How a renowned producer pitched Mark Few on a film about Gonzaga’s rise to prominence: ‘The story told itself’

The feature-length documentary spotlighting Gonzaga’s unlikely rise to college basketball prominence picked up at least one favorable review Monday night moments after a private screening at the Bing Crosby Theater.

Granted, the viewer is somewhat biased.

“Crazy, powerful, emotional, funny,” Mark Few said after watching “Gonzaga: The Slipper Still Fits,” an all-encompassing film on his program that’s premiering at midnight on streaming service Tubi. “Just the whole gamut of emotions. Man, I thought it was great.”

And to think, the 27th-year Gonzaga coach nearly turned down the initial pitch meeting.

Few was making the rounds during the 2023 Final Four in Houston. Meetings, conferences, conventions, all of the usual obligations coaches tend to have when they descend on the busiest weekend of the college hoops season. With a rare two-hour window in his schedule, Few wanted to decompress. Escape the madness of March Madness.

Usually he’d link up with Sean Ford, a longtime friend who serves as USA Basketball’s National Team Director, and get away from the chaos. So when Ford instead proposed another networking opportunity – the type of thing GU’s coach has been doing all weekend – Few wasn’t exactly thrilled.

“We have these fun two hours where we just kind of get away,” Few recalled. “I’m like, ‘Really? Come man, this is our time.’ He’s like ‘No, no. You need to meet this guy.’ ”

That “guy” was Thomas Tull, a businessman, entrepreneur and film producer. Worth an estimated $5.3 billion, the former CEO of Legendary Entertainment was an executive producer of box-office hits such as “Inception,” “The Hangover” series, “Interstellar,” “The Dark Knight” series and dozens of others.

Tull, who played football and basketball at New York-based Hamilton College, is also a part-owner who holds minority stakes with the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers and MLB’s New York Yankees.

Something you wouldn’t find on his Wikipedia page? Tull is a massive Gonzaga basketball fan despite no tangible connections to the city or university.

“He’s the greatest dude, but he’s also a huge, huge Zag fan all the way out in Pittsburgh,” Few said. “We went up to the hotel and we met and Thomas said from the jump, ‘What can I do to help? How can I help?’ He’s like, ‘I’d love to make a documentary about Gonzaga basketball if you think it would help.’ ”

Three years removed from their meeting at the Final Four, Few, Tull and hundreds of people associated with Gonzaga’s program – from John Stockton to Matt Santangelo to Adam Morrison to Graham Ike – filled the Bing Crosby Theater to watch Monday’s private screening of the 74-minute documentary.

“The two teams I loved as a kid were the Pittsburgh Steelers and New York Yankees,” Tull said. “I was fortunate enough to be in the ownership group of both, which is about as surreal as me standing here in front of you with Mark Few. The Zags, I was captivated near the beginning of journey. I’m like, where is this place and what is this?

“There are a bunch of teams that I can name that have great players for one or two or three years while they were there, they were great because they just had the right team or a superstar. But nobody’s ever done anything like this and I’m intellectually curious as to why.”

Chronologically, the film captures and highlights the various eras of Gonzaga’s rise to the top of the sport, beginning with Stockton’s tenure at the school in the 1980s to the program’s unbeaten run to the 2021 national championship game.

Roughly two-dozen players were interviewed for the documentary, inlcuding former Zag greats like Stockton, Morrison, Dan Dickau, Casey Calvary, Nigel Williams-Goss and Przemek Karnowski, along with Drew Timme, Chet Holmgren, Jalen Suggs and every member of GU’s active NBA contingent.

“Coach Few called up a number of us and said, hey I need you to do this,” Dickau said after Monday’s showing. “When coach Few’s like, hey I need you to do an interview, you kind of oblige. … It turned out well for all of us. We all wanted to be a part of it to a certain extent in helping kind of share the story of what Gonzaga’s been about for so long.”

The documentary covers the program’s climb to the top of the sport while weaving in behind-the-scenes footage from Gonzaga’s 2023-24 season. A film crew, led by director David Check, chronicled the Zags during an up-and-down year where the school’s NCAA Tournament streak appeared to be in jeopardy until a key nonconference win in February over Kentucky at Rupp Arena.

The crew was granted access to capture exclusive footage of practices, pregame pep talks, postgame meetings and Few’s gameday ritual of hiking around the forested area that surrounds his home in Spokane.

“You have this image of this fairyland of basketball in the Pacific Northwest, but you come here and it’s really that good,” executive producer Jonathan Hock said. “… It’s a cliche, but the story told itself. They wrote the story, we just helped make the film happen. I’m pretty confident people are going to like it.”

Few, who’s in the middle of another successful season with the 12th-ranked Zags, appreciated a rare opportunity to take a step back Monday and reflect on what the program’s built before his team takes the court next week at the West Coast Conference Tournament.

“It hits you totally man,” Few said. “It hits you in the heart, it warms your soul. … It took a village to get a program like this to where it is and everybody deserves to feel good about it.”

In an early scene, former athletic director Mike Roth shares the story of hiring Few – a process that began with recommending the assistant’s name to then-president Father Robert Spitzer Jr.

“That’s great, that’s great,” Spitzer Jr. told Roth. “Which one is (Few)?”

Santangelo, a guard who helped spur the team’s Cinderella run to the Elite Eight in 1999, was brought to tears in an interview discussing the breakthrough season that started Gonzaga’s current NCAA Tournament streak.

“Culture is a term that’s thrown around so much and it’s almost a cliche,” Check said, “but here you can feel it.”

Different parts of the film elicited reactions from the crowd that got a sneak peek on Monday. Audience members roared when Suggs’ iconic overtime shot against UCLA was played over the screen and chuckled during phases of Timme’s interview.

“The Zags, they make you feel like you’re a part of it,” said Alastair “Gee-Lock” Christopher, a photographer who spent time on the ground filming the Zags during the 2023-24 season. “If my kids were playing ball, I’d have them come out here. It’s just a blessing to be able to have access to show the world how amazing they are.”

The documentary is informative, sharing certain parts of Gonzaga’s story that aren’t as widely known nationally. It covers the university’s financial struggles that nearly shuttered the athletic department in the 1990s, as well as the player reunion that took place before Gonzaga’s national championship appearance in 2016-17.

“I’m biased, but I thought it was just tremendous and it was so nice to be able to jolt some of those memories,” Few said. “A lot got left on the cutting room floor because there’s so much good stuff, but Thomas did a great job of parroting it down to make it I think palatable and entertaining for somebody to watch in Iowa or New York or Georgia.”

Former players and current coaches agreed the film will double as an effective marketing and recruiting tool for Gonzaga, shining a light on the program’s rare combination of culture, development and success.

“I think it obviously casts the program in a great light,” said top GU assistant and former player Brian Michaelson. “I think it tells the history in a really good job which is obviously really difficult when you’re talking 25 years.”