Streetball scenes

You could capture all the world’s great stories in a single Hoopfest tournament. There’s drama and comedy, tragedy and triumph, love and … well, if not actual hatred then at least heated dislike.

“It’s a weird thing,” says David Tanner, director of “3 on 3,” a documentary film about Spokane’s annual three-on-three basketball tournament that opens Friday at the River Park Square Cinemas.

“They hug each other, they like each other,” Tanner says of the opposing teams. “But once they go out on the court, there’s no love lost.”

It’s fitting that “3 on 3” should open Friday. On that same day all around the center of Spokane, Hoopfest volunteers will be preparing 389 courts set up over a 40-block area for Hoopfest 2004, which begins its two-day run on Saturday.

Tanner, one of the founding partners of Spokane-based North by Northwest Entertainment, was among those who looked at the tournament and saw potential for a film.

“We just thought it was a fantastic story, right here in our back yard,” he says. “I mean, it’s the largest tournament of its kind in the world.”

Tanner says his inspiration was “Spellbound,” the 2002 Oscar- nominated film that followed several contestants as they competed in the National Spelling Bee.

Part of Hoopfest’s allure is the many diverse teams that come to play. To capture that, Tanner and writer-producer Andrea Palpant looked hard for the right players on which to focus. After a researcher spent two months looking at tournament records, three teams emerged as top contenders:

“ Fab 4: four 10-year-old white kids from North Spokane (Carson Blumenthal, Cole Ramey, Matthew Rinaldi, Parker Hahn).

“ We Got Game: four teenage girls from the Spokane Indian Reservation (Chanel Ford, Amanda Marchand, Daryle Palmer, Rhonda St. Pierre).

“ Team Atlanta: four middle-aged black men from Georgia (Jerome Shelton, Bill McNair, Earl Warren, Charles Burkette).

From the opening throw-in to the closing basket, Tanner had four-person crews following each team, recording their wins (and losses), their thoughts, their hopes and dreams and — especially in the case of one member of Team Atlanta — their individual personalities.

“These people had a crew living with them the entire weekend, firing questions at them,” Tanner says.

No one basked more in that attention than Team Atlanta’s Jerome “Big Sexy” Shelton.

A 37-year-old detention center officer, Shelton walks through the movie as if it were about him alone — and he’s hardly surprised by that fact.

He talks loudly, he struts, he leads his team in prayer, he eats everything put in front of him, he complains both about the officiating and about not getting enough attention from the crowd.

“I think this is going to be my last year,” Shelton says at one point. “I hit a damn-near 30-footer and I didn’t get a clap!”

It’s just talk, part of the role that he plays. Because in the next minute, he’s cheerleading his team to another victory.

Like Hoopfest, Shelton is a whole drama unto himself.

“We knew from the beginning that he was the guy we wanted,” Tanner says. “He’s so charismatic.”

Besides “casting” the film, director Tanner oversaw his crews on the two-day shoot. He stayed in contact with each segment producer by walkie-talkie, conferring with them as each point was played, each foul complained about, each publicity stop made (in one sequence, Team Atlanta visits a children’s hospital ward).

When it was all over, Tanner had some 50 hours of raw footage to work with.

Six months after the project began, three months of which were spent in the editing room, Tanner had an 83-minute film. It’s narrated by “Mad TV” supporting cast member (and former Spokane resident) BD Freeman.

“It turned out to be a bigger undertaking than I originally thought,” Tanner says.

North by Northwest isn’t known for documentaries. Besides its commercial work, the company has made a mark with such narrative films as “The Basket,” “The Big Empty” and “Hangman’s Curse.”

Tanner, who just finished shooting a one-hour documentary on Japanese internment camps (Patty Duke narrates), learned quickly enough that making documentaries requires a special touch.

“People know us for scripted movies,” he says, “and in a documentary you have to find the script in the material. It took a lot of time, a lot of editing. But we knew at the end of Hoopfest that we had a movie.”

Partly that’s because of the diverse teams that they chose. The preteen boys come from privilege; the Indian girls do not. The girls are looking ahead to their adult years (especially Ford, who talks of attending Duke University); the men from Atlanta all have established careers. The Atlantans get treated like rock stars; the preteens get noticed only by their own families.

The one thing that links them: They all love to play.

And that, actually, is what Tanner hoped that his film would show. A 1978 graduate of Wilbur High School, he knows what it’s like to play small-town ball.

“Sports puts something in you,” Tanner says. “The thing about growing up in a small town is that anybody can play sports. And that’s the correlation with Hoopfest. Anybody can play in Hoopfest. You get your moment of glory. Everyone who wins their bracket gets to be a champion.”

And even if they don’t, they can act like one.