Editor’s Note: Our Boys in the Boat is a series about the legacy of Whatcom and Skagit County rowers on the University of Washington crew that won Olympic gold in 1936, depicted in the book and movie “The Boys in the Boat.” Today’s story details the re-creation of the University of Washington’s shell house for the movie set, and author Daniel James Brown’s reaction to the film.
When Hollywood came calling to shoot a movie based on the University of Washington rowing “Boys in the Boat” book, it chose the River Thames over the campus’s Montlake Cut.
The movie by the same name, directed by George Clooney and starring Callum Turner and Joel Edgerton, is scheduled to open nationwide Christmas week.
Most filming took place at different sites in the U.K., including at the Upper Thames Rowing Club in Henley. One of the sites is near Clooney’s English mansion home, where he lives with his wife, activist and human-rights attorney Amal, and their 6-year-old twins.
The true story, about a tightknit blue-collar university crew that stunned the rowing world in winning 1936 Olympic gold against venerable German and Italian teams in Hitler’s Germany, took place on the picturesque UW campus, where the original shell house still stands on the shore of Lake Washington.
“We were a little disappointed they didn’t shoot it here,” said “Boys in the Boat” author Daniel James Brown of Redmond, who has taken an active role in UW’s $18.5 million campaign to renovate and restore the historic shell house used by the 1936 Olympic champion team. “They shot the whole film in the U.K. for tax reasons.”
Brown is surprised at the continued popularity of the book 10 years after its publication.
“It’s been a complete whirlwind,” he said by phone from Redmond. “Most books tail off after a while, kind of naturally to make room for other books. It just kept getting revived at different points … and the movie, of course, it’s the most recent revival. So it’s been quite a ride.”
Brown, who has since written another intensely researched nonfiction book, “Facing the Mountain,” about Japanese-American World War II heroes, feels lucky the movie was even produced after a tangled history. Two years before the book’s 2013 publication and the day after its sale to Viking Press, The Weinstein Company purchased the film rights. In 2018, the studio declared bankruptcy following Harvey Weinstein’s firing and subsequent imprisonment for rape and sexual assault, along with the company’s longtime financial problems.
“I was sure it would disappear into the black hole of the Weinstein Company, and it did for a while,” Brown said. “Well before the Weinstein Company imploded, we were getting frustrated because they weren’t moving forward with it.”
Movie rights bounced to different companies before being picked up by MGM, which was acquired by Amazon last year, when filming began.
From left, James Wolk stars as Coach Bolles, Dominic Tighe as Coach Brown and Joel Edgerton as Coach Al Ulbrickson in “The Boys in the Boat.” (Photo courtesy of Laurie Sparham/Amazon MGM Studios) The film includes a full-size replica of the ASUW Shell House built for the occasion. A pre-production team visited the UW campus and “did all kinds of high-tech scanning of the (shell house) inside and out,” he said. “It looks remarkably like the real thing. When people see this film and then come to Seattle and walk into the building, they will feel as if they have already been there, already have seen it.”
Nicole Klein, capital campaign manager for the ASUW Shell House renovation, said the team contacted her and worked with UW’s libraries and special collections to scour photos and online yearbooks to get details on student life and how 1936 Seattle and campus looked. Famed boatbuilder George Pocock’s shop in the loft of the shell house was of particular interest.
“They asked, ‘Are you sure the Pocock shop is on the second floor?’ and I said yes. ‘How’d they get the boats out?’ ‘They came out the window,’” Klein said.
Klein’s group interviewed the 1936 crew’s family members to get an idea of their personalities to pass along to the actors who would play them.
Brown had little to do with the screenplay or filming, but Clooney contacted him soon after taking the director’s job and they had a long conversation by phone.
“I was very heartened by that because it was very clear that he had not only read the book, but he really sort of got it on a visceral level,” Brown said.
In August, Clooney invited Brown and his wife to a screening in Los Angeles, where they talked at length in person.
After Brown saw the movie, “I was enthused by what he had done.”
Moviegoers who have read “The Boys in the Boat” will undoubtedly miss some favorite storylines and details from the 370-page book that the movie won’t cover. But Brown said the film did what he hoped it would.
