Chris Bell had a subject for his new documentary. He had the facts. He had the experience. All he needed was an angle.
“I knew a lot about steroids because I was a power lifter and had been training for my whole life,” Bell said in an interview with The Diamondback. “At some point I said [to writers Alexander Buono and Tamsin Rawady], ‘Well, you guys know that my brothers are both on steroids, and they would talk to us.’ And that was the part of the project where they said, ‘Wow, that’s a great hook – tell a family story.'”
Thus, Bell’s (Billy Jones) documentary on steroids in American sports, Bigger, Stronger, Faster*, was born. A widespread critique of the role steroids play both on the playing field and within the nation’s culture, the heart of Bell’s film is the use of his own family to give the subject an in-depth analysis on a personal level.
“I found my brothers to tell me the truth about what they were doing, how they were doing it, how they were obtaining it and all of these different things that you’re not going to get out of someone who is a big athlete or a movie star,” Bell explained.
While Bell and his two brothers, Mike and Mark, were growing up, they admired the bulky heroes of American television and movies. All three pursued careers in professional wrestling, a path that took each down the dark road of steroid usage. While Chris went into filmmaking and only briefly used performance enhancers before stopping for “moral and ethical” reasons, his two brothers remained on steroids, he said.
During the film’s opening moments, Bell introduces his witty narrative, exploring the irony of how many steroid users have become poster boys for the American dream.
In one of the more amusing segments, he points out there is nothing more American than Rocky IV. In that movie, the burly boxer trains with old-fashioned methods before going to Soviet Russia, defeating juicing murderer Ivan Drago and essentially ending the Cold War – by himself. But Sylvester Stallone, of course, was on steroids, and the American image he portrays could not be further from the truth.
“The main thing that drew me toward making this movie was the fact that I grew up watching all of these heroes like Hulk Hogan and Rambo and Rocky,” Bell said, “these heroes that were larger than life, and I wanted to be like that, so pop culture was a heavy influence on the reasons why my brothers and I decided that steroids were something we would end up doing.”
An unbiased look at the issue, Bell’s film reports fairly on both sides of the topic, covering matters such as the health risks of steroids and the ease with which one can obtain them. In one sequence, he finds that the Olympics, as clean an event as he thought there could be, regularly includes thousands of failed drug tests. In another scene, he decides to make $60 worth of dietary supplements from home, only to find that it costs him just $1.40.
“I found out that the supplement industry that I was a big supporter of was a completely unregulated industry,” Bell said. “That was something that was really bothersome to me on a personal level, but also something that I felt people needed to know about.”
In a film where he talks to everyone from world-renowned athletes Floyd Landis, Carl Lewis and Ben Johnson to Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and comic book author Stan Lee, it turned out Bell did not have to go far to find the “most interesting person” to talk to: his mother.
“Her perceptions of growing up in a Christian household and how that related to the steroid issue, it was just so mind blowing,” Bell said. “Almost everybody who watches the film, their first comment isn’t ‘Wow, Carl Lewis’ or ‘Wow, you really got Floyd Landis there, and that’s amazing.’ The first comment is ‘Your mom is amazing.'”
Although he said he second guessed the decision to use his family at a “couple points,” they are ultimately the glue that holds Bigger, Stronger, Faster* together. As for their initial reaction to the film, Bell took a lighthearted tone on the matter.
“My family completely disowned me,” Bell deadpanned before letting out a laugh. “No, they actually loved it. My family was totally on board with the film from day one. They watched the film and felt that I portrayed them exactly the way that they spoke.”
tfloyd1@umd.edu
RATING: 4 STARS OUT OF 5
