It’s a long way from the corner of Industrial and Cadiz in Dallas to Green Square in Tripoli. But for Mickey Grant, that journey is part of a career in which the unique world of pro wrestling has shaped the way he has put everything on the line to tell stories that might otherwise go unseen.
Grant has sacrificed time and money to try to complete his documentary Burning Green, the story of the Libyan revolution from the perspective of the ordinary people who took to the streets. He’s now engaged in a desperate struggle for funding to bring the film to the attention of movie and TV companies around the world.
After studying radio, film and television at Southern Methodist University, Grant began working at Dallas’ highest-rated radio station, KVIL. He tells FSM that regular host Ron Chapman gave him an education that prepared him for all elements of his career.
“Ron was a genius at knowing how to hold an audience. Each year we’d get figures on our mean demographic which would be, say, a 33 year old female. We’d actually go out and find a 33 year old female listener, bring her in to the studio and talk to her, then put her photograph right next to the microphone so the hosts could always picture who they were talking to.”
Also becoming experienced in TV sports broadcasting, Grant talked to KVIL’s sportscaster Bill Mercer about the potential to use the same broadcasting equipment and style used at a football or basketball game to cover pro wrestling. “We even thought there’d be a screenplay in wrestling given some of the crazy stories we’d hear from people like referee Bronco Lubich.”
A lack of funds meant the idea went nowhere until Grant was working at local TV station KXTX and was asked to pitch ideas for “a show that would guarantee a five rating.” He persuaded management that wrestling would be a hit and successfully pitched local wrestling promoter Fritz Von Erich on the idea of KXTX taking over production of its main TV show which would not only air locally but be syndicated across the country.
“At the time the local show only used two cameras, and one of them would be stationary with no operator. The other was so heavy that the operator couldn’t really move about much, so couldn’t get close to the ring.” The new and improved World Class Championship Wrestling switched to a multi-camera set-up, with light, hand-held cameras that allowed the operators to get up close to the action.
Dodging wrestlers who hit the ropes wasn’t the only hazard however. “Some of the camera operators were terrified of being hit by flying beer cans! You have to remember Fritz had a deal with a local beer supplier where they sold cans for just a dollar at shows and split the money. The Sportatorium was the only place where you could buy a full crate of beer for yourself with a straight face.”
The TV show also featured several vignettes filmed outside of the wrestling arena, from Jim Garvin spending a day as a slave on the Von Erich ranch to Mercer interviewing the Freebirds in a drive-thru rib joint. While the wrestlers were playing characters, their verbiage was neither scripted nor predictable, and the interaction with the public was sometimes very real. “I have to say we didn’t always get permission before filming in a restaurant or wherever — it was just easier that way!”
While filming wrestling helped hone his technical skills, Grant learned just as much from wrestling about human nature. In particular he learned from booker Gary Hart, with whom he had a curious relationship: Hart would never formally confirm to Grant how wrestling worked or that he decided the outcomes, but at the same time Hart was keeping Fritz Von Erich in the dark about exactly how much detail he was sharing with Grant. It was an unusual induction into the way wrestling blurred reality.
“I don’t want to be disrespectful by using a word wrestlers hated, but Gary Hart could really out act any actor. Though I’m a Christian, I have Buddhist beliefs so I often think about the difference between illusion and reality, and I’m never 100 percent sure.
“When I heard Gary died I was positive he wasn’t dead. In fact I even convinced myself to phone his house and when I got his answerphone I left a message telling him he hadn’t fooled me. His kids heard the message, but luckily they found it hilarious!”
Hart also gave Grant an education in how to engage an audience, whether in wrestling or other forms of media. “Gary always said a show needed lots of ‘hits’. He’d sit in his office in the Sportatorium during the show and he knew that every so often he should hear a big scream, which was a sign something had worked as planned with the audience. He taught me that whatever you’re producing, if you don’t make it entertaining, you’re in trouble.”
Grant recalled his wrestling experiences as he moved into documentary making with 1987’s China Run, the story of American Stan Cottrell who ran 2,125 miles across China in just 53 days. While Grant struggled with the moral question of whether his presence as a filmmaker was influencing rather than merely recording events, the physical challenges, emotions and triumphs involved lent themselves to a natural narrative.
