Blood on the Camera

Capturing the rise of women’s roller derby in Seattle

By Dan Green

Derby player “Basket Casey” skated at full speed, slammed into her opponent, and then lost control and crashed into several spectators. One of those spectators was filmmaker Lainy Bagwell, sitting behind a camera. The hit was just one of several that Bagwell and co-director Lacey Leavitt took in the process of filming their 2007 breakout documentary Blood on the Flat Track: The Rise of the Rat City Roller Girls.

“The sport is such a spectacle,” Leavitt says. “It’s empowering, entertaining, salacious, and yet completely respectable.”

Like all the best sports films, Blood dives behind the spectacle and into the lives of the players, capturing the human elements that appeal both to fans and to people who know nothing about the sport. The result has been effective—so far the film has taken awards at the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and the Detroit Docs International Film Festival.

With just a two-woman crew, aided by a single editor/assistant, Bagwell and Leavitt discovered during the filmmaking process that meeting the ambitious goals of a feature-length documentary meant working nearly as hard as their intense roller skating subjects.

“We wanted to get to know the personalities of the players,” Bagwell says. “They look so tough. Are they really tough behind the scenes? What do they do for a living? I wanted to show how much work they put into the sport.”

The players, it turns out, come from a variety of backgrounds and make an interesting cross-section of Seattle: a Starbuck’s employee, a bartender, a couple of self-employed candle makers, legal professionals, medical researchers, and so on. The Rat City Roller Girls league formed in 2004 in the White Center neighborhood of south Seattle, drawing from the neighborhood’s old-time nickname “Rat City.” It consists of 4 local teams: the Throttle Rockets, the Derby Liberation Front, the Sockit Wenches, and Grave Danger. There is also a fifth team of all-stars that go to inter-league competitions around the country.

Over the course of a year and a half starting in June 2005, the filmmakers shot local derbies, a championship tournament in Tucson, a Flat Track Invitational at Bumbershoot, parties, promotional events at bars, and countless individual interviews. The women became familiar with the skaters and established friendships. They filmed behind-the-scenes looks at romantic relationships between players, interviewed a mother and daughter from the same team, and met a group of derby-playing sisters.

In the end, they had between 250 and 270 hours of footage. “That’s the beauty and the curse of contemporary filmmaking,” says Leavitt. “DVD being so much cheaper than film—we’ll just shoot, we’ll just shoot it all.” As the women filmed, they talked about what they were getting and exchanged ideas about what would go where in the final product.

“It was so great to be able to go out there and kick someone’s ass,” says Basket Casey with obvious delight in her eyes. “And not only was that okay, I’d get high-fives for doing it!”

The film’s opening scene captures the color and noise of the roller girl experience. Two provocatively dressed teams get onto the track to begin a bout. One player rams an opponent with her hips, and simultaneously a scream erupts from the soundtrack as a punk band churns into high gear. The use of local bands like Hammerbox, the Gits, and the Steel Tigers of Death, mixed at ear-blasting volume, provides a fast and furious backdrop to the action.

The sport’s punk aesthetic belies players that are deeply serious about competition. But as spectacle, there’s a distinct added sexual tease of women in short skirts. In a brief but funny moment in the film, a male derby fan explains that he was first attracted to the sport because of the women, before his mind shifted and the “sports part of his brain” took over the sex part.

For the filmmakers, some choices were obvious, such as highlighting the player nicknamed Basket Casey. In one telling scene, she explains how great is it is “to be able to go out there and kick someone’s ass,” with obvious delight in her eyes. “And not only was that okay,” she says. “I’d get high-fives for doing it!”

“[Basket Casey] was like the unofficial narrator of the film,” says Leavitt. “[The interview] was immediately like gold.”

The work didn’t stop at the close of shooting. Like a derby team heading into a finals tournament, Bagwell and Leavitt entered post-production with a tough deadline to finish a rough-cut in time for entry into the Seattle International Film Festival.

“I captured footage for about three months straight, not leaving my house at all,” says Bagwell, referring to the process of watching tapes, picking out the best shots, and transferring them to computer. This was followed by an eight-day marathon of editing with editor and videographer Wes Johnson.

“Wes and I edited 24 hours per day, in 12 hour shifts,” says Bagwell. “I did the day shift, he did graveyard.” Using this brutal method, they finished a rough cut and made the last SIFF entry deadline of February 1.

The final cut came to about 95 minutes of estrogen-fueled mayhem interspersed with interviews and insights. Johnson ultimately chose the striking use of silent blackouts as transitions between scenes. “That really worked,” says Lainy. “The film would have seemed like a run-on sentence without breaking it up like that.” Lacey concurred: “There are lots of hits and noise and colors. I think [the blackouts] give people a little time to breathe.”

What did they learn from the project?

Bagwell: “There were just three of us that worked on the movie. I think that’s a big deal. I can’t think other films made by only three people. I don’t think I would have done it differently. Except for a sound guy—I could have used a sound guy.”

Leavitt: “Never do a documentary project if you’re not completely in love with the subject matter, because otherwise it would be unbearable.” (Leavitt, proving her true love of the subject matter, wants to try out for a position on a roller derby team.)