Maybe cinema is all just shapes moving through time. Certainly no contemporary filmmakers have more vigorously battle-tested this notion than Alex Rubenstein and Jon Bois. Starting a decade ago with Pretty Good (2015)—a documentary series written, animated, and directed by Bois that details our most charmingly aberrant sports incidents—the moving images emerging from out of Secret Base have deftly and daffily illustrated the possibilities of history in a cinema of shapes. Composed in a series of maps and grids pirated from and edited in Google Earth, and co-narrated in a style more akin to color commentation than filmic monologue, Bois and Rubenstein’s cinema alchemizes the raw inanity of so many data points into a medium more suitable to human awe and confusion. Towers and monoliths and line rays and grids and every myriad contortion of digital polygon bend in order to uncover histories we thought we knew; in the speculative cinematography of Bois and Rubenstein, history itself isn’t for knowing, but rendering—and in so doing, discovering anew. You cannot win at history any more than the Mariners or Falcons can win at baseball or football. And if they win—and they will win—how we tell their story isn’t about winning, because storytelling isn’t an optimized function, it’s a sequence of stupidity marshaled into a shape that means something. Finding out how we allow it to mean something to us is Bois and Rubenstein’s experiment.
In film-length projects like The History of the Seattle Mariners (2020) and The People You’re Paying to Be in Shorts (2022) as in shorter ones such as What if Barry Bonds Had Played Without a Baseball Bat? (2017) and I AM GOING TO FIX THE KNICKS (2025), a grand theory of radical stupidity emerges, one distinctly at odds with our increasingly slop-bowled and smooth-arted modernity. In their (hi)stories of successful losers as well as all the winners who fail perfectly, Bois and Rubenstein find our most human shapes: pleasure in each others’ company, the sublime tension of failing again better, and something like love by a different name. Theirs is an art that—in examining the past—charts a future, perhaps never more turbulently than in a 2016 video titled Every NFL Score Ever. It’s here that Bois introduces the term ‘scorigami,’ a word that has since been picked up by gambling corporations and sports analysts alike to refer to any final score in sports that has never happened before. In an epic echo of this 20ish minutes of graph and graphic, Rubenstein and Bois have now composed Scorigami (2025), a four-part peoples’ history of the National Football League through the lens of its most novel-shaped scores. So often, Rubenstein and Bois address the raw material of history to tell us about the present moment. And while Scorigami’s four portions certainly enact this familiar grid-iron ballet, they add a genuinely future-facing axis to the duo’s storytelling. What are the shapes that we have not yet beheld, and what cinemas will we need to construct in order to come even halfway close to showing them?
On the occasion of the Mariners standing on the verge of their first pennant in history Scorigami: Part IV’s screening at New York City’s SVA Theatre, I spoke with Jon and Alex over video chat about the hidden histories emerging in images, booth dynamics, and the science-fiction mathematics that keep us returning to games of heart and chance. The ensuing conversation was, unsurprisingly, more a volley of each filmmaker engaging the other in mutual curiosity, ceding credit to each other and the great undiscovered public trawl of the universal footage-finder.
Frank Falisi: There have been longer episodes in your series before, but there’s something truly epic in the image-making here in Part IV. Can you talk a little about how you approached the feature-length run?
Jon Bois: We had originally planned on doing four episodes that were each around the same 45-ish minutes length. Once we realized we actually would be able to do a theater screening, Alex and I thought, Do you want to just make this one episode feature-length? Push for 90 minutes and actually say all the stuff we want to say? Because in all the other episodes, we trimmed ourselves way down—there were entire, cool stories that were just left on the cutting room floor. But this time, we thought, Nope, we’re gonna do all the math, throw all the numbers on the screen, just throw caution to the wind. So we did really rev up the engines for Part IV, actually made it expressly for the purpose of putting it on a huge screen. That was pretty fun.
FF: There really is a sense of massive scale to these numbers and their expression. It feels like you’re thinking about what all this data looks like big.
JB: It’s cool that that came across. It is funny, it’s the first time Alex and I have produced something specifically knowing that it was going to go on a theater screen.
Alex Rubenstein: And when you have to convey 272 billion football games like Jon managed to do, the big screen certainly comes in handy.
FF: I keep getting lost in the speculative implications of scorigami. We know what one, say, three-hour football game looks like on a screen. This film really conveys the impossible magnitude of an almost-unimaginable number of those kinds of games, with an entirely different visual language.
AR: Even on a screen that size, it’s borderline impossible to grasp.
