Tucson native Rachel Neubeck owes it all to her quarter-life crisis.
“I was not enjoying what I was doing, and I broke down crying with my mom. She said, ‘If you could do anything, what would you do?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, Anthony Bourdain’s job looks cool.’”
Recently, Neubeck won a Sports Emmy for her work on “Ragged Old Flag: An American Chorus.” On Friday, June 2, her feature-length documentary “S.O.G.: The Book of Ward” will premiere on Showtime. The film, which follows the life of professional boxing champion and Olympic gold-medalist Andre Ward, is her feature-length debut as director and executive producer.
“This has been a wild week, I am not going to lie to you,” said Neubeck, a Tucson High School graduate who earned a BA in fine arts at NYU. “It’s been pretty next level. We went up to the Bay for the premiere of this. The Sports Emmys were this week. We got a billboard for this show in Times Square this week. My nervous system is a little ‘en fuego,’ but it’s been great.”
Neubeck’s friends joke that she’s lived a million lives. Once an aspiring singer and dancer, later a salesperson, and even a certified chef in Italian cooking, the documentarian has worn many hats.
“You name it, I’ve probably tried it,” Neubeck said. “I did not grow up thinking that I wanted to do this.”
Following her self-proclaimed “quarter-life crisis” in her late 20s, she pursued her MA in specialized journalism at USC. The program allowed her to take classes in the journalism and film schools.
“I basically came out here, and I’d missed enrollment, and I begged them to let me in. I just said, ‘Please let me in, I’ll be the best student you’ve ever had,’” Neubeck said.
“From day one I fell in love with editing, and ever since then it’s been a slow climb through the ranks. I went from editing, to story producing, to producing in the field, to post producing, I was a camera assistant for a while. You name it, and I did it. It was just one little bit at a time until I got to my directing jobs, and that was that.”
After working on a miscellany of projects, spanning everything from Super Bowl pregame promotionals to the “Stranger Things 3” press trip, the opportunity for “S.O.G.: The Book of Ward” came to the director.
“He had been filming with the co-director on this project, Diaunte Thompson, and they’d been filming more or less for over a decade. They just had a camera around, and Diaunte and crew would shoot some stuff. They were trying to figure out what they wanted to make.”
When Ward brought the project to Uninterrupted, LeBron James and Maverick Carter’s athlete empowerment company, the footage already featured household names including Michael Jordan, Roy Jones Jr., James Prince, Ryan Coogler, Marshawn Lynch and Damian Lillard.
The boxer himself chose Neubeck to “shepherd the project through.”
Ironically, she is not a fan of sports.
According to Neubeck, this is one of her biggest advantages as a filmmaker.
“There’s an element of distance between me and just fangirling over the subject, which I think is helpful,” Neubeck said.
“I always feel like being someone who isn’t starstruck by these people, you’re the one saying, ‘Why would I want to care about you?’ or ‘Why would a mom in Wisconsin want to care about you?’
“You already have the people who love sports watching sports, but I feel like if I can get you interested in a person or story in a way that will make you want to watch their games or fights because you know more about them, that was always really interesting to me.”
Neubeck’s interest in Ward’s personal life, opposed to his boxing acclaim, landed the director the job.
“I was given a hard drive full of all of this footage that I picked through, and then I made a pitch to Andre for what I thought would be a good angle: a humanizing of him that maybe people hadn’t seen before,” Neubeck said.
The documentary peers into Ward’s tumultuous childhood, how he overcame his parents’ battle with drug addiction and his father’s death. Ward also retrospectively comments on his struggles and pressures within the world of boxing and his decision to retire at the age of 33. According to Neubeck, her role in the film was to challenge the boxer to be honest.
“I think that honesty makes a really great documentary,” Neubeck said. “I think that’s something that he and I really worked on. Part of my job was to push him. Sometimes I won that argument, sometimes I didn’t win that argument. That’s just how it goes in a collaboration.
“He kept saying, ‘I don’t want this to be a puff piece,’ and I’d say, ‘OK, if you don’t want this to be a puff piece, then I’ll push you.’ You need someone willing to go there and tell some stories that maybe they’ve never come clean with, or give some inside perspective that the public hadn’t known about before. Really be honest about parts of his business and parts of his career that weren’t things that people had been privy to before.”
But while she encouraged the athlete to open up, Neubeck’s overall intention as director was to let Ward control the narrative. In her opinion, the subject, opposed to the documentarian, should be the storyteller.
“The truth is much more interesting than fiction,” Neubeck said. “My job is making sure that what he wants to have said is said, all the things he’s always wanted to say he can finally say, and playing a role of facilitating that for him.
“The history of docs for so long was a bunch of people telling stories about athletes with very little of their involvement. And now I think the pendulum has swung in a way where a lot of athletes are very much in control of their own stories and what’s being told. I would say that what’s interesting about this film is that it’s as much a collaboration with Andre as it is anything else.”
