Super Bowl LIV is only a few days away and it will be seen by millions of people all over the world. The NFL has made the Super Bowl a global phenomenon as it has become more than just a football game. But for football fans, they can access a replay of any Super Bowl easily as it can be seen on the NFL Network during the offseason. But documentary filmmaker Jeremy Coon, who is known for being a producer and editor for the film Napoleon Dynamite, is looking to do something that hasn’t been done before. Super Bowl I is the only game where fans haven’t seen a replay on television. That has led to Coon launching a campaign to release the “lost” Super Bowl I broadcast, as he shares exclusively with PopCulture.com.
He launched a Kickstarter page to help raise enough money to release his documentary The Tape: The Lost Recording of Super Bowl I and get the Super Bowl I tape to be seen by everyone this time next year.
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“I was with the New York Times,” Coon said the PopCulture.com when asked why he wanted to do this. “As a documentary filmmaker, in the back of my head I had all these questions and I get the idea of someone being bullied. So those two things [lead to] ‘I want to dig into this more and see if something’s there’ because that’s usually the genesis in most of my projects. I just have a whole bunch of questions that I want answered. “
The first Super Bowl, which was called the AFL vs. NFL Championship game, took place in 1967 between the Green Bay Packers and Kansas City Chiefs. The game was aired simultaneously on NBC and CBS, but neither network nor the NFL preserved a copy. So it seemed lost forever — but not exactly as Troy Haupt and his childhood friend saw a Sports Illustrated article and remembered seeing a box labeled “Super Bowl I” located in Haupt mom’s attic decades before in Pennsylvania. Troy’s father, who is now dead, recorded the game on quadruplex reels.
The family then stored the tape at the Paley Center vault in New York and they were going to sell it to the NFL. The tape is worth $1 million and the NFL offered the family $30,000. The league then said they can sue the family because they claim they own the recording due to copyright laws. It’s been sitting in the Paley Center Vault ever since and it has led to Coon starting the campaign. But how much money does he need?
“$50,000 we can finish the film, $200,000 finish the film how we would like,” Coon said. “The $1.5 million gets us to where we can buy the tape, release it and have a legal reserve, because we know if that happens, the NFL’s going to come after us. Sounds like a lot of money, but we lose 30 percent right off the top because of Kickstarter fees, credit card fees and fulfillment. 1.5 (million) becomes 1.2, $750,000 to buy it.”
So far, Coon has filmed interviews with Jerry Kramer (Green Bay Packers offensive lineman), Fred “The Hammer” Williamson (Kansas City Chiefs defensive lineman), and Jack Whitaker (CBS Announcer for Super Bowl I who recently passed away at the age of 95). He the goal is to raise the $1.5 million, buy the tape and release it to the public one week before Super Bowl LV next year. And while they have some work to do, Coon is confident they will get the job done.
“We would love to be successful, release Super Bowl I and that would be the end of the documentary and it would come out a couple of months later,” Coon said. “That’s why the doc would come out afterward because we’re hoping we have some kind of nice happy ending where the recording is out.
“We have legal analysis done on everything. The NFL could try to slow us down but we had three experts look at it and they were like ‘we don’t think the NFL has a case.”
