Disgrace Documentary

[Kevin]

Fourteenyears after the first known case in American college sports of a player murdering his teammate, Abar Rouse is on the phone from Fort Worth, Texas, where he has taught general education in a federal prison for four years, helping incarcerated men earn their GED diplomas.

Because this is the sad truth 14 years after that awful summer: Dave Bliss, a white, 73-year-old basketball lifer who lied about a murdered player, has a coaching job in 2017. And Rouse, a 42-year-old black whistleblower, has yet to be offered a full-time college coaching job anywhere.

In Disgraced, Austin documentarian Pat Kondelis is thorough and unsparing. Spoiler alert: There are no silver linings or happy endings. The documentary comes no closer to providing a motive than anyone did back then. But through interviews with friends and family members, it unspools the terror both Dennehy and Dotson experienced before the murder.

Mounds of interviews, court documents and evidence point to alleged harassment and stalking by a recent addition to the team, Harvey Thomas, and his cousin, Larry Johnson. Dennehy told coaches, players and his girlfriend that Johnson had pulled a gun on Dotson and him in his apartment.

Bliss never determined the threat to be credible after Thomas denied to him that his cousin even had a gun. Yet, fearful for their lives and after telling coaches and friends that someone had stolen $300 from their apartment, Dennehy and Dotson bought guns and began going out to the gravel pit for target practice.

But the head of the psychiatric unit where Dotson had stayed for four months before his trial declared him mentally competent to stand trial. And that physician ordered him to continue taking his psychotropic drugs.

There is more to be angry about in Disgraced. Dotson was indeed the perpetrator, but on the advice of his attorneys he changed his plea to guilty just five days before the trial, which surprised the prosecution.

The documentary begins in June 2003 with the disappearance of Patrick Dennehy, a junior on the Baylor basketball team, not long after Dennehy reported to his coaches that he and teammate Carlton Dotson were receiving threats from another player, Harvey Thomas. In police statements and in an interview for the documentary, Thomas denies making any threats, but friends of Dotson and Dennehy recalled that the two were so fearful that they had purchased guns. About a month after Dennehy went missing, however, it was Dotson who confessed to killing him. Police later found Dennehy shot to death in a gravel pit north of Waco.

Kondelis convinced Bliss to sit for several interviews for the documentary, and after the case is laid out on screen, you hope to see Bliss explain his actions and feel something close to remorse. Instead, Bliss seems to double down on his denials and continues to deflect responsibility onto other coaches, players, and the Baylor administration.

Dan Rather Reports: "A National Disgrace" (Episode #617)[1] is a two-hour television report about the Detroit Public Schools (DPS), in Detroit, Michigan, that aired on HDNet (today AXS TV) on May 10, 2011. Presented by journalist Dan Rather, this episode was part of his investigative documentary series.[2] It explores a political struggle between the Detroit Board of Education, the governing body of DPS, and Robert Bobb, the emergency manager appointed by the State of Michigan after the city declared bankruptcy.[3]

The filming took about 18 months and included interviews with DPS school board members, teachers and administrators, and students and parents.[4] The production filmed a Detroit Board of Education meeting in which the board announced that superintendent Connie Calloway, who held the position for 18 months, was fired.[5]

According to Rather, the failure of DPS is a failure of a top-down educational system.[6] He argued that the problems are related to public schools in the entire United States and are not limited to Detroit.[7]

At the time of the program, residents of the City of Detroit had a functional illiteracy rate of 50%.[8] The title originates from a statement made about Detroit public schools by Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education.[2]

The report explores the problems associated with the city's struggles with declining economy, poverty of many residents, and how the schools are performing.[9] It states that in 2009 the DPS district scored the lowest ever National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test results.[8] Henry Ford High School is featured in the program.[1]

Jonathan Oosting of MLive said that "Rather's report is sure to upset some residents -- and of course local leaders -- tired of seeing Detroit in the national media for all the wrong reasons."[7] After the documentary was aired, Bobb accused Rather of ignoring efforts by the Bobb-led administration to reform the district. Bobb argued that it "grossly and completely neglects an entire year or more of transformative efforts to change the system."[3] DPS board president Anthony Adams also criticized the documentary, saying that it "really bashes the city, bashes the district, doesn't really talk about the accomplishments and the great strides that we've made."[7]

One of the benefits of retirement is finally being able to read the many books I'd bought during my working years, but never had time for. "One of these days," I'd tell myself, and those days are now. I recently pulled my copy of When in Disgrace down from the shelf where it's been gathering dust for the past thirty years, then sat down by the fire to read.

