“We wanted Red (Auerbach) and Bill (Russell) to really be ever present in the way that they were to so many of the players we sat down with,” director Lauren Stowell says about the presence of two NBA icons throughout the nine-episode series. “They’re such a part of the history, they’re ingrained in it. To be able to have that moment in episode seven that you’re talking about, the jersey retirement, to bring Bill back in that moment was really special for us.”
Director Stowell collaborated with showrunner Gabe Honig to build a compelling timeline as Boston built its NBA dynasty with “Celtics City”, the new documentary series airing on Max in partnership with HBO.
The series finale airing April 28th, encapsulates eighty-plus interviews featured throughout the nine-part documentary series which doesn’t pull any punches with its narrative.
In recent Celtics history, former Celtics coach Rick Pitino–who Stowell and Honig weren’t sure if he would want to talk–opens up about his time on Boston and that he would do things differently if he had to do it again. The Pitino-led years were not a high point in Boston’s history, but Paul Pierce was among the Celtics draftees during this time who would go on to become one of the greatest players in the team’s history…standing tall with previous all-stars like Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, and Robert Parish.
Bird, McHale, and Parish are presented prominently when the series showcases the 1980s and the “Showtime” rivalry with the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1980s. Reinvigorated by the likes of Bird and Magic Johnson, the two squads were perennial contenders, matching up against each other three times during the decade. The Celtics would only win one of three NBA Finals series against the Lakers in the 1980s, but Boston owns winning records in their all-time regular season and postseason head-to-head matchups. Dating back to their first NBA Finals matchup in 1959, Boston has a 43-31 postseason record. Their 12 postseason matchups have resulted in nine Celtics championships, with six of them playing a role in setting up the Celtics dynasty in the 1960s. James Worthy, Pat Riley, and Jerry West are among those repping the Lakers.
The interview timeline in “Celtics City” spanned April 2023 through August 2024, allowing it to showcase the Boston Celtics winning their 18th NBA championship.
Showrunner Gabe Honig tells Awards Focus that early in production, they had an opportunity to view the 17th championship trophy in owner Wyc Grousbeck’s office. Honig recalls telling Grousbeck, “Be a pretty good ending to our series if you guys can win another one. Mind making that happen for us?”
Stowell’s first conversations with executive producers Bill Simmons and Connor Schell took place a few years after their initial conversation in 2020. Stowell says she thought she knew the story of the Celtics but realized how the team’s story intersected with American culture and society from 1950 through the present day as she read through “the history, the tradition, the people, the moments.”
Awards Focus had a wide ranging conversation with the creative duo and their approach to telling the narrative and landing the interview, which you can find below the trailer for the compelling docuseries.
Awards Focus: “Celtics City” is quite the deep dive into Boston Celtics history. How did you first become attached to the project?
Lauren Stowell: Right? Yeah. It’s been a long time kind of coming for Bill Simmons and Connor Schell. They had conversations around 2020 about doing a multi-part docuseries on the definitive history. They approached me a couple of years after that initial idea, initial conversations. I read the initial treatment. It was unbelievable. I thought I knew the story of the Celtics and as I started to read through just the history, the tradition, the people, the moments, but also how it intersects with American culture, society from 1950 really current was the kind of approach that we were able to take with this. I was thrilled. Gabe and I started to talk about it. We were excited. We knew there was a lot of potential here. We knew it was going to be a lot of work to get it all—one cohesive nine-hour story, but really an incredible, incredible opportunity, with just a great organization.
Gabe Honig: Yeah. As a native New Yorker and a huge sports fan, I never envisioned myself spending two years of my life consumed by a story of a Boston sports team. Then I read the treatment, and then I met Lauren. After our first conversation, where she wanted to point the lens as a storyteller, I was all in. That first conversation has lasted two and a half years at this point. We haven’t stopped talking about it.
AF: HBO formally announced the production in November. When did photography start rolling?
Stowell: We shot our very first interview with Mr. Bob Cousy, who at the time was 94 years old, at his home in Worcester. That was in April of 2023. Right, Gabe? And then, our final interview, number 98, was Kevin Garnett in August of 2024. So yeah, it was quite the journey, and obviously very aggressive production timeline. I know Gabe can speak to how he kept us all on track, and just a lot, a lot of interviews and a lot of shooting from, really, when we started the production team in around January, February of 2023 to the end of this past year—2024—was when we really delivered. Gabe, if you want to add to that the timeline.
