The 36th Washington DC International Film Festival

The Cinema Lounge

Adam's Rib Names His Best of 2021 and Examines "The Slap Heard Around the World."

The Loyola Project: Q&A with Director Patrick Creadon

By Annette Graham, DC Film Society Member

A preview of the documentary The Loyola Project (2022) was shown at Landmark's E Street Cinema on March 29. The film's director, Patrick Creadon, discussed the film and took audience questions. Also present was Lucas Williamson, narrator and co-writer, and student/athlete at Loyola and Loyola Rambler's Captain. Moderating the discussion was Roxanna Scott, USA Today's managing editor for Sports. This Q&A has been condensed and edited.

In 1963, George Ireland, basketball coach for the Loyola Ramblers, broke an unwritten rule that you couldn't have more than three black players on the court at the same time. The team also made history when the all-white Mississippi State Bulldogs had to sneak out of the state to play an integrated team. (Loyola won).

Moderator: Patrick Creadon made his first feature film Wordplay (2006), next was IOUSA (2008) which was short listed for Best Documentary. In 2014 he made If You Build It (2013). On Saturday [April 2] CBS will show a one-hour version of the film at noon Central Time. Lucas Williamson is a two-time Conference USA Defensive Player of the Year. He has been named a finalist for the Lefty Driesell Award which is presented annually to the top defensive player in the NCAA Division 1 Men's Basketball. In addition to his defensive dominance, Lucas has also closed out his collegiate career as the school's all-time winningest player with 124 wins and is also one of only 23 players The Loyola Project.

Moderator: Before you started working on this film how much did you know about this story of the 1963 team and the overt racism the players experienced during that historic run to the championship?
Lucas Williamson: I think the story is well-known on campus. If you go to Loyola it's kind of hard to not know about the story but the extent of my knowledge there was the game change where they had to sneak out to the play the game and they won a national championship. But that was about the extent of my knowledge and it wasn't until I actually took on this project and started narrating the story that I really got to know all the nuances and details that these guys went through. It really blew my mind. Because I had no idea.

Moderator: How do you manage to narrate a film, co-write it, go to school and play basketball?
Lucas Williamson: When you put it like that... It was just figuring out scheduling. It didn't take too much of a toll on me. I worked on it at least a year and a half. So it was just about finding 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there. In fact, I did the whole thing in my closet. The majority of the VO was recorded over quarantine during lockdown. So Patrick sent me a mic, a mic stand and he would send me a script and that was that. There was no professional studio, none of that. Literally, I would get out of practice and I would go in my closet and work.

Moderator: Patrick, what brought you to the story?
Patrick Creadon: Christine [O'Malley] and I are both from Chicago originally and we're both big sports fans. And we had never heard of this story. And that was intriguing to us. How is it that we lived in Chicago and never heard of this? I got a call from a friend of a friend, "My buddy has this idea for a movie and he'd love to talk to you about it." We get those kind of calls from time to time and it's always good to hear that but usually it doesn't go anywhere. This just really grabbed me Lucas and his teammates had just been to the Final Four and there was all this energy and excitement around the team and we throught this could be kind of cool. And we decided to do it. Christine and I make a lot of movies and sometimes it's for Netflix or ESPN or something like that. But sometimes we make movies independently. And this movie we made independently. We raised the money ourselves, we made the movie ourselves, and then we figured out who our partner would be. Our partner on this would be Paramount. But none of that was figured out on day one. We shopped it around, couldn't find an interested party, so just did it anyway. We've had a lot of corporate support. At the beginning on day one we partnered up with Bob and Betty Parkinson who met up at Loyola in the 1970s and they wanted to celebrate the '63 team and they became our financial partners. They put the money behind the film and that's it. That was two and a half years ago. Bob Parkinson passed away while we were making the film so he was not able to see the film. Jerry Harkness died while we were making the film; Les Hunter died while we were making the film. These stories are fading away right in front of our eyes. There's a sense of urgency. If we don't tell it now, it isn't going to get told. The people who knew this story, they knew about this stubborn Irish coach who broke this rule and they also knew about the story of how Mississippi State snuck out of the state to get to this game. It's a cool story, no doubt. The story that hadn't been told was the story of the guys on the team. Their experience had not been told. Lucas never knew the story. A lot of guys on the team didn't know that story because they didn't talk about it amongst each other. So for us it was a stroke of good luck that this came knocking when it did because if it had come along much later a lot of these guys would have been gone. George Floyd happened while we were making the film and that really made us realize this is no longer really a history lesson. This story is alive and well today. It definitely added a sense of urgency to what we were doing. It took on a different level of urgency. Lucas did a lot more than just read the lines of narration that we sent to him. He was a co-writer on the film and Lucas really was our filter. We did the work but none of us are college students, none of us are elite athletes, so we did the behind-the-scenes work, the research and interviewing. But once that work was done we put it in front of Lucas and Lucas digested it. Lucas could give his opinion on things in a way that was way more meaningful than if I weighed in on something. I have a decent jumpshot but not an elite athlete. I didn't play B-1 basketball. I'm not a young man of color There's a lot of things to the story that I don't have a connection to. Lucas did. And so having him as a teammate makes it a whole different story. Yes he narrated and he does a great job. But his role and his perspective was way more valuable than him just telling the story.

