08/02/2007

Record-Eagle/Tyler Sipe
Brian Aimsback, 18, from left, Hope Yablonski, 19, and Kyle Robinson, 19, speak with a movie-goer after the conclusion of "Nimrod Nation" Wednesday at Old Town Playhouse in Traverse City. The three came with a group from the U.P. town of Watersmeet, where "Nimrod Nation" was filmed.

Nimrods take a road trip to see film

U.P. town's basketball enthusiasm subject of series for Sundance Channel

By Tom Carr

tcarr@record-eagle.com

TRAVERSE CITY — Some of the most down-to-earth movie stars you're likely to find sat in the back of the Old Town Playhouse Wednesday.

"Nimrod Nation,” a film series for cable TV's Sundance Channel, laid bare the lives and loves of the people in an Upper Peninsula community for the packed theater. The show is about Watersmeet, a town of about 1,500 people in the western U.P. It showcases their affections for the high school basketball team — the Nimrods — the wild area in which they live and each other.

Several of them came from Watersmeet for the screening. They said they didn't play for the cameras, as crews followed several of them around for four months in 2005 and '06, during which the Nimrods won the district championship.

"I think everybody was a bit more reserved because of the cameras,” said Phillip Zelinski, co-founder of Zelinski Brothers Logging and Excavating in Watersmeet and a 1984 graduate of the Watersmeet Township School.

He and others did forget the cameras were there eventually.

"After the first week, if you had to go to the bathroom, you'd just go behind the nearest tree,” he said.

None of that made it into the movie, yet "Nimrod Nation” does feel more real than reality TV. There's nobody looking straight into the camera, no contrived contests and no narrator. Director Brett Morgen let the people of the town tell their own stories and asked them to do the things they would normally do.

That means the crews followed the townspeople not only to ball games, but in their homes and on their jobs, as they went ice-fishing or hunting or slaughtered a pig, or to a local diner where some of them meet for coffee.

The U.P. wilderness and weather play prominently in the film, as well.

"The show is as much about the landscape as it is about the characters,” Morgen said.

The Watersmeet residents who met to discuss the experience after the first showing said they are happy with how they are portrayed.

Yet Nathan Vestich, a member of the basketball team at the time, did say he was a bit embarrassed by one part.

"I got ejected in the last game,” he said. "That hurt my chances for anything after that in basketball.”

"He flipped off the ref,” Hope Yablonski, a cheerleader during the filming, chimed in.

That fit together to help make it a compelling subplot, as earlier episodes dealt with "Nate having to control his temper,” Morgen said.

It also helped show how the people in the town all care for one another.

"The town rallies behind him,” Morgen said. "Coach (George) Peterson leaves school the next day where he works to drive to Nate's home to see that he's OK.”

The idea for "Nimrod Nation” came after Morgen filmed ESPN commercials featuring Watersmeet's mania for a team named after a hunter in the Old Testament and a word that can also mean a generic hunter. As a result, team members were invited to appear on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

None of that is played out in the film, though the effects of it are there.

"Every team was playing their best when they played us,” because of that publicity, Vestich said.

As Morgen sat down with the stars, he and Jeffrey Zelinski, also a co-founder of the logging business, traded good-natured insults.

"We razzed him just like everybody else,” said Zelinski, who graduated from Watersmeet in 1973 and was the basketball team captain.

The eight-part series will begin on Nov. 26 at 9 p.m. on the Sundance Channel and will be aired in two episodes each on following Monday.

The festival scheduled three sold-out screenings of part of the series at Old Town Playhouse.