I would suggest you contact Vance Jones at Balmorhea , tx
Six Man, Texas: More Than Just a Game
Merle Bertrand
Merle Bertrand, Yahoo Contributor Network
Mar 12, 2009 "Share your voice on Yahoo websites. Start Here.".
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High school football is wrapping up another exciting season across the country. Perhaps understandably, in Texas, as is probably the case elsewhere, the big schools - the 5As and 4As around the state -- tend to dominate the press coverage, although those schools that play 3A on down to 1A ball certainly generate their fair share of press as well, especially within their own respective markets.
Yet, there are even smaller towns out there, dusty well-worn burgs that share Texans' seemingly genetic passion for football; towns whose residents love the game, yet just don't have the sheer numbers necessary to compete in traditional football. It is here that the phenomenon known as Six Man Football has interwoven itself into the fabric of life. It is here, too, in these hardscrabble hamlets scattered mostly throughout sparsely populated west and southwest Texas, that director Alan Barber's poignant and passionate documentary Six Man, Texas takes root.
While Six Man, Texas hangs its structure on the regular season and play-off runs of the Aquilla Cougars, with plenty of exciting Six Man football action to satisfy the sports fan in all of us, the film goes far beyond mere football. For even as its prep stars do battle on the Six Man gridiron, the film explores an even bigger struggle; the sobering implications of entire high schools, their surrounding communities, and an entire rural lifestyle simply disappearing into the west Texas desert, doomed by the harsh socio-economic realities of 21st century life.
"The film contains two interdependent themes," explains Barber, a soft-spoken man with salt and pepper hair and a beard that could let him pass as Kenny Rogers' younger brother. "The fast and exciting game of Six Man football, a pivotal focus for many very small rural high schools and communities in Texas, is played because rural economies are failing and rural populations are disappearing, not just in Texas, but throughout the U.S. Our film attempts to show that dichotomy and shed light on how people in Texas' smallest rural communities feel about themselves, their schools and their children."
A Texas Tech graduate and businessman, Barber has had a lifelong interest in film since seeing Fellini's surreal classic 8 ½ at a Lubbock art house theater. (Fellini in Lubbock? Go figure.)
"After moving to Austin in 1974 and starting two businesses here, one in 1977 and one in 1990, I noticed the evolution and growth of the film community in Austin," he relates. Eventually, he acted on his passion. "I took a few screenwriting classes, read a stack of books on screenwriting, film production and independent film and finally took one of Steve Mim's comprehensive film courses in the fall of 1999. The course final was to make a five-minute film. Mine was absolutely horrible. I couldn't even get two or three decent minutes!" he admits.
But it was during this course when the idea for Six Man, Texas emerged.
"During course discussions about stories appropriate for film themes, I recalled an incident from high school," Barber relates. "While traveling to Texas/OU weekend, a buddy of mine and I were recruited to move to a small Texas town so they would have enough players for their Six Man team. I had never heard of Six Man football but the memory of that incident never left me.
"By the last day of (Mims') class I had decided filmmaking was not for me, based on my disastrous first film. But regardless, I pitched the idea of a documentary on Six Man football, which I still knew nothing about, to...Steve Mims. At that point I had nothing to lose. Even though my film was the worst in class, Steve thought it was a compelling idea and encouraged me to go for it. So in July of 2000 I visited the Six Man All-Star Games in Lubbock, made a few contacts with the gracious help of Granger Huntress of sixmanfootball.com and started shooting Six Man, Texas soon after.
"We started filming in 2000 after I met my Co-Producer Laura Toups" Barber continues. "In the beginning it was just the two of us traveling to different Texas towns for the Friday night games with a couple of Canon XL-1s, two tripods, a few mini-DV tapes and two Sony Lavaliere mics. At first we could only afford packs of five tapes so that is all we would shoot in a weekend. It quickly became obvious that we needed more than five for a full weekend of shooting and travel so I began to spend 'what it takes' out of pocket and find extra money wherever I could."
The duo filmed piles of football footage, probably because, as Barber would readily admit, it was the easiest thing for them to shoot.
"We would leave as early as needed on Friday and return Saturday or Sunday depending on where we ended up," Barber recalls. "It was very early in the process and we were not sure of the who, what, when, where and why of our story. Actually, we knew where: rural Texas towns whose schools play Six Man, but that was about it...We were still not sure where we were going with our story.
"Laura kept saying, 'It's more than about football, we need to stop shooting games and focus on something else'...But I loved traveling to the small towns, seeing the games on the sidelines and experiencing the different cultures, situations and people. And I felt that shooting the games first was our way inside the community. Even though it took a long time and a lot of footage, I believe it gave us credibility. However, we did not yet know the real heart of our story."
Barber and Toups eventually accumulated some 110 hours of football and interview footage over the course of two years, an amorphous tangle of tape that still lacked a central thread. However, one event in particular sparked the initial formation of at least an embryonic theme to the film.
"In late fall of 2001, we heard about Three Way School and the fact that they might shut down forever next spring," Barber sighs. "My mother had been a schoolteacher all her life, raising three kids in the '50s and '60s as a widow on a schoolteacher's salary, so I felt a special affinity for public schools.
"It was the threat of Three Way School closing that made us aware of larger forces controlling the fate of rural economies. Until we met and understood people who were living with and impacted by economic forces beyond their control, it was not obvious why Six Man is played so widely in rural Texas. By the fall of 2001, Laura and I were closer to some of the folks we interviewed and began to understand more completely that part of Texas we referred to as 'the Six Man community...'
