Jon Bois Interview Introduction First Draft

Complete first draft for Filmmaker Magazine.

Over the past eight years, Jon Bois has risen to become one of the key pioneers of documentaries made for the Internet. As the creative director of Secret Base, the YouTube channel of the sports blog network SB Nation, his work across three series — Pretty Good, Chart Party, and now Dorktown, which is co-written by Alex Rubenstein — takes often unconventional and lesser-known sports stories as a jumping off point for increasingly ambitious yet deftly handled portraits of some of Americana's most crucial mainstays. By focusing equally on the minutiae of statistics, the highs and lows of a game, and the many human dramas in sports teams and the cities that surround them, Bois and Rubenstein establish an aching and potent investment in the narratives that they craft, finding continuity and suspense in what might otherwise come across as the arbitrary nature of a career or season. Paired with this attention to narrative construction is Bois's facility as a director, crafting a distinct aesthetic through a combination of voiceover, Muzak, stock footage, and a form of animation generated by placing images and charts in Google Maps and virtually flying around them. These abstract spaces become loci of both familiarity and surprise, the emotional tenor of a moment often determined by a sudden appearance of a visual element that would be mundane in any other circumstance but whose meaning has been made clear by Bois and Rubenstein's pre-established context. While Bois and Rubenstein's work has been deservedly feted since at least his first major Dorktown series The History of the Seattle Mariners in 2020, it wasn't until the second half of 2022 that they began referring to their projects as films, with two features that vividly represent two extremes of their craft. The first was Section 1, a fleet 42-minute piece that covers the events of a single date, December 19, 1976, where loss of life due to a plane crash was avoided due to a lopsided Baltimore Colts-Pittsburgh Steelers game, which emphasized the urgency of the situation and the heroism/sports prowess of both teams. In contrast, The People You're Paying to Be in Shorts is a sprawling two-and-a-half-hour saga chronicling the 2011-12 Charlotte Bobcats, the worst team in NBA history despite being owned by the one and only Michael Jordan, which unfolds in arguably the funniest and most absurd video that Bois has ever made. Both amply capture the peculiar, singular skill, joy, and pathos of one of the most exciting documentary filmmakers working today.