New football film adds twist to documentary genre

A documentry chronicled the Peglegs of Stuyvesant High through a middling season on and off the gridiron. Courtesy of Paulette Douglas

NEW YORK -- Four blocks off Broadway and 1,900 miles removed from the football fields of West Texas, the collective fans of film and football flocked to the first-floor auditorium of Stuyvesant High on the West Side of Manhattan in early October.

No red carpet greeted the parents, faculty and students attending the premier of The Peglegs of Stuyvesant High, a documentary chronicling the academically-renowned school's football team through a 5-5 season. No cheerleaders prepped the crowd. Not there to see High School Musical, those in attendance were there to witness what happens when the maturation process is caught on tape. "I think this film is actually the anti-Two-A-Days and Friday Night Lights story in a lot of ways," says producer and director Paulette Douglas, whose elder daughter was a cheerleader at Stuyvesant. "In New York City with these smart kids from all around the world, I thought Peglegs would play out well, but you never know the reality or the drama to come. These kids use football as a commonality and the purity of sports came into focus."

Welcome to the reel world of high school athletics, where cameras roam the halls in an attempt to capture the essence of young athletes in their element. Thirteen years after Hoop Dreams, the benchmark project in the prep scene documentary genre which earned an Academy Award nomination, there is now a proliferation of producers and directors relating coming-of-age tales to a growing audience.

"There is an insatiable appetite in the media for stories and at this age, kids are not fully developed, and genuine stuff is revealed," Douglas says of Stuyvesant, which is set in the shadows of the Statue of Liberty and is made up of a general populace seemingly more apt for Spellbound, the classic film on the plights facing talented youths chasing the National Spelling Bee title.

While not new in its formula, Peglegs is nuanced in its execution. To be sure, there are the typical touches of off-field candor, what with the main character, Romeo, wrestling with an application to Harvard and an overbearing father. There is Max, who is admittedly "not the best student here" coping with his mother's bouts with cancer, and to lighten the mood is Aaron, a playful teen who bounces off walls as he adjusts to situations with his ADD. "I don't think the cameras were invasive, after a while you just get used to it and it's not really there," says Max, who is now studying as a freshman at Baruch College where he does not play football. "I had seen Through the Fire with Sebastian Telfair, and obviously we don't have a lot of the same decisions on whether to go pro or not."

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