Moderator: How did you make the story so personal and so riveting for us to watch?
Lucas Williamson: I think that it was already a story that I held near and dear to my heart to begin with. I was very hesitant to take it on because I didn't want to mess it up. I knew some of the players. I had a close relationship with Jerry Harkness--he was at all my games. And especially when I learned some of the things they had to deal with away from the court, I wanted to make sure the movie was done right. I just added my opinion on things and they would run it by me. We would figure it out in terms of the language. It was a lot of fun working on it, adding a different perspective, a lot of fun working with the whole team.
Patrick Creadon: There's one part of the story which didn't make it into the film. One night after a game, two of the white guys, Jack and Chuck, went out drinking after a game and they got in trouble and got arrested and taken down to the police station during a tournament. So they're in a jail cell and the coach gets a call at 1:00am. He goes down, signs a couple of autographs, shakes a couple of hands and gets them out of jail. He takes them home and both Jack and Chuck are telling the story and laughing about it. And that story was in the movie for awhile. We told that story to Lucas. "Whoa. Good thing that's not Vic and Les. Because if it's Vic and Les they're probably not going home that night. They're probably not playing next weekend in the Final Four. They're not going to win without Vic and Les." That was a teachable moment that Lucas taught us. I see the world differently now. Not perfectly, but my perspective has changed dramatically in life because of working with Lucas and because of the story. Talking about race is very difficult and depending who you are it can get very emotional; people get very defensive. What this movie does, I hope, is hear about someone else's story. You can hear their story and take it in. And figure out how does this apply to my own world, my own reality. That's what Lucas brought to this project. It was incredibly valuable for all of us.

Moderator: Race theory is very much a topic now. How important is it to have films like this that discuss race so openly and from different perspectives?
Lucas Williamson There are 42 states that have either passed bills or are trying to pass bills that will make it illegal to teach race if it makes people uncomfortable. I think that's absolutely ridiculous. How are you supposed to grow if you don't talk about things that are uncomfortable? Growth doesn't happen from a comfortable place. You don't learn about other people by staying in your own bubble--people who look like you, talk like you. You have to go out and experience other people, other cultures. You have to learn about yourself, your history and not shy away from it. That's where growth happens. I hope that this film is a segue into having those tougher conversations because this is a sports story. The championship game is exciting--they're losing the game, then they come back, you can't write a better story than that. But then on top of that there's some heaviness to it. And I think we can sneak up on having those tougher conversations by easing into it through sports. Talk about the brighter moments of the movie and then ease into those tougher conversations that make people uncomfortable and sometimes we don't necessarily even want to have.

Audience Question: What did you learn about yourself doing this film? Have you taken the film to Cincinnati and Mississippi?
Patrick Creadon: It has played in Mississippi a few times but we plan to do a follow-up screening. There's one coming up in Cincinnati but I'm not going to that one. (everyone laughs) Lucas Williamson: For one, I'm not in this field. I'm a journalism major and getting my master's in marketing right now. Filmmaking isn't a field that I study. One thing I learned about myself is that I'm very open to opportunity, open to trying new things and if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. But at least I gave it a shot. And I think this one worked out. I enjoyed working with Patrick, storytelling and I think that's something I'm very passionate about especially a story like this that has purpose. And then on top of that, I've learned so much about the privilege I have to be in 2022, the fact that I only have to focus on school and basketball, which is a job in itself. But these guys, they had to worry about school, basketball, their life, their safety, their security. One of my favorite parts of the film is when they're talking about what it's like to be discriminated against. And Ron Miller is saying that It feels like you're invisible, it feels like you're not even there. And he's talking about his experience at Loyola and those are the same halls and same places that I literally will go home to tomorrow. I occupy the same space, I have the same title as student-athlete but my experience is completely different. When I go home on campus I'm celebrated but he felt like he was invisible, like his life didn't matter. He won a national championship. So things like that made me see a different perspective to where I am right now.
Patrick Creadon: When I was in college I didn't do any filmmaking and I didn't really learn anything. I think some of my blind spots have come away. I still have some because how we are all raised and our own realities but I think my blind spots are hopefully a little smaller than when I started making this movie.