To say that Budd Boetticher led a wild life is a massive understatement. Like several directors of his era, he was raised in a wealthy household -- back then, who else but a rich kid would have the financial freedom and confidence to take a stab at being a director in Hollywood?* After he parents died, the very young Boetticher had the good sense to be adopted by wealthy parents who saw to it that he attended excellent schools where he met other kids from wealthy families, making connections that would eventually pay off in Hollywood. Still, the key to unlocking the film industry door turned out to be his knowledge of bull fighting. Being an athletic young man with a taste for adventure, Boetticher traveled to Mexico with a friend after they were done with college, and there he became entranced with the bloody art of the matador. Deciding to become a bullfighter, he studied the craft under the tutelage of some great Mexican toreros until his mother found out what was going on and cut off his financial support. Desperate to save him from what she considered a lethal, disgusting hobby, she arranged a job for him as a technical advisor on Blood and Sand, a bullfighting movie directed by Rouben Mamoulian. The job went well, and young man discovered that he liked the movie business. As so often happens in Hollywood, one thing led to another as he worked his way up the Hollywood food chain to become a widely respected director with a knack for making lean, taut movies. Boetticher is known for a series of particularly good westerns known as the Ranown Cycle, starring Randolph Scott.

Despite his success in Hollywood, he never got over his fascination with bullfighting, and was possessed by a desire to make a documentary about the brutal craft unlike anything that had ever been filmed, so back to Mexico he went to begin the wildest phase of his life. To quote Wikipedia:

"Boetticher spent most of the 1960s south of the border pursuing his obsession, the documentary of his friend, the bullfighter Carlos Arruza, turning down profitable Hollywood offers and suffering humiliation and despair to stay with the project, including sickness, bankruptcy, and confinement in both jail and asylum. Arruza was finally completed in 1968 and released in Mexico in 1971, and the U.S. in 1972."

I've been to one bullfight that featured two matadors facing three bulls each, and although that was quite enough, I must admit that it was one of the most transcendent "worst of times/best of times" experiences of my life -- the kind you never forget. My family had embarked on a month long trip to Mexico in the mid-60s, driving our VW bus south from the San Francisco Bay Area to the border at Nogales, Arizona, then on down through Guaymas, Mazatlan, and finally to Guadalajara, where my dad -- who was fascinated by the culture of Mexico -- bought tickets to a bullfight. Having grown up in the country where we'd occasionally slaughter one of our cows to have it butchered and packed into the freezer, I was familiar with the intimate link between life, death, and what appeared on our Saturday night dinner table, but my only exposure to bullfighting came from cartoons and a children's book called Ferdinand the Bull, none of which prepared me for the up-close-and-personal bloodbath I witnessed in that arena.**

I recently tracked down a copy of Arruza, and although parts of it are embarrassingly stagey -- especially footage shot on the ranch with Carlos Arruza and his family, none of whom were actors -- the bullfighting scenes shot in various arenas are very real, and absolutely riveting. They're also bloody, of course, so be ready for that if you ever have a chance to see the film, because such is the nature of the beast. Although I can't and won't defend bullfighting -- it's a brutally atavistic, horrifying spectacle -- there's no denying the compelling sight of a man alone in a ring, armed with nothing more than a piece of cloth to defend himself against the violent fury of a bull that packs a thousand-pound punch behind a pair of murderously sharp horns. Fighting bulls like this is an undeniably courageous, occasionally lethal endeavor, and though I'll never see another bullfight, I'm glad I did ... once.

Still, what's up with the title of Boetticher's opus, When in Disgrace? It comes from Shakespeare's Sonnet 29, and here's the man himself reciting the verse from which he lifted the title of his autobiography.

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