“There was so much influence from my wrestling days on the film. Every minute of recording I was thinking the same way as in wrestling about how the story would play out.”
Subsequent documentaries saw Grant continue to visit remote, often rarely documented locations. Destination Da Nang saw Cottrell visit Vietnam to engage with America’s former enemies, while the Cu Chi Tunnels explored a network of underground hideouts in which Vietnamese civilians and guerrillas alike had evaded American forces during the war. Technically it was a far cry from sports broadcasting, with Grant carrying his own camera, accompanied only by a Vietnamese assistant who he trained in sound recording. (“He ended up working for the Associated Press for many years, so he’s probably richer than me!”)
It was designed as a potentially uncomfortable and controversial viewing experience, particularly for Americans reluctant to see guerrilla fighters tell their story and become humanised. Still, it found a global audience including at the BBC, where Grant learned another lesson. “Initially they didn’t have room to show it, but about four years later they were doing a Vietnam war anniversary season. The BBC chief Michael Jackson contacted me and said he wanted to show it but didn’t have a two-hour slot available. I agreed to cut it down to an hour and it absolutely made it a much better film.”
The question of how to assess the truth of what an interview subject returned when Grant produced Gentleman’s Choice, the story of WCCW’s Chris Adams. For once it wasn’t the wrestlers whose words had to be weighed up but rather that of Brent Parnell, the man who fatally shot Adams in a drunken brawl but was acquitted of any criminal wrongdoings.
“The only thing that really made me wonder if he was telling the truth is that it was the strangest story I ever heard,” Grant recalls of his time interviewing Parnell for the documentary. “The story was that the two of them were sat next to an 80-year-old woman watching Tombstone on TV and Chris was being too loud so they ended up arguing. Then Chris, who was a tremendous athlete, winds up breaking off a bedpost and going after him, but he happens to land next to a gun on the bed and fires in self-defence. We went through the story about five times and the details were the same every time, so I guess it was true.”
In 2006, Grant produced what was not only a powerful documentary in its own right, but would prove an unexpected influence on his career. Titled Injection, it explored a case of around 400 children in Libya contracting HIV, leading to the conviction of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor. The Gadaffi government accused the group of intentionally infecting the children on behalf of the CIA.
The documentary instead made the case that the disease, as with hepatitis in Egypt, had spread because of the misuse of “disposable” syringes in the healthcare system. Unlike older glass syringes which could be safely sterilized and reused, these needles were designed to be thrown away after a single use. Instead, the evidence presented in Injection suggested that, partly because Gadaffi’s regime had intercepted and sold medical supplies shipped to the country, medical staff had habitually been reusing the syringes.
The documentary attracted the interest of a Bulgarian television channel which wanted to buy out all rights to the movie, something to which Grant was reluctant to agree, despite wanting exposure for its message. “That was another case of the wrestling influence as while in wrestling I got used to thinking of creative and unusual ideas. I came up with the proposal that I’d let them show it without charge, but only on condition they showed it on a loop for 24 straight hours. And they did it!
“It turned out the station aired on satellite television across the Mediterranean, so the movie got a much wider audience than I expected and was even picked up in Libya. In fact I was told the Gadaffi family condemned it and wrote a negative editorial in a state newspaper.”
It led to Grant making contacts with opposition groups in Libya who later contacted him around a week before the start of the Libyan revolution as small protests led to growing tension. He saw a webcam link to a camera set up on a TV truck in what was then known Green Square, the Tripoli landmark redubbed Martyr’s Square after the revolution. After speaking to opposition figures on Skype and helping pass on messages between rebels in different parts of the country, Grant found an unconventional way to draw attention to the situation.
“I sent a link to the webcam feed to every single person I could find on Skype who had Libya as their location. They started contacting me and at one point Facebook got in touch because I was getting a thousand messages an hour on my account.”
After hearing that retreating Gadaffi forces had not only lain waste to hospitals but intentionally destroyed medical supplies, Grant used US television appearances to talk his way into getting a humanitarian flight into the country with medical supplies. As well as delivering the supplies he visited Derna, one of the first cities to fall into rebel hands, and began interviewing opposition figures from leaders to ordinary citizens.
“It’s the most unusual country in the world, but I fell in love with it. The people were so friendly it reminded me of being a hippy back in the late 60s and hitch-hiking around.”
