Filmmaker producing ‘rockumentary’ of Howard rink

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This article was published 04/12/2010 (5753 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MEDICINE HAT, Alta. — Glenn Howard has won Briers and world championships. His latest venture could net him a best documentary Oscar.

Howard and his Coldwater, Ont., team (third Richard Hart, second Brent Laing and lead Craig Savill) are being accompanied all season by a filmmaker who’s putting together a documentary — “We’re calling it a rockumentary,” joked Howard — on the team.

It’s not a curling movie, said the film’s producer, Buck Goodbrand. It’s a real-life movie about curlers.

“The documentary isn’t so much about the curling as it is about behind the scenes of the curling lifestyle,” said Goodbrand, who’s in Medicine Hat at the Canada Cup of Curling. “They are the best of the best in the world, and the irony is that even though it’s one of the biggest sports in Canada, they don’t get treated like pro athletes. They don’t get the money of other pro athletes, they don’t live the lavish lifestyle. They have to go to work, they have to hop in cars right after work and go to the airport, and then go right back to work on the Monday.”

Goodbrand, a member of the Barrie, Ont., police department’s tactical response crew who dabbles in filmmaking, is friends with Laing, and the two discussed the idea of a documentary in the past. Goodbrand had produced documentaries on mountain-climbing, and while he’d had no exposure to curling, he thought the story was interesting. So Laing approached the rest of the team, and the proposal took flight.

The finished product should be completed late next fall, with hopes of selling it to a television network, and then selling DVD copies.

“He’s with us basically 24-7, and he doesn’t necessarily want to do all curling; basically, it’s about the life of curling,” said Howard. “He interviews fans, he interviews other curlers, he interviews relatives.

“He wants to get real life, as best he can. Maybe you come off a bad loss and he’s in the change room when you’re making a few comments or banging your broom on the bench. He wants to capture that because that’s reality.”

That means exposing both sides of the equation.

Goodbrand, who appeared on the Outdoor Life Network series Mantracker, made it clear that the documentary is not dependent on Howard having a great season.

“Let’s put it this way: if the team wins the Brier and the worlds, I mean, that would be the ultimate, perfect film,” he said. “But on the flip side, they also understood right from the onset that the film goes ahead regardless. They’ve all agreed that if they catastrophically fail and don’t even make it to the Brier, then it becomes a film about how they catastrophically failed.”

— Postmedia News