Take what you think you know about FC Cincinnati and get ready to make room for a lot of new footnotes, entire never-before-told stories and influential personalities from behind the scenes at the club.
The forthcoming FC Cincinnati documentary entitled "Nonstop Flight: The Untold Story of FC Cincinnati," which debuts Wednesday at 8 p.m. on WCPO-9, peels back the curtain on the first five years of the club in a way that's likely to grab new and old fans of FCC alike.
The 4th Floor Creative agency, which is owned by FC Cincinnati play-by-play voice Tommy Gelehrter and has had cameras on the FCC organization since the club's introductory news conference in Aug. 2015, produced the documentary.
The film focuses on five of the most important moments in FC Cincinnati history, all of which played out in the public eye to a large degree.
As with any professional sports franchise, though, the most important moments also played out behind closed doors to a larger degree – sometimes in unforeseen and uncomfortably dramatic ways.
That's what the 4th Floor team endeavored to bring to light with the documentary: The real story behind one of the greatest startup business successes in Cincinnati history, warts and all.
"We started this process (five) months ago. We decided to film 20 people and we had to dive into the top five moments in FC Cincinnati history. We went through those and found them – the first match, the Crystal Palace match, the Open Cup run, the (USL) regular season championship and the MLS home opener," said Marc Graham, the senior director of video creative at 4th Floor and director of the film. "But to tell the story of those moments, there’s so much more that happens that leads up to it whether it’s (John) Harkes getting fired and Alan (Koch) coming into the picture or moving into that last year in USL and you’ve got to bring the trophy home. That was the goal from the day we started."
Included among those that participated in the documentary are Chief Executive Officer and controlling owner Carl Lindner III, Jeff and Lindsay Berding, FC Cincinnati Chief of Staff Cody Parsons, Koch, Director of Soccer Operations and FCC's first-ever employee Dan McNally, Gelehrter and FC Cincinnati commentator Kevin McCloskey, two-time interim head coach and current assistant coach Yoann Damet, former club executive Gary De Jesus, current and former players, supporters and The Enquirer.
After talks to have him be part of the documentary, former head coach John Harkes declined to participate, Graham said, adding that 4th Floor was happy to have the participation of Koch, who was relieved of his managerial duties in May 2019.
“In my opinion, if you would have told me ‘you can’t have Alan and you can’t have Harkes, let’s do this,’ I would say you can’t. It’s not right because those two have such a unique perspective," Graham said. “You have to get the different perspectives because without those, it’s just a feel-good story, there’s only good coming from it and you’re not doing the story justice."
The process of creating the documentary is as interesting as the documentary itself.
The film was commissioned during the height of coronavirus pandemic. It was hatched from discussions about content creation with FC Cincinnati sidelined while Major League Soccer's 2020 season was halted by the pandemic.
The pandemic produced some considerable obstacles, the least of which might have been that FCC wasn't playing games.
For Koch's interview, camera equipment was flown to Colorado where Koch is coaching the Colorado Switchbacks of the second-division USL Championship in Colorado Springs. Then, Graham led Koch through a line of questioning via Zoom with minimal on-site support.
Interviewees were given location options for conducting their interviews. Off-camera masking was emphasized, as was social distancing.
What resulted from the pile of visuals and audio from each interview is what you'll see on Wednesday, but it was no easy task getting to that point.
"Think of it as diving into the deepest part of the ocean without any understanding of what's below, staying down there for a couple years, then coming up for air and trying to tell someone what you saw while you were down there," said associate producer Will Rettig of the film-making process.
Each interview typically went longer than 75 minutes, Graham said, with Jeff Berding's going the longest at about four hours over parts of two days.
That left 4th Floor with about 25 hours worth of interviews to transcribe and sift through. Naturally, a lot of good material hit the cutting room floor.
Squeezing 25 hours of interviews into a two-hour documentary (adjusted for TV, that means the documentary runs for 100 minutes) meant 16-hour days for the film crew and long nights away from home during production.
"We made a 100-minute documentary in less than four months," Graham said. "That doesn’t happen very often but we’re at a unique point in time. We’re in a pandemic… now is the opportunity to give people something to escape from."
It sounds cliche, but it really was a labor of love for 4th Floor to act on the opportunity to take on the documentary. The club and the agency have partnered together since the club was born, and the filming process was a continuation of that relationship, Graham said.
It was also a labor of honest storytelling, said Graham, who in an August interview said the completion of the film would be one of the finer moments of his career.
"What I learned is when you are telling a story that involves so many people – an entire city, a culmination of so many people that had a hand in this story's success – you're given the task to give the story a heartbeat, give it a pulse and let the film open its eyes to the world," Graham said. "That's what we did with this. It's a new look on a story that we've all lived."
The 4th Floor Creative team that worked on the film was led by Graham and included Cori Ward (producer and editor), Rettig, Brennan Warner (director of photography and editor), Connor Leupp (sound editor and sound mixer, assistant editor) and Robbie Boyles (assistant editor, camera operator).
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