“I have memories of everything from being in a mosque because it was supposedly the one place you could get Internet access, to interviewing a man billed as a former Al Qaeda member who told me that he now felt much better towards the US, to the fact that there were coffee shops everywhere.
“It was a very unusual form of civil war because even though the country is so wide [from West to East], most people want to live near the coast. So that meant most of the fighting was along roads. You also had all these rumours and stories of the CIA helping the opposition, but it simply being them running a two hour course on how to fire a gun!
“I spend the first third of the documentary trying to establish who the rebels really are and the truth about them as real people. I honestly believe only about half a percent of them are the real troublemakers, and most people in a revolution are just confused. When you watch the news you don’t get a sense of who people really are, and that’s something I spent a lifetime trying to figure out.”
Writing an artist’s statement on his website, Grant likened his documentary style to that of traditional Chinese painters who use brushes made of fine human hair and were thus forced to concentrate on fine detail rather than grand themes. “The Chinese artist strove to discover the most meaningful limitation of the theme or moment and then worked to express himself within that limited convention and to discover the subtle threads within its form which echoed a fundamental human truth. When I write or direct, I have learned that, by expressing the finite brush strokes found within the appropriate limitation, then and only then, could I begin to communicate anything of substance to an audience.”
While filming the events of the unfolding revolution, including capturing scenes of the violence between the two sides, Grant noticed one media figure above all others. “There was a white-haired reporter who was even older than me, but he was always out in the front line when other journalists had retreated.” Grant wasn’t surprised to discover it was the BBC’s John Simpson. “I worked with [BBC Nationwide presenter] Bernard Falk back in the 70s and we got on well, mainly because I was the only one who dared go out drinking with him. Having worked with crews around the world, I have to say BBC crews were always the ultimate.”
Grant’s first round of filming came to an unexpectedly premature end. “An Al-Jazeera cameraman who was staying down the hall from us was killed. We were then told that we had been followed by government officials ourselves. We left early the next morning, switched cars a couple of times, then drove at 70 miles an hour all the way to Cairo.”
Upon returning to the US, Grant was forced to stop work on the movie for most of the following year after his mother developed a long-term illness and required continuous medical care. During this time he made only a brief return to film in Libya, visiting the last place the Gadaffi family was spotted before deposed leader Muammar Gadaffi’s capture and killing by rebel militia.
Around nine months after his mother’s death, Grant saw The Square, an Egyptian-American documentary about the overthrow of the Mubarak regime in Cairo. “There was nothing like that about Libya. The BBC had done a documentary called Mad Dog about Gadaffi, but it didn’t get shown in America. I decided last November that, come hell or high water I wanted to finish my movie.”
Between his mother’s illness and the time he’d spent on the documentary rather than on paid work, Grant has fallen into serious financial difficulties and says he has been forced to sell many personal possessions.
He’s run a crowdfunding campaign on the Indiegogo site and used this money towards a final shooting trip to Libya where he investigated the 2012 attack on the American embassy in Benghazi, something that he hopes will increase the documentary’s appeal in the US market.
While in Libya he suffered a knee injury which, thanks to the way the US healthcare system works, left him with further medical bills and limited opportunity for freelance work, so is still appealing for funds. According to Grant, the money he needs is to pay his living costs while completing editing on the movie and then the lengthy task of trying to attract distributors.
“It’s film festivals that make or break a documentary and the competition has never been tougher. Back when I started, festivals would get 200 or 300 competitors and everybody knew everyone. That’s partly because back then you had to submit on 16 millimetre film, whereas now you just send in a DVD. Today you can get 35,000 or more entries.
“Because of that, the festivals have started charging entry fees. That means we can’t afford to enter the contests, but I want to be able to hire a screening room at Cannes in May and get as many people in the industry to see it as possible. The BBC and HBO are always my favourite sales for documentaries, but you never know what the flavour of the month is.”
According to Grant, the fact that it’s three years since the revolution shouldn’t mean Libya is old news, or that the content of Burning Green is outdated. “People think it’s all over, but it won’t be for some time. Who wins in Libya is still up for grabs.”
Injection, The Cu Chi Tunnels, China Run and Destination Da Nang can all be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/user/Mickeyfilm.
