INTERVIEW: New film explores history, impact of foosball
Photo: Ryan Moore is one of the professional foosballers featured in the new documentary Foosballlers, directed by Joe Heslinga. Photo courtesy of Foosballers / Provided by K+S with permission.
Foosballers, the new documentary directed by TV writer Joe Heslinga, will open up the 2019 Kicking + Screening Soccer Film Festival in New York City. The film looks at the unique history of foosball, or table soccer, and features interviews with some of the greats in the sport.
The screening takes place Tuesday, June 4 at 7 p.m. at Scandinavia House on Park Avenue. The doc will be paired with Now We Can Die in Peace, a mystery that takes place at the time of the 1998 World Cup, and GOAAL!, centered on Diego Maradona, the legendary soccer player.
“It started out as a conversation with me and a good friend of mine,” Heslinga said in a recent phone interview about Foosballers‘ development. “We were talking about obscure sports and how it would be really cool to do a TV show that followed different world championships of stuff that’s never on TV, like mini golf and pingpong and foosball. We just started running a list of 100 things we thought would be fun to check out. It was literally an internet rabbit hole that we went into.”
That trip down the rabbit hole turned up the wonderful world of professional foosball, and Heslinga was immediately impressed. He found tons of videos with substantial views (100,000 and more).
“It blew my mind, so I started searching more,” he said. “I found they had a World Table Soccer Almanac that is [more than] 600 pages full of all the history from the early 1900s to I think the book was published in 200. … And I realized they had never done any movie or anything like this that really covers not just professional foosball but the history and the people that play it, so it seemed like, hey, let’s table the TV show idea. I think it’s a great idea, but let’s make a movie because there’s so much material here. So that’s what started it.”
Actually getting professional foosballers to talk to him on camera proved to be a bit of a chore. When people hear professional foosball, they often laugh and wonder whether that’s a real sport. The game is a lot of fun, but many people believe it should be relegated to basements, arcades and college parties.
Heslinga took a more professional approach.
“Professional foosball I’m sure if you ask nine out of 10 people they would probably laugh and then say, ‘Wait, there is no such thing as that, right?’” he said. “You say there’s professional foosball, people think you’re joking, so the people that have covered pro foosball in the past, they didn’t really get it. They would write a one-page article that was kind of lazy. They’re just like this is just crazy, ha, ha, ha, and then that was it. They didn’t really dive into the actual history of the sport and treat it as such, so when I first reached out to them, they were like, ‘OK, yeah buddy, sure. Good luck, people have tried it. They didn’t really get it.’ It took a little coercing. It was a lot of cold emails that were met with a little bit of hesitation, but once we started meeting people in person and having more than just an email exchange, like a phone conversation, we started to get a little traction.”
The real progress came when Heslinga made the journey to Las Vegas for a professional foosball tournament. He drove to the city and started meeting players. Once they saw he was for real, more people signed up.
“Once they saw that we were real and not just crazy people hitting them up on the internet, it kind of paved the way to fill out our cast,” he said. “Once we would film with everybody, it just made things a lot more easy.”
Heslinga, who is a writer on Netflix’s F Is for Family, then turned to Kickstarter to gather the funds necessary to make Foosballers a reality. He launched the campaign in 2016 and had more than 200 people donate a total of $43,000 to the project.
“I’ve worked in the business for about 10 years, both in development and I’m a TV writer and producer, but I had never made a movie,” he said. “And I think for anybody who is making a movie for the first time, it’s hard to convince people to give you a lot of money to go out and do something, especially in the documentary world. It’s like, sometimes you’ll make a movie, and it’ll sell for $1 million. Sometimes you’ll make a movie, and it’ll sell for zero. So on an unproven filmmaker, it’s hard to raise money. So we’re like, we know have a great idea. We know we can execute it. Let’s let the foosball fans and the people on the internet respond to our idea, so that’s how we got our initial money was Kickstarter.”
Heslinga and his team spent a weekend in Colorado filming Mike Bowers, who won the first world championship; Ryan Moore, who is heavily featured in the film; and Robert Mares, a player since the ’90s.
This was only the start of a long filming process, but it provided enough material for a solid trailer.
“When it was all said and done, all the footage that we had was maybe 5 percent of what ended up making it into the movie, but we were able to cut a trailer essentially to get people excited,” he said. “And it was the first ever Kickstarter I did. It was super nerve-wracking because you’re like, OK, this could fail. You just put it out there, and luckily both the indie film community and the foosball community together helped us reach our goal.”
And now both communities are excited to see Foosballers at film festivals in the near future.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Foosballers will play the Kicking + Screening Soccer Film Festival Tuesday, June 4 at 7 p.m. at Scandinavia House in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