Audience Question: What, if any, explanation did the Ireland family give you for not letting you see the mail?
Patrick Creadon: They said that they felt like the time wasn't right to show this mail. George's grandson [Judy's son] became the person I was dealing with and talking to. He said, "We've decided that if you ever make another movie about Loyola, we'll show you the letters then. Nona [Martin Storr] said it best after I had like the 19th conversation with them that wasn't going anywhere. The guys on the team didn't believe that there was any mail, because the coach had never shown it to them. These guys are in their late 70s and early 80s and they started to think the coach had just made up this stuff about the mail. But then when I went to the house I said, "I really want you to show me the mail because a lot of people think it doesn't exist. She took me into a back room, she showed me the letters, And I'm reading them. Death threats, N-word this, N-word that, KKK. Remember, the mail was so threatening that he hired security guards to look after his daughters but he didn't do that for his own players. So when I went back to the guys on the team and told them I had seen the mail they said, "Was any of the mail addressed to us?" I said, "Yes." They said, "We want our mail." And that's when it got weird. "The guys want their mail" "We don't want to give it to them. All these crazy things going on in the world these days. We think it's really dangerous." "Who are you trying to protect?" So I called Nona to get her advice. "I feel like this needs to be in the movie." And she basically said, "Damn right it needs to be in the movie." This is the height of patriarchy, which is "I have your mail and not only am I not going to give it to you, I'm going to do what's best for this mail and for you. I'm going to make all the decisions here." It's outrageous to me.that the family has not turned over the mail. What would be terrific is if the school very aggressively went after the letters, got the mail, and put it in the archives at Loyola. It's also worth noting that not all the mail was hate mail. Some of it was very supportive of the coach. I told them if you share this mail with the audience, Coach Ireland becomes way more sympathetic. But they just didn't want to hear that. It's kind of crazy. Whoever is going to go get that mail, it isn't going to me because I tried really hard. I drove up to Northern California twice. They told me twice they would give me the mail and I left empty-handed. But I'm not bitter about it (everyone laughs) But aagh, that annoys me. But thank you for that question. I really appreciate it.

Audience Question: What happened to Coach Ireland?
Patrick Creadon: He became national champion with his team; he stayed at Loyola for another ten years or so The last two years he served, he was the athletic director and his assistant moved up to be head coach. He had a pretty complicated relationship with his players and with the school and when he left, it was not a real graceful exit He really had a difficult relationship with his players. I asked two of the players, after they had seen the movie, "Do you think we were fair to the coach?" Ron Miller said, "You kind of went easy on him. He was tough." The thing about the coach which I would never begrudge him--he was a coach and it was his job to win games. He wasn't hired to be a civil rights activist and it would be unfair to expect that of him. He was hired to win games and because of his temperament and because of his desperation to keep his job, he broke this unwritten rule to great effect. But to use a modern day term, he wasn't a great ally. I know that's a term that's very common today, it wasn't really common at the time.at least in this context. He was kind of indifferent to his players. He had a chance for them to all sleep under one roof together in New Orleans and he didn't take them up on that. He turned them down and split up the team on the road trip in the deep south in 1963. He knew he and his family had read all that mail and the players hadn't. There are just some things about him that are tricky.
Lucas Williamson: He's an interesting character but I can't figure him out. At some points in the movie I'm cheering for him but some of the decisions he made, how can you not care about the players? It's almost like he's with everybody else; he celebrates them on the court but not off the court. The relationships I have with my coaches--for example when the George Floyd thing happened, the first person to call me was my head coach, just calling to see how I was, just checking in. Would George Ireland have done that? Absolutely not. Even if George Ireland had known what was going on, I still don't think so. I don't think he was very educated in what was going on at the time. I know this is me looking back to the '60s and I obviously don't know what it was like but I have to figure if you were alive at the time you at least knew a little bit of what was going on. You would at least know that if you went down south you couldn't get in a cab with a black driver. I think he was in left field a lot. In his position as head coach where you are making decisions that can impact the safety of some of your players, it's really hard for me to look past that, especially as a player myself. If my coach was putting me in situations where I felt like my safety was being threatened, I don't know if I could look at him in a positive light.

The Loyola Project will be streamed on Paramount+ and on CBS Saturday April 2 at noon Central.

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