Buddy Moorehouse, sportswriter-turned-documentarian, is the Senior Creative Director at Stunt3 Multimedia. Their most recent documentary, “Black and Blue: The Story of Gerald Ford, Willis Ward and the 1934 Michigan-Georgia Tech Football Game,” earned an Emmy nomination as “Best Historical Documentary” in 2012, and will be showing at the Dawn Theater on April 18 at 7:30 p.m. Moorehouse works with Stunt3 Media as well as the Charter School Association.
How did you get your start in journalism?
My dad had instilled in me kind of a love of newspapers. We got the Detroit Free-Press every morning and that would be kind of a ritual that we would look through the newspaper together. So, I grew up a newspaper kid. I loved reading the newspaper. I hadn’t really thought about it when I went to college. I didn’t know what I wanted to do — maybe law school. I didn’t really know. It was sort of a love at first sight thing when I went and wrote my first story for the newspaper. I love writing. I love sports. I thought that if I could get a job going to games — I wasn’t going to be an athlete — then what better job could there ever be than being paid to go to basketball games and football games and hockey and all that. I’d always been a sportswriter at heart, and that’s what I love more than anything else.
Was it always primarily sportswriting?
That’s all I ever did in college. Then I changed my major over to communications after that. Every story I had to do as a class exercise — if I could pick what it was — it was always sports. There’s so much drama built into it. Even if you don’t care about football, even if you don’t like football, even if you have no interest in it, hopefully the story itself is interesting enough that you’re still going to want to follow it. The football part of it might be interesting to other people, but the human element is still going to be there. I always loved that part of it.
How did you transition from newspaper journalism to documentaries?
It was right around the time that the newspaper industry was starting to collapse. I knew that the industry was changing. I knew I still wanted to be in some kind of communications field. It’s all I’d ever done. It’s what I loved. It’s really the only thing that I knew. So, that’s when my friend Brian Kruger and I decided we were going to start our own company to make documentaries. We knew that there were other people out there doing it. But we didn’t really have any other personal background in that ourselves. We just knew that we wanted to try it. What helped us out at that time was that ESPN had just started doing its 30 for 30 films. So, there was this renewed focus on sports documentaries at the time. People were looking for them. There was more interest in them. People saw how cool a sports documentary could be at that point. That helped us get some attention to what we were doing.
What were some of your favorite documentaries to film?
“Black and Blue” is probably my personal favorite because the story was so good, and because of what happened afterward in that we were able to get people to know who Willis Ward was — he’s such an amazing person. Now when you ask the average Michigan football fan or just a person in Michigan, there’s a lot better chance that they’ll say, ‘Oh yeah! I know who Willis Ward is. I know what he did.’ That just showed me that you can accomplish things with a documentary.
What advice do you have for future documentarians?
Number one is that it’s easier now than it’s ever been. Really all you need is a decent camera and some editing software. You don’t need to invest a whole lot of money into it. Secondly, the best advice I can have is you have to find a great story. If there’s a story you think is interesting, find as much information as you can about it. And then just ask other people, “Would you like to see a documentary about this?” It’s all about the story. Pick a great story.
-Compiled by Sarah Leitner
