle-class and working class black men and women and did well at the box office over many decades everywhere in the world. I was surprised that the Hollywood establishment with which I made contact between. 2008 and 2013 to get financing seemed to be unaware that a large middle class black moviegoer market for our kind of content existed.
• I learned that much of the profit line of major studios derived from either fee-based markups of marketing expenses, over-allocating overhead to films, and the sale of ancillary items (e.g. toys, amusement park characters, logo items). Their profit models inevitably drove them to prefer big budget "tentpole" films. They liked franchises built on cartoon characters like Spiderman or on characters in novels, like the Harry Potter series. Our film checked none of the boxes. Today, many more potential financing sources exist than was the case in 2008-2011.
• We did not do well in the first-weekend theatrical release. The film did not fit neatly into any genre. The marketing arms of distributors and exhibitors are more comfortable with single genre films for which tried-and-true marketing formulas work. Our film was a well-presented slice of the life of a real and inspiring flesh-and-blood human being, which is far more difficult to market. With the benefit of hindsight, the inability of our marketers and exhibitors to market the film should have been a sign that a theatrical release was not the optimal way to get this film to the market.
• The best market for the film was different from what the Hollywood-based marketers believed. They thought that we would attract 21-45 year old black women who would be attracted to Taraji P. Henson and the character she played. One of Coach Starks' golfers, who lived with his Dad in The Villages, an age-restricted community in North Central Florida, was far more prescient. He said: "The Villages is the perfect community for your film. 65-year-old couples play golf in the morning, take their children ands their 10-15 year old grandchildren to the movies in the afternoon, have the early bird dinner at their favorite restaurants and play bridge at night. This is the kind of film they will enjoy and talk over with their children and grandchildren." He was right. The theater in The Villages was our best-performing theater during the four weeks it ran there.
• I did not know what I did not know about the optimal audiences for the film. A few years later, I commissioned a marketing research study to determine the best market for the film. It was different in subtle, but significant, ways from what. our marketers had believed: (i) The film was most attractive to people of all ages who were coaches, teachers, social service workers, human resources professionals, and people who trained and mentored others; (ii) the optimal age range was the over-45 viewer, not the 21-45 year old group; (iii) The optimal audience was multi-racial, not just black women; and (iv) Whereas the marketers targeted audiences with 55% women (representative of the broad filmgoing audience, our optimal target audience was 71% female. Not surprisingly, with the mismatch between what the marketers believed and the audience our film should have attracted, we spent a lot of marketing money inefficiently at the time of theatrical release.
• We received surprisingly little support or encouragement from the leaders of historically black colleges or from the associations that support them. Even with a black director and co-producer Pierre Bagley, we had trouble getting Tennessee State to let us use the school's name and logo. The film should have been adopted by the HBCUs as a celebration of their great value in delivering a first-rate education and social experience for their students. I came to admire HBCUs, but could not get their support or encouragement when I needed it.
• Many friends of mine of all races stayed away from going to. theaters to see the film. because they believed it would be a low-quality vanity project, because I was a white retired CEO. They were astounded at how much better the film was than what they expected. Stereotyping hurt me in the one case, as it routinely hurts people of color.
• Without being solicited to do so, many people of all races have told me that this film will have longevity. We sought to make the film timeless and I expect that it will be. We have secured two new licenses for cable TV viewing that will take our presence in cable into 2023.

All of these life lessons happened to me because I was blessed to learn about Catana Starks in 2004 and to secure the rights to her story in 2006. There may be an incremental opportunity to tell her inspiring story, and I am working on a plan to do so, but if the film is my only opportunity to tell that story, I will feel fulfilled by the experience.

However, we deeply admire Catana Starks as a coach, a teacher, a community leader, and an inspirational human being. We recognized that we are a guardian and promoter of her legacy and will continue to take that responsibility seriously.