Watch “Stadium Status”

Personally, I’m a pretty big sports fan—particularly baseball. I love the grace, the passion, the intensity, the drama. But the business side of sport can be pretty ugly. A lot of people complain about player salaries, but I don’t really have a problem with that; as Babe Ruth once said, “No man who works for another man was ever over-paid.” That is, the owner isn’t going pay his players so much that the team (and the owner) is losing money. (A lot of owners claim they are, but the accounting is pretty dubious.) Moreover, the players bust their butts for their whole lives to make it to professional sport; they deserve whatever they can get. I’d much rather my ticket fees go to some hustling kid from the Dominican instead of some fatcat who’s friends with Richard Nixon and/or Bernie Madoff (cf. the Mets and Yankees owners).

So while I roof for players to make millions, it follows that I’m not super happy about shiesty deals that land new stadiums that line the owner’s pockets and shaft the public.

Rooftop filmmaking alum and Board Member Casimir Nozkowski and The Internets Celebrities (Dallas Penn and Rafi Kam) have made a great, funny, documentary about the new New York stadiums. Check it out.

It’s hard being a sports fan these days.”

Stadium Status is a documentary which examines the rush of new sports stadiums in NYC as the latest example of an obscene national trend. New stadiums are built every year and the private businesses that own them benefit from huge sums of public money for their creation. Are we getting our money’s worth?

Stadium Status from Internets Celebrities on Vimeo.

PS: The “I’m Calling It Shea” shirts were made by another Rooftop Films alum, the producer of Dock Ellis and the LSD No-No. The shirt is available at www.nomas-nyc.com and the wonderful backstory behind it is here.

See more films like this at Rooftop’s “Brooklyn Transformations” show on July 17, 2010.