"It was two filming sessions, one in the fall of 2001 and one in May of 2002 when we filmed the last days of Three Way School, that the true power and emotion of the loss of Texas rural economy and culture began to truly impact me. It sunk in and I began to feel that loss myself, even though I did not grow up in a small rural community. For better or worse, it became personal."
As often happens with independent filmmakers as well, however, economic reality intruded, and Barber, forced to tend to his personal, financial and business interests, reluctantly shelved the film for nearly two years.
"I never let go of the idea of finishing the film, but I felt overwhelmed by all the footage...and the fact that the story was only partially developed in my mind," he admits. "I could not see a clear path to completion and felt incompetent to complete it by myself... Laura...was by then working on her (own) project and it had evolved into something other than film. Since I had personally funded all the travel and expenses out of my pocket, I was in debt, out of cash and frozen by circumstances over which I thought I had no control."
Like a team down 21-0 at the half, Barber knew it was time to mount a comeback.
"By the winter of 2004 I was so frustrated with my inaction that I decided to somehow find the funds to pay an editor and finish the damn thing."
Enter Mike Scannell, a family friend, UT Film School graduate, head of Post-Production at Austin Community College...and football fan, who, in early 2005, took on the daunting task of molding over 100 hours of footage into a watchable film. Scannell and Barber quickly realized, almost to their amazement, that they needed still more.
"The old devil of a question replayed like a bad dream: 'What is our story?'" Barber shrugs. "After a couple of difficult nights (editing), I decided to draw a 'critical path' of what I had seen during our travels and how they might converge in a climactic scene. I decided to graph out what I 'hoped the film could be,' regardless of the footage we had thus far. I focused my timeline on Six Man towns in general and then on three schools specifically to find the story; Aquilla, Three Way and Sanderson. I was hoping that Mike would be able to fill in slots on that path and see a story emerge from the wreckage."
Hoping to build off of an intense locker room scene shot during Aquilla's state title run, Barber and new camera operator Tom Chamberlain returned to the town simply hoping for some atmospheric cutaway shots. What they found instead was the soul of the film.
"We were parked in the school parking lot setting up for some shots and two of the boys from the 2000 team happened to drive by," Barber recalls. "They stopped, we caught up a bit, and then I asked them if the rest of the 2000 team were still around. Within twenty minutes, five of the seven starters from the Aquilla 2000 team were there. We were shooting some B-Roll of the field when they all started reminiscing about the 2000 season and what it meant to them.
"I signaled Tom and our production assistant to focus cameras on the boys sitting on the tailgates of their pickups. We shot informal interviews in a number of locations around the tiny town of Aquilla that day until the sun was almost down. As we were driving back to Austin I said, 'We have our story. We can tell it using the Aquilla 2000 season as our main story. Everything else will revolve around that.'"
With a solid narrative direction at last in place and momentum building, production resumed and continued through late 2006. Throughout this time and over the following year and a half, Scannell and Barber whittled away at the seemingly endless footage - ultimately some 154 hours by the end of production - culling it down to the powerful and poignant 71 minutes that at last had its World Premiere October 2007 at the AFI Film Festival in Dallas, seven years after the cameras first rolled.
"Our approximate shooting ratio is 137:1. Maybe that is a record. I would like to think we set some kind of record!" Barber chuckles ruefully, before turning serious.
"I believe that this project was kept alive by many forces beyond my control. Just as Six Man football is a game played by small schools and towns who are greatly impacted by something over which they have no control, our film was kept alive at key points by pivotal circumstances over which I had no control."
While high school football may be the unofficial "National Sport of Texas," it's clear that the deeper issues Barber explores in Six Man, Texas extend beyond the borders of the Lone Star State.
"About a month ago, I got an email from someone who runs a website about Kansas Prep (High School) football," the filmmaker relates. "He was quite excited to hear about our film and wanted to promote it, so I sent a press screener. After reviewing it with a couple of high school coaches he knew, he responded, saying the situation was the same in Kansas, where small rural schools play Eight Man ball and are slowly disappearing. He said our story is the same story all over the Midwest. I suspect it is the same all over the U.S. Rural economies are slowly fading away.
"So yes, I would like our film to shed a LOT of light on these issues. This is a loss not just for Texas and the Midwest, but for all of America."
Though these bigger issues are clearly important to Barber, he is equally as gratified by the exposure his film has provided to the people who live in these communities with whom he now shares a personal connection.
"The best part for me," he recalls, "was in front of the theater (at the premiere), after the screening crowd had mostly dispersed. Coach Vance Jones, one of the first coaches I met back in 2000, came up to me, put his arm around me and with tears in his eyes said, 'You have captured the heart of our communities, of our world. Thank you!' I told Coach Jones how much his comment meant to me.
"After the first season of shooting, I remember telling my Co-Producer Laura Toups that I wanted to do my best to show people what the world of Six Man was like, to communicate to the rest of Texas how people felt about their communities and their children. Coach Jones confirmed that for me. It felt good. At that moment I felt my film was a success because it accomplished a major thing I had set out to do.
"I felt like I was finally a filmmaker, or at least well on my way!"
For festival and screening information, as well as info on DVD releases, please go to
www.sixmantexas.com Alan Barber and his production company Never Too Late Films have started a Scholarship Initiative for Six Man Schools in Texas and are looking for sponsors for the scholarship. A portion of any revenues the film generates will be dedicated to the scholarship program. Simply click on the site's Scholarship Program link for more info.
