Burning Desire (FSM 105; April 2014)

It's a long way from the corner of Industrial and Cadiz in Dallas to Green Square in Tripoli, but for Mickey Grant, that journey is part of a career in which the unique world of professional wrestling shaped the way he has put everything on the line to share stories that might otherwise go untold.

Grant has been threatened with eviction from his home as he puts every dollar he has into completing his documentary Burning Green - the story of the Libyan revolution from the perspective of the ordinary people who took to the streets. He's now engaged in a desperate struggle to bring the film to the attention of movie and TV companies around the world.

After studying radio, film and television at Southern Methodist University, Grant began working at Dallas' highest-rated radio station, KVIL. Studying TV sports broadcasting on the side, he talked to KVIL's sportscaster Bill Mercer about using the same equipment and style as at a football or basketball game to cover pro wrestling.

"We even thought there'd be a screenplay in wrestling given some of the crazy stories we'd hear from people like referee Bronko Lubich," Grant explained to FSM.

A lack of funds meant the idea went nowhere until Grant was working at local TV station KXTX, when he was asked to pitch ideas for "a show that would guarantee a five rating". He persuaded management that pro wrestling would be a hit, and successfully sold local promoter Fritz Von Erich on the idea of KXTX taking over production of his main TV show, which would not only air locally, but would also be syndicated across the country. Not only was the result a new and improved World Class Championship Wrestling, but it was revolutionary for the sport, too.

"At the time, the local show only used two cameras, and one of them would be stationary with no operator," said Grant. "The other was so heavy that the operator couldn't really move about much, so he couldn't get close to the ring."

With the new setup, however, camera operators could stand on the apron on the outside of the ring, capturing the sights and sounds of the action so vividly that many pro wrestlers hated working in Dallas, because they'd have to take so many more hard hits in order to ensure the close-ups didn't expose the business. It was an engagement with the audience at home that no other organisation was willing to make until WWE began broadcasting in high definition in 2008, by which time the perception of the business had change irrevocably. The TV show also featured vignettes filmed outside of the wrestling arena, from Jimmy Garvin being forced to spend a day working on the Von Erich ranch to Mercer interviewing The Freebirds in a drive-thru rib joint. While the wrestlers were playing characters, their verbiage was neither scripted nor predictable, and the interaction with the public was sometimes very real.

"I have to say, we didn't always get permission before filming in a restaurant or wherever," Grant admitted. "It was just easier that way."

THE HUMAN CONDITION
While filming wrestling helped hone his technical skills, Grant learnt just as much about human nature at this time. In particular, he got an education from booker Gary Hart, with whom he had a curious relationship: Hart would never formally confirm to him how wrestling worked or that he decided the outcomes, but at the same time Hart was keeping Fritz Von Erich in the dark about exactly how much detail he was sharing with Grant. It was an unusual induction into the way wrestling blurred reality.

"I don't want to be disrespectful by using a word wrestlers hated, but Gary Hart could really out-act any actor. Though I'm a Christian, I have Buddhist beliefs, so I often think about the difference between illusion and reality, and I'm never 100% sure.

"When I heard Gary died, I was positive he wasn't dead. In fact, I even convinced myself to phone his house, and when I got his answerphone, I left a message telling him he hadn't fooled me. His kids heard the message, but luckily they found it hilarious."

Hart also gave Grant an education in how to engage an audience, whether in wrestling or other forms of media.

"Gary always said a show needed lots of 'hits'. He'd sit in his office in the Sportatorium during the show, and he knew that every so often he should hear a big scream, which was a sign something had worked as planned with the audience.

"He taught me that whatever you're producing, if you don't make it entertaining, you're in trouble."

ON THE RUN
Grant recalled these experiences as he moved into documentary filmmaking with 1987's China Run, the story of American Stan Cottrell, who ran 2,125 miles across China in just 53 days. While he struggled with the moral question of whether his presence as a filmmaker was influencing rather than merely recording the events, the physical challenges, emotions and triumphs involved lent themselves to a natural narrative.