Honig: You got it!
AF: Of course, the Celtics had their own plans, and thankfully won another championship along the way.
Honig: Yeah. It was funny. Early on in production, Lauren and I were summoned up to Boston to meet with Wyc, the owner, and Rich Gotham, the president, and a lot of other executives up there. At the end of the meeting, Wyc took Lauren and I into his office to show us the championship trophy from 2008. I looked at him, and I was like, Be a pretty good ending of our series if you guys can win another one. Mind making that happen for us? I think he probably wanted to throw me out of his office. (Laughs) Sounds pretty good, but hey. Yeah, we got a pretty good ending there with Banner 18.
AF: How many hours of archival material did you all sort through during the process and what was the process of choosing what stays and what goes?
Stowell: Yeah, I mean, those are—Gabe, do we even know how many hours? Did we ever get an actual total.
Honig: For archival? No way, it’s an incalculable amount of footage that we received. We’re talking about 77 years of history and games, playoff games, and full Finals games. The NBA was amazing. We had full access to their library. We were digging through features that were done. There’s stuff that is going to shock fans, that haven’t been seen in decades. Our archival team dug up film reels from the seventies. Episode 3 is is just wall to wall 16mm film that—they would shoot on 16mm, broadcast it, put it back in the canister, and that’s where it was until a couple of summers ago when someone on our team knocked on their door and we got access to it. But an actual number of hours for archival, no way. Interview wise, yeah, we’re talking 98 interviews, Maybe a couple of interviews were shorter than two hours, but most interviews were in the 3-4 hour range.
Stowell: Yeah. Initially, when the production process started, we were like, Oh, my G-d, are we really going to be able to fill 9 hours. Even HBO at one point was like, are you sure we have 9 hours here? It went very quickly, Danielle, from I don’t know how we’re going to fit all this into 9 hours. We were overwhelmed. At points, we were like, Oh, my G-d! The stories that we were getting from people. Like Gabe is talking about, the archival that we were digging up because it wasn’t just highlights. It wasn’t just talking heads and basketball footage of the greatest iconic moments of Celtics history. It was more than that. We had vérité scenes that were really important to me that we were able to go into people’s homes and talk to them about their experiences, get some people together, go to some locations that were really meaningful to the story. Hellenic College, where the teams of the 80s played at this Greek Orthodox campus, and going back to the old gym and trying to bring some of these stories to life. That takes time. As a storyteller, it takes time to let those kind of scenes unfold. But I really hope we struck a good balance of great iconic moments and basketball that is just undeniable as the best of the best through these eras, and some of the bad times, too, but also really allow you to immerse in the characters and some of the scenes that we were able to capture with them.
AF: One of the moments that really got me emotional was seeing Bill Russell’s jersey retirement ceremony, which I probably previously saw during the two-part documentary that was on Netflix a few years ago.
Stowell: Yeah, that was a really special moment for us in the story, just for us to be able to have that moment where Bill is appreciated by the city by the fans all those years later, the moment that he shared with his daughter, Karen. Yeah, it was really important. Gabe and I spent a lot of time with our team. We wanted Red and Bill to really be ever present in the way that they were to so many of the players we sat down with. They’re such a part of the history, they’re ingrained in it. To be able to have that moment in Episode 7 that you’re talking about, the jersey retirement, to bring Bill back in that moment was really special for us.
Honig: Danielle, you also hit on something that was another challenge for us is that parts of the Celtics story have been told before. We weren’t going to deny it. You’re talking about the Bill Russell doc that was a couple years old. ESPN ran a whole 30 for 30 on the Lakers-Celtics rivalry from the 80s, and for us, it wasn’t so much about, well, how do we make it different? It was how do these moments that got their own documentaries or their own series—how does it fit into the totality of the story and the themes that this series is going to delve into. It wasn’t so much about taking something that everybody knew and just trying to be different for different sake. It’s that when you look at it all together, it’s all telling this common story with these common themes that I think we’ve done a pretty good job of weaving throughout the 9 hours.
AF: The late eighties into the nineties featured so much tragedy. You had Len Bias dying and then Reggie Lewis died. For a moment or two, it looked like Paul Pierce—
Honig: Yeah.
AF: And then Pierce goes down in history as one of the greatest Celtics of all time.