“What mattered to me was that they captured the spirit of this story,” he said. “They created a really nice, uplifting kind of film that I think people are going to come out of the theater feeling.
“One of the things George Clooney actually said was, and I agree with him, that the times we’re in now seem so dark in so many ways that he thinks that we’re all ready for just an uplifting, pull-together kind of film and that’s what he set out to produce. And that’s what he did,” Brown added.
Coming Tuesday: A story of the resurrection of the University of Washington’s shell house after it was nearly lost to history.
Meri-Jo Borzilleri is a freelance journalist whose stories have appeared in Cascadia Daily News, The Seattle Times, New York Times and ESPN.com, among other outlets. A former sports reporter for the Miami Herald, Colorado Springs Gazette and Hilton Head Island Packet, she was rowing a single scull when nearly run over by a tugboat during a Learn to Row session on Lake Union.
How well will the movie fare to Pacific Northwesterners?
Editor’s note: Reporter Meri-Jo Borzilleri saw an early screening of the film and shared her thoughts.
It’s not often you get to see a time-period Hollywood movie with so much local flavor. Pacific Northwesterners will be able to claim a piece of “The Boys in the Boat.”
The Depression-era, true story tells of an eight-man crew, plus a spunky coxswain, most of whom were desperate to make the team because of the steady meals and housing provided. The movie plot, like the book of the same name, centers on Sequim’s Joe Rantz, but two rowers had ties to Skagit and Whatcom counties — Don Hume of Anacortes and Gordy Adam of Everson.
The movie is an inspiring story that was pretty much forgotten to history. Shot in amber light, it’s an old-fashioned sports film with all the attendant figures — a demanding, brooding coach in legendary Al Ulbrickson, played just right by actor Joel Edgerton; the boatbuilding philosopher and guru George Pocock (Peter Guinness); and Rantz (Callum Turner), whose hard-luck story of abandonment, along with his platinum blond hair, has him stand out on an ascendant junior varsity team that bonds over shared desperation and underdog status.
The rowing scenes are notable for their closeup and bird’s-eye camera views. Clooney pulls off a not-so-easy task, building suspense in a movie where the competition outcome is already known. The film was not shot on campus, but the UW old shell house looks like the real thing, inside and out, and care was taken in period clothing, hairstyles (a fortune must have been spent on gel) and dialogue verging on corny — though that was the language of the time.
Still, it was hard not to get goosebumps when coxswain Bobby Moch exhorted his teammates with the cadence-directing command “As … ONE! As … ONE! As … ONE!” during the chaos of the Husky Clipper’s rally to gold.
Adam is barely featured in the film, but Hume, considered the boat’s most talented oarsman in the key stroke position, gets a good amount of screen time. Played by Jack Mulhern, the stoic Hume provides comic relief as the team’s socially awkward crew member who also plays a mean piano. It’s Hume’s illness during the Olympics that provides the drama at the film’s high point in their Olympic race.
I would have liked to see epilogues explaining each of the characters’ later lives, and I didn’t care much for the beginning and ending fictional vignettes, showing present-day rowers and an old man (Rantz, presumably), encouraging a young boy rowing a fiberglass shell. Maybe better bookends would have been Rantz’s daughter, Judy Willman, leading author Brown to her house and ailing father, Joe, to tell his story in the months before he died.
“But [it’s] not just about me,” he told Brown. “It has to be about the boat.” It’s a scene that all but writes itself, and has the benefit of being true.
Still, the advance showing at Barkley Regal Cinemas, with many area rowers in attendance, ended with some applause, as a feel-good movie should. It’s a sweet rendering of a nearly forgotten time when competitive rowing was a big deal, and when this part of the Pacific Northwest — with local guys as two boys in the boat — was the center of it all.
“The Boys in the Boat” has multiple showtimes Sunday, Dec. 24 through Thursday, Dec. 28 at Regal Barkley Village. A special showing of “The Boys in the Boat” will take place from 6:30-7:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 30 at Anacortes Cinemas in Anacortes. The event will include the UW Rowing historian who consulted on “The Boys in the Boat” book, the Hume family, historical context from the Samish Canoe Family, interpretive panels from the Anacortes Museum and more. Tickets are $50. Info: https://downtownanacortes.square.site/.
