Disc Dreams
A filmmaker documents the thrills, beauty of Ultimate Frisbee, a sport which took flight among the brainy kids at Columbia High

by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer
09.21.05

First in a series about the making of Flying Saucers

Sunday morning, 9:30 a.m. While you were in bed or drinking your morning coffee, they were running up and down a field trying to catch a flying disc.

“Arrgh,” yelled one, missing the throw. The best among them would stop only for water breaks over the next two hours. “Nice throw!” called another. A novice had trouble keeping up with a more experienced player. She turned and looked up the field to see the player she was covering catching the Frisbee in the end zone.

This is Ultimate (often referred to as Ultimate Frisbee) for the 40-something set in Maplewood’s Maplecrest Park, a disc’s toss from where the sport — a sort-of hybrid of soccer and football — was founded, in the parking lot of Columbia High School in South Orange. The founders were locals Bernard “Buzzy” Hellring, Jonny Hines, and Joel Silver — now better known as the flamboyant Hollywood producer behind action flicks like Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, and The Matrix.

But on this particular July morning, it was another filmmaker, James Ford Nussbaum, who was at the center of the action, capturing the Ultimate game for a documentary he is shooting.

“It’s a beautiful sport to watch: a flying disc gliding over the field to another player. And no one is ever turned away. It’s a multicolored, multi-gendered sport,” Nussbaum told NJ Jewish News a few days earlier in his living room. The award-winning producer/editor runs Galileo Productions, LLC, a video production company, out of a converted dining room in his Randolph home. He has worked with CNN, Good Morning America, Fox News, and, more recently, the National Basketball Association.

Just beyond the living room is his office, outfitted with three computers and as many desks. The area is decorated with his snow globe collection, plenty of award statuettes, and his diplomas from Columbia High School and Emerson College. Sitting on an easy chair facing the sofa, he described his vision — a film flowing with “eye candy,” to glorify not only the sport but also the human body. There will be plenty of footage of tossed discs, slow-motion views of freestyle tricks, and a rich musical score.

“Frisbee is still considered an underground sport,” Nussbaum said. “Not a lot of people know how structured it is, how many amazing teams there are out there. I want to get people to see the beauty of the sport through photography and music. The goal of the film is to give people an inside, behind-the-scenes look at Ultimate Frisbee” and freestyle.

Rather than a PBS-type documentary, he said, the work “will be more like Weird NJ,” referring to the magazine of state oddities edited by Essex County residents Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran.

In addition to the Maplewood group, Nussbaum has also begun filming a younger, more hard-core group in Basking Ridge, and a third team in Whippany.

Originally from South Orange, Nussbaum became bar mitzva at Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel of South Orange when it was still Temple Israel in East Orange and later served as president of the youth group there. He has a love of the game that developed while he played for Columbia from 1977 to 1980.

Filming sports also happens to be a specialty. He first discovered his passion for it in high school, when a teacher put a camera in his hands, added Super 8 film, and said, “‘Go film the football team,’” he recalled. “There was a freedom in it. It was a whole new way to express myself.”

In 1982, while at Emerson College in Boston, he created Galileo with his roommate. They made documentaries about everything from teenage suicide to paintball and garnered several awards for their work. Later, a job with Good Morning America lured him back to the New York area. But his heart has always been with Galileo, and in 1991, he took sole ownership of the company. He dove into it as a full-time job a few years ago and has since produced a documentary on trauma recovery for Cablevision, a health-care video on posttraumatic stress, and projects for the NBA.

About three months ago, he hit on the idea of a film about Ultimate, which he has given the working title of Flying Saucers. Nussbaum said he believes the appeal to viewers will be partly nostalgia, but, he added, “it’s a very visual sport.”

Of course, he has a few technical issues to resolve before he can move the film from its infancy to the next stage of development: He needs to access players and develop a storyline, not to mention land interviews with the sport’s living founders, including Joel Silver.

He’s already raised the United Frisbee Association’s interest in the project, and he’s hoping to sell the film to WHAM-O, the toy manufacturer behind the Frisbee, or other organizations associated with the sport. He’s tapping whatever Ultimate web sites he can find to access players and teams. And he’s searching for a player with a story that pulls the images together: someone who has a disability that all but disappears on the Ultimate field, or a player who has a highly skilled professional job, a lawyer, say, or a physicist by day, but who is an avid player by night — the “yin and yang of the person,” he called it.

Nussbaum appeared to grow more confident about the eventual outcome of the project through the interview and in the days that followed. By the time NJJN met up with him again a few days later in Maplecrest Park, he expressed certainty that it would move forward.

And as Sunday morning inches closer to Sunday afternoon, Nussbaum turned to one player, sizing up the freestyle footage possibility, and asked, “Can you spin a Frisbee on your thumb?”

Johanna Ginsberg can be reached at jginsberg@njjewishnews.com.