"There was so much influence from my wrestling days. Every minute of recording, I was thinking the same way as in wrestling - about how the story would play out."

Subsequent documentaries saw him continue to visit remote, often rarely-documented locations. Working again with Cottrell, Destination Da Nang took him to Vietnam to engage with America's former enemies, while The Cu Chi Tunnels explored a network of underground hideouts in which Vietnamese civilians and guerrillas alike had evaded American forces during the war. Technically, it was a far cry from sports broadcasting, with Grant carrying his own camera, accompanied only by a Vietnamese assistant whom he trained in sound recording. ("He ended up working for the Associated Press for many years, so he's probably richer than me!")

It was designed as a potentially uncomfortable and controversial viewing experience, particularly for Americans reluctant to see guerrilla fighters tell their story, often becoming all too human in doing so. Still, it found a global audience, including at the BBC, where Grant learnt another lesson.

"Initially, they didn't have room to show it, but about four years later they were doing a Vietnam war anniversary season. The BBC chief Michael Jackson contacted me and said he wanted to show it, but didn't have a two-hour slot available. I agreed to cut it down to an hour, and it absolutely made it a much better film."

The question of how to assess the truth returned when Grant produced Gentleman's Choice, the story of English pro wrestler Chris Adams. For once, it wasn't the wrestlers whose words had to be weighed up, but rather that of Brent Parnell, the man who fatally shot Adams in a drunken brawl, but was acquitted of any criminal wrongdoing.

"The only thing that really made me wonder if he was telling the truth is that it was the strangest story I ever heard," Grant recalled of his time interviewing Parnell. "The story was that the two of them were sat next to an 80-year-old woman watching Tombstone on TV, and Chris was being too loud, so they ended up arguing. Then Chris, who was a tremendous athlete, winds up breaking off a bedpost and going after him, but Parnell happens to land next to a gun on the bed and fires in self-defence. We went through the story about five times, and the details were the same every time, so I guess it was true."

THE POINTED TRUTH
In 2006, Grant produced what was not only a powerful documentary in its own right, but one that would prove an unexpected influence on his career. Titled Injection, it explored a case of around 400 children in Libya who had contracted HIV, leading to the conviction of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor. The Gaddafi government had accused the group of intentionally infecting the children on behalf of the CIA.

The documentary instead made the case that the disease, as with hepatitis in Egypt, had spread because of the misuse of disposable syringes in the healthcare system. Unlike older glass syringes that could be safely sterilised and reused, these needles were designed to be thrown away after a single use. Instead, the evidence presented in Injection suggested that, partly because Gaddafi's régime had intercepted and sold medical supplies shipped to the country, staff had habitually reused them.

The documentary attracted the interest of a Bulgarian television channel that wanted to buy all rights to the movie, something to which Grant was reluctant to agree, despite wanting the greatest exposure for its message.

"That was another case of the wrestling influence, as while in wrestling I got used to thinking of creative and unusual ideas. I came up with the proposal that I'd let them show it without charge, but only on condition that they showed it on a loop for 24 straight hours - and they did! It turned out the station aired on satellite television across the Mediterranean, so the movie got a much wider audience than I expected, and was even picked up in Libya. In fact, I was told the Gaddafi family condemned it, and wrote a negative editorial in a state newspaper."

TALK OF ALL LIBYA
This led to Grant making contacts with opposition groups in Libya, who later reached out to him around a week before the start of the country's revolution, as small protests led to growing tension. He saw a webcam link to a camera set up on a TV truck, in what was then known Green Square, the Tripoli landmark redubbed Martyr's Square after the revolution. After speaking to opposition figures on Skype and helping pass on messages between rebels in different parts of the country, Grant found an unconventional way to draw attention to the situation.

"I sent a link to the webcam feed to every single person I could find on Skype who had Libya as their location. They started contacting me, and at one point Facebook got in touch because I was getting a thousand messages an hour on my account."

