The women’s locker room is supposed to be a safe space. And yet its feeble record for warding off unwanted attention is underscored time and again in TV tropes and class-action lawsuits. It goes a long way to explaining why, despite the abundance of fly-on-the-wall sports documentaries, you’d be hard-pressed to name one that follows a women’s team as closely and earns enough trust to linger.
In so many ways director Arlene Nelson is breaking the mold with Angel City, a three-part HBO Sports doc that goes inside the same-named LA franchise pushing for change on and off the pitch. The series embeds with the team over the course of the 2022 season, as the National Women’s Soccer League was reeling from an internal investigation that implicated five coaches and a general manager in a toxic workplace scandal marked by verbal abuse, racist remarks and sexual misconduct. “It was really important for us to assure them that we appreciate the need for that protection,” says Nelson, who came to this project from a Secrets of Playboy miniseries that unmasked Hugh Hefner as a predator and sadist. “It was a delicate dance, trying to find that balance of being respectful while also getting the story right.”
It’s a complex tale. Angel City FC was born in the wake of the Time’s Up movement from a majority female ownership that includes the actor-activist Natalie Portman, the venture capitalist Kara Nortman and the Hollywood exec Julie Uhrman. The story is as much about them trying to prove pro women’s soccer can carve out a viable niche in the entertainment-saturated LA market as it is about whether there’s even profit to be had within a league experiment on its third draft, the NWSL being the first to make it past year three. Much of the reason for optimism comes down to Portman, a soccer naif too bold and blunt to let the game’s entrenched biases and business practices stunt her ambition. Her persistence, too, is awe-inspiring. “She does a really good job of asking ‘Why is this happening?’ and then putting in the work behind it to change things,” says Julie Foudy, the former US National Team captain turned Angel City investor.
All the while Angel City is bidding to finish with a winning record in its launch season – a near impossible feat for an expansion team. And they add to the degree of difficulty by not making any trades or roster cuts unless by player request. The idea is to provide a sense of security within a league that was capricious about on-field shake ups before assenting to a collective bargaining agreement. But it comes at the expense of Angel FC’s ability to make roster upgrades throughout the season and really bites them hard when a slew of injuries wipe out their offensive lines.
Equally daunting was the job of capturing all this drama. Where HBO’s Hard Knocks has small armies of people to embed with key characters and permission to hide cameras around NFL team facilities, Nelson filmed Angel City with a 40-person crew, squeezing that number like an accordion while haggling with the team over shooting opportunities; so it goes when your subject team doesn’t have its own training complex. “It was incredibly challenging having to figure out which storylines we were going to follow,” Nelson says.
Many times a story would continue unfolding after production had exhausted its allotted filming time, forcing Nelson to grab a go-bag and get the footage herself. “I had my camera in the garage at the ready, batteries always charged,” she says. “When Sydney Leroux was traded from Orlando, I scrambled from Culver City to catch her arriving at LAX with her kids.”
Nelson made a point of assembling a production team that was as female and inclusive as Angel FC. But the effort didn’t score the hoped-for points. Members of the team still come off guarded and vigilant. At one point in the first episode Uhrman is at the team office in Santa Monica kibitzing with her twin sister Amy Longhi (a marketing consultant for the team) about Amy’s habit of ignoring her car’s fuel gauge.
“Again?” she exclaims, swiveling around to the fly on the wall. “Did you hear this?”
“Why are we talking into camera?” Amy shoots back nervously.
It’s the kind of exchange you’d never see in sports docs about men, who disrobe as easily as they lay bare their darkest professional fears in front of viewers. Sportswomen, on the other hand, don’t have nearly as much practice or protection in similarly vulnerable moments, let alone a Last Chance U-type project to offer some guidance on how to relax around a film production that’s designed to style them as larger than life. So it figures Angel City players would be suspicious when Nelson’s camera crew approach from a low angle.
How could it not feel intrusive when women athletes are already sharing so much of themselves as a matter of course. “We have to be more than athletes just to, you know, make money,” says the defender Madison Hammond. “I look at male athletes on social media and there’s nothing about their weekend, who they’re with, why they’re with. All their pictures will be from their sport.
“But then I look at my peers, my teammates – even myself, I’m posting what brands I like to use or where I’m going on the weekend. People have to think I’m a person.”
Hammond is a documentary subject out of central casting: a Black Native American from New Mexico who happens to be the niece of the former PGA Tour fixture Notah Begay. When she wasn’t starring on Wake Forest’s ascendent soccer team, she was playing violin in the Demon Deacons orchestra.
If this were Hard Knocks, that skill wouldn’t just be captured on camera; it’d be fodder for a cold open. But Hammond never felt like she could ever bare that much of herself. “I just heard different stories about how there’d been cameras and boom mics everywhere and, you know, that’s not something I had ever experienced as an athlete,” says Hammond, traded to the team weeks into shooting. “It’s difficult to kind of put those walls down to let people in and just continue operating like you normally would.”
It’s hard not to wonder how much richer the Angel City story could have been with the benefit of more access and time. “We wanted to go deeper and highlight players even more,” Nelson says, “but it was a challenge to keep everything to three hours.”
Still, it would be a shock if Angel City was a one-off for HBO, still the sports documentary gold standard. The network just began streaming US women’s national team matches this year in the run-up to the Women’s World Cup later this summer. As the Americans attempt to become the first team – men or women – to win three titles in a row, US support figures to be massive again even with the tournament scattered across Australia and New Zealand. Domestic TV ratings for the 2018 women’s final were 22% higher than the men’s.
There’s always been an audience for high-level women’s soccer – which, for young fans in particular, is every bit as absorbing as the men’s game, if not more. Angel City, plenty gratifying on its own, doesn’t just prove the need for sports docs that center women; it serves up an excellent template. “In 15 years, when the NWSL is huge and people are making millions of dollars playing women’s soccer, this documentary will be a very interesting snapshot in time,” Hammond says. “Like, seriously, there was a moment when we weren’t gonna do that?”
Angel City is now available on HBO Max in the US and in the UK at a later date
