The final scene in ESPN’s 30 for 30 “Boo-Yah: A Stuart Scott Portrait” is a Top 10 highlight if I’ve ever seen one. And frankly, the documentary’s director can take very little credit for it.
Andrew Gaines tells The Hollywood Reporter he had “easily” 400-500 hours of footage to use for his 30 for 30 installment, which honors the late SportsCenter anchor, much of which Stuart Scott shot himself … of himself. That includes what became Gaines’ poetic ending scene, first dug out of the archives by the documentary’s editor Ryan Lohuis.
“Hi there — surprise! You’re not surprised, are you? It’s me,” a young, handsome Scott, dressed in a green button down shirt tucked into jeans, says to-camera.
“I’m gonna walk off into the sunset,” he says, and glances to a gray North Carolina sky. “Well, it’s a cloudy day, so I’m gonna walk off into the cloudy day sunset, and I want you to walk with me, alright? I’m serious. I’m walking into the sunset.”
“Take my hand,” Scott continues, extending his arm and palm as he walks away from the mounted Camcorder. “Take my hand as I walk.”
In Gaines’ version, when Scott reaches the bottom of the small hill he set his tripod on, the young journalist vanishes, presumably to the heavens.
In reality, Scott was in no way foreshadowing his death decades later, but the repurposed scene serves as the perfect piece of symbolism — particularly when placed after 75 minutes of celebrating a life lived on camera, both professionally and personally. Scott passed away in 2015 following a battle with cancer. He was 49.
Gaines called the discovery of this particular scene, found on a perfectly preserved VHS in Scott’s ex-wife Kim Scott’s personal, climate-controlled collection, “a gift as a filmmaker.”
“The beginnings and endings of films are the hardest things to manufacture,” Gaines said. “You go through so many different iterations of them — trial and error — to really see what works the best.”
The discovery will prove to be a gift for millions of people beyond Gaines and Lohuis.
“I didn’t hear from [Lohuis], probably for about, like, two days. I reached out to him and said, ‘Hey, where’d you go?’ And he was like, ‘I’m having a hard time. I’m going to send this to you now — you’re not going to make it,’” Gaines recalled. “He sent it over to me, and I was watching it — I like to watch the whole movie all the way through, just to try to see how these scenes are working — and, yeah, once I hit that moment, I was just bawling like a baby.”
Same, bro.
The perfect ending is almost too perfect.
“‘Wow, is this AI or something?’” Gaines remembered thinking at the time. (For the record: “No AI was used in the making of this movie at all — we didn’t have to,” Gaines said. “We had this treasure trove of assets that we were able to use.”)
“I even had someone ask me, ‘How did you guys do that? It’s almost like Stewart was making this film before you and he just happened to pass away in the middle of production,’” Gaines said.
There was a small amount of technical tinkering on the final shot of 30 for 30 “Boo-Yah: A Stuart Scott Portrait.” In the original video, a love letter to Scott’s long-distance girlfriend (at the time) Kim (they would marry in 1993 and divorce in 2015; Stuart and Kim share two daughters), Scott “runs back to the camera and adjusts the angle for another take,” Gaines said.
“He does this a few times, and we used the best take,” he continued. “I made the creative decision to have him vanish because his physical self is no longer with us, only his spirit.”
And a big “Boo-Yah” to you, Andrew and Ryan.
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