Yesterday I posted a film review of the Kris Belman’s STVM documentary More Than A Game, which had its US premiere at the Silverdocs Film Festival in Silver Spring, MD.  In said review I promised two more follow-up pieces.  This is one of them.  I got a chance to catch up with Kris on Tuesday morning, after seeing the film Monday night.  Kris is a native of Akron and graduated from Walsh Jesuit High School.  We talked for half an hour, about everything from his film, the ’97 World Series, Macbooks not going to sleep properly (I’ll spare you the details), and life as a Cleveland fan in LA.  Below is how our conversation unfolded.

Denny: So you went from Northeast Ohio where you grew up, and transferred to Loyola Marymount in LA for film school.  You had kind of a small fish in a big pond situation, catching a lot of flak from people, so you wanted to show these people that there’s something worthwhile in Ohio.  What made you pick these guys?

Kris Belman: Well, it’s funny because the first thing I did after I transferred in, is nobody from that school was from east of Arizona – I think maybe they’d been to Vegas, but whatever – the first thing I did was buy a book on Ohio and I tried to learn all these Ohio facts.  I started spitting out all these ridiculous facts like I knew Cincinnati is the number one exporter of caskets, which is probably not something we should brag about, but I knew that.  I was going with that for a while – all these stupid facts and then I was like “I need to find something tangible here, this is absurd.” [Read more...]