Director's film-school project turned into critically lauded 'More Than a Game'

(MCT) DALLAS - Seven years ago, while a film student at Los Angeles' Loyola Marymount University, Kristopher Belman decided to do a 10-minute documentary about his hometown of Akron, Ohio. Today, that project, "More Than a Game," chronicling the ups and downs of five young basketball-playing friends, including an adolescent LeBron James, is a critically lauded, nationally distributed feature film.It's all caught Belman, 29, who had not made a feature before, by surprise.

"The only word I can use to describe the whole thing is surreal," he said in a conference room at his publicist's office. "Never in a million years did I think I'd be in Dallas right now, having just come from Seattle. This is my fifth city in five days. It's tiring but a lot of my classmates would kill to be here. I'm not taking any of this for granted."

Actually, he can thank some of those classmates for partially giving him the idea for the movie. He remembers they would often joke about there being nothing worthwhile in Ohio and so, when given an assignment in a documentary class, Belman decided to prove them wrong by returning to Akron to find his subject.

"I was reading about these boys in high school. They were doing some incredible things on the court but it said they had played together since the fourth grade and they were going to high school together no matter what. I was blown away by that," Belman said. "That showed a sophisticated friendship that a lot of people in their 30s and 40s don't have."

Not long after, James made the cover of Sports Illustrated, and it looked like newfound fame might prove a barrier to Belman.

"They were really trying to keep the media out of their hair," Belman said. "I finally got to the coach, and that's when I said, 'I'm from Akron, this is a school project, I'm just trying to get an 'A,' and it's not about LeBron.'"

Belman was told he could come to one practice. They got along well enough that Belman decided he would just keep showing up until they told him to get lost. They never did.

"I became an unofficial member in a way, just me and my camera," he said. "They called me 'Cameraman.'"

From the beginning Belman said what he wanted to capture was not so much their winning style of play - though there's plenty of it in "More Than a Game" - but the dynamics of their friendship.

"You could walk in a room, and after 10 minutes, you could see these guys have been together their whole lives," he said.

That's when Belman decided that what he wanted to do couldn't be captured in a 10-minute project.

"I thought I was going only to film them for a day or two," he said with a laugh. "But then it became a balancing act [with school]. I had a lot of excuses. I had a lot of illnesses."

Although he turned in his short film - "I got a B-plus on it" - he continued to work on something longer. It was a process that would continue after he graduated in 2004.

"I spent the next year editing it, and I spent two years trying to find financing," he said. "To get the film to [what I wanted], I wanted visual effects and original music. My credit cards would only go so far."

By this time, it was getting tough to reach James - a star player for the Cleveland Cavaliers - for follow-up interviews and many of Belman's friends were urging him to cut his losses and drop "More Than a Game."

"That was a pretty rough two years," he said. "I was turning down pretty large sums of money to sell the [James] footage, and my friends were telling me I was wasting my time and move on."

He finally found a producer and then distribution fell into place through Lionsgate after the first public screening at the Toronto film festival last year, where "More Than a Game" came in second to "Slumdog Millionaire."

Looking back, Belman said, the long gestation process worked.

"To sit down with LeBron James for seven hours, in front of a camera, and talk about growing up without a father, I don't think a lot of people could get that," he said. "Even if they did, it would be what I call 'Podium LeBron,' the one you see after a game. I had to make sure he was 'Living Room LeBron,' a little rough around the edges. It took six years to get that."

Belman isn't done with basketball yet. Someday, he'd like to dramatize the story of famed '80s-era Loyola Marymount basketball players Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble and coach Paul Westhead, whose aggressive, "run-and-gun" style briefly turned the small college into a b-ball powerhouse. (Gathers collapsed and died of heart failure on the court in 1990.)

But before that, he wants to do something unrelated to sports.

"I'm really afraid of being pigeonholed," he explains. "I've got a lot of screenplays that I'm reading. I'd love to do drama, or even comedy. I prefer stories that are character-based. If the characters have heart and there's a positive message to it, then the genre doesn't matter.

"I come mostly from a comedic background. Lots of my short films were all comedy-based," he said. "Now I'm going to have a hard time convincing people I can do comedies.