Stowell: That’s something that was also important to us. This was a moment for Paul’s arc. His story arc, which, again, hasn’t really—the story of the Celtics has been told in bits and pieces, but never in this framework, this greater context, the whole story. As you’re mentioning, to be able to see just how the organization dealt with the tragedies that almost back to back with Len and with Reggie, and then to have that happen again with Paul, and to actually be able to sit and talk with him about that experience. How did he come back and play every single game of the season the next year? It was unbelievable. I mean, just to be able to hear that, and for him to really open up and for him to share that part of his story., it was a gift to us that we were able to to have the 9 hours to be able to do that.
AF: I remember reading about the KG and Ray trades, but I’d never heard about the Minnesota Timberwolves owner making the comment, “Congratulations on winning the championship.”
Stowell: (Laughs) Yes, that was a really cool moment. Yeah, we love that Wyc shared that story with us.
Honig: For that section of the film, I think the direction was we wanted to make it feel like a heist. Right? Want to make it feel like Danny Ainge and Doc Rivers, they’re dangling like Tom Cruise in “Mission: Impossible”, trying to steal all these players and come out with a championship squad. That is one of my favorite parts of the series is that moment in time is great andWyc is a great storyteller as well—gets that phone call on the beach and the rest is history.
AF: Of course, the Rick Pitino chapter is important to me, being from Louisville and growing up as a Kentucky Wildcats fan. When he left the school in 1997, I adopted Boston as my team.
Stowell: Yes. Well, Rick, we knew that was gonna be a big part of the story. We actually didn’t know if Rick was going to want to talk. We had reached out. We didn’t really hear anything for a while, and Gabe circled back around with St. John’s. I’m glad that we were able to get him into the film and let him tell his side of the story. We obviously had so many, as you saw, recollections and anecdotes about his tenure. It was the dark days, the dark green days, whatever people call them. It was the crisis years. But yeah, we were fortunate that we were able to to kind of show as much of every side of that story in that time, really.
Honig: Hey, Danielle, I think it’s interesting. Your arc of following Rick Pitino there is, I think, what we tried to show at the beginning. The introduction of Rick Pitino was this idea that, like no, this is going to work. This is the best coach on the planet is now taking over the storied franchise. I think that gets lost. Obviously, people love to focus on on the negative sometimes. But no, he came in with all the promise of the world. It just didn’t work out, I think he says his truth in the film. We let the players tell their side of the story, too. It all came from a point of like we want to make this work. I think that people would have—if you were betting then, you would have bet that Rick Pitino would have walked out of Boston with a championship ring, and of course, it didn’t quite go that way.
AF: What do you hope people take away from watching the series? Obviously, Boston fans are going to have a lot of nostalgia.
Stowell: Yeah, I think it might be different for Celtics fans. I hope that there is—you’re able to go back and remember these times. But I also hope that for Celtics—speaking specifically for the fan base—that they do feel like they’ve learned something new in this film, that they are seeing different shades of the characters that made this organization what it was, whether that’s Red or Russell. Gabe talks about Robert Parrish, who we never really heard from in the eighties and the nineties. It was just like he didn’t have a voice. He wasn’t present in the media. I hope this is great, I think, for the Celtic fan. But I hope that more than Celtics fans watch this. I think that it’s a great American story. There is rich history here that intersects with every part of our life. You can tell the story of the NBA through the Celtics. You can tell the story of America through the Celtics. There’s a real story here. This isn’t just a highlight reel of just purely nostalgia. There are real stakes. There are real lives that are involved in this, and I hope that people appreciate and enjoy it.
Honig: Yeah. For the non-Celtic fan. I’m just gonna say this, your preconceived notions about the Boston Celtics are wrong. They’re wrong. The people who make up those teams and that organization, they’re human, just like we are. They have their good days and their bad days, and they have their strengths and their weaknesses. What I hope the viewer takes away is that this is the human experience. The good and the bad. And yeah, they just happen to be playing basketball. They just happen to be playing basketball in Boston. I think that if non-Celtic fans turn it on, they’re not going to turn it off until that 18th banner is raised at the end of episode 9. Sorry for the spoiler.
AF: How’s it gonna play in LA?
Stowell: (Laughs) Yeah.
Honig: (Laughs) I mean, hey, look, it’s the title of Episode 5. That’s how it’s probably gonna play.