After hearing that retreating Gaddafi forces had not only laid waste to hospitals but intentionally destroyed medical supplies, Grant used US television appearances to talk his way into getting a humanitarian flight into the country, with medical supplies. As well as delivering those, he visited Derna, one of the first cities to fall into rebel hands, and began interviewing opposition figures, from leaders to ordinary citizens.

"It's the most unusual country in the world, but I fell in love with it. The people were so friendly that it reminded me of being a hippy back in the late-'60s, and hitch-hiking around. I have memories of everything from being in a mosque because it was supposedly the one place you could get internet access, to interviewing a man billed as a former Al Qaeda member who told me that he now felt much better towards the US, to the fact that there were coffee shops everywhere.

"I spend the first third of Burning Green trying to establish who the rebels really are, and the truth about them as real people. I honestly believe only about half a percent of them are the real troublemakers, and most people in a revolution are just confused. When you watch the news, you don't get a sense of who people really are, and that's something I spent a lifetime trying to figure out."

While filming the events of the unfolding revolution, including capturing scenes of the violence between the two sides, Grant noticed one media figure above all others - the BBC's John Simpson, whom he spotted was "always out in the front line when other journalists had retreated." For Grant, however, this first round of filming soon came to an unexpectedly premature end.

"An Al-Jazeera cameraman who was staying down the hall from us was killed, and we were then told that we had been followed by government officials ourselves. We left early the next morning, switched cars a couple of times, then drove at 70 miles an hour all the way to Cairo."

Upon returning to the US, Grant was forced to stop work on the movie for most of the following year, after his mother developed a long-term illness and required continuous medical care. During this time, he made only a brief return to film in Libya, visiting the last place the Gaddafi family was spotted before deposed leader Muammar Gaddafi's capture and death at the hands of rebel militia. Then, around 9 months after his mother's passing, Grant saw The Square, an Egyptian-American documentary about the overthrow of the Mubarak regime in Cairo.

"There was nothing like that about Libya. The BBC had done a documentary about Gaddafi called Mad Dog, but it didn't get shown in America. I decided last November that, come hell or high water, I wanted to finish my movie."

GIVE TO LIVE
Between his mother's illness and the time he's spent on the documentary rather than on regular work, Grant has now fallen into serious financial difficulties, and says he has been forced to sell many personal possessions. He's run a crowdfunding campaign on the Indiegogo site, and used this money towards a final shooting trip to Libya, where he investigated the 2012 attack on the American embassy in Benghazi, something that he hopes will increase the documentary's appeal in the US market.

While in Libya, however, he suffered a knee injury that, thanks to the way the US healthcare system works, left him with further medical bills and limited opportunity for freelance work, and thus he is still having to appeal for funds. According to Grant, the money he needs is actually to pay his living costs while completing editing on the movie, before the lengthy task of trying to attract distributors.

"It's film festivals that make or break a documentary, and the competition has never been tougher. Back when I started, festivals would get 200 or 300 competitors, and everybody knew everyone. That's partly because back then you had to submit on 16 millimetre film, whereas now you just send in a DVD. Today, you can get 35,000 or more entries, and because of that, the festivals have started charging entry fees. That means we can't afford to enter the contests, but I want to be able to hire a screening room at Cannes in May, to get as many people in the industry to see it as possible. The BBC and HBO are always my favourite sales for documentaries, but you never know what the flavour of the month is."

According to Grant, the fact that it's three years since the revolution shouldn't mean that Libya is old news, or that the content of Burning Green is outdated.

"People think it's all over, but it won't be for some time. Who wins in Libya is still up for grabs."

To ensure that Burning Green: The Libyan Revolution is completed, please consider donating to Mickey Grant via Paypal using the email address [email protected].
For more information, you can visit www.BurningGreenFilm.com, while Injection, The Cu Chi Tunnels, China Run and Destination Da Nang can all be viewed at http://tinyurl.com/MickeyGrant.

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