FF: In part because you frequently address the viewer directly, your movies often feel intimate. What was it like to make Part IV knowing that it would not only be projected on a big screen, but would be experienced communally by a large crowd?
JB: I mean, it definitely made me more intentional. Okay, is this joke gonna land? If I leave a little joke here, is it gonna sink like a rock in front of a live audience? Are they gonna know that it’s a joke, is it gonna scan as a joke? More generally, we definitely try to do the conversational thing, with each other but even more so between us and the audience. Honestly, I think one of the unique things about having a two narrator setup with me and Alex, is that, like, this one guy vouches for the other guy, so they’re probably not insane. They’re probably not completely crazy—there’s at least one other person who hangs around with them.
FF: Do you remember when you happened on that two narrator form?
JB: Alex, I don’t know if you remember? Because we started making Dorktown when I first started doing the production, like the direction and backend stuff…I feel like there wasn’t a moment when we decided on this weird thing with two narrators, we just kind of started doing it, right?
AR: Yeah, that’s pretty much been from day one. The genesis of it was sort of that back and forth and playing off each other and just having that sort of clear delineation. Sort of a Dorktown staple.
JB: I think it works pretty naturally, with a really minimal handoff. Sometimes we do lead into each other—like, “Here’s Alex to tell you more about blah blah blah”—and sometimes we don’t even do that, which sometimes makes you worry, because there’s a lot of people who don’t have the best time telling different voices apart. I know people from England who have trouble telling different American voices apart. But we think that overall, since Alex tends to tackle more of the like, really really weird patterns and sequences that play out, there really is “an Alex line of discussion.” Whereas, like… “A guy pooped his pants,” oh yeah, that’s a Jon story.
FF: I appreciate that you mentioned not being able to tell the voices apart because it frequently doesn’t really feel like you’re Jon and Alex, but that you’re these two voices in the grid. There’s more of a radio feel to it, where the voice exists by itself. It’s the booth, yeah?
AR: Yeah, I think we’re both working to tell the same story. And so these two voices converge on what’s ultimately a shared, similar path towards how the story is going to be told.
JB: It really feels like the best kind of play-by-play. We didn’t do it as much in Part IV, but especially in other projects, Alex usually covers the play-by-play—he’s like our default play-by-play broadcaster because it’s fun to hear him call the action and be able to break down exactly what’s going on with the benefit of years and years of hindsight. It’s like watching a game except way, way more fun.
FF: When you’re working on a project, especially writing it, are there other voices that you seek out?
JB: Yeah, you mean like inspirations?
FF: Yeah, I mean, Jon, you’ve spoken about Vin Scully before. I wondered if there’s any other writers who have a certain tendency in their voice (spoken or written) that you seek out when you’re trying to tell a story a certain way.
JB: Alex, do you take direct inspiration from Vin Scully? I do in the greater sense, in that he’s a great storyteller who was on top of everything but also just felt very, very approachable. I think the original parasocial relationship was the one people had with Vin Scully. Alex, do you ever try to directly imitate him or anything like that?
AR: One thing I’ve always admired about Scully in particular, that we certainly have emulated in Dorktown, is the use of the tangent. Vin Scully, over the course of a three-hour baseball game (where it’s not always super action-packed), will know exactly when to sneak in a story about some player, when he was in third grade, what happened in class one day, something like that. I know probably our biggest example was in our Dave Stieb documentary, when we took a detour to break down all of Ricky Henderson’s plate appearances in a playoff series with the Blue Jays. Finding these places to sort of expand the story a little bit is, I think, something that’s a staple of Dorktown and definitely one of many reasons why Vin Scully is Vin Scully.
FF: It also feels like when you do the tangent, it’s no longer a tangent. When you take the story there, it becomes part of the map you’re building. Does that make sense?
JB: There is a lot of de facto logic that we use, I think: it is part of the story because we decide it is. Which is why when we talk about the history of the Falcons, Vikings, Mariners…I like those titles, but accurately, they’re not ‘the history,’ they’re ‘a history.’ They’re kind of a peoples’ history, because they’re not a completely representative, authoritative account. The stories are heavily subject to what Alex and I find interesting. We kind of have to take those tangents—we’re journalists but we’re also entertainers. And if something isn’t entertaining, we need to jump ship immediately into something that is. Which is why we will sometimes skip entire years of a team’s history. Yeah that’s boring, let’s talk about this one weird bullpen prank that happened in 1993 instead.
FF: You said ‘journalist,’ you said ‘entertainer.’ Is ‘historian’ a useful term for you guys? Do you think of what you do as ‘doing history’?
JB: I’d say so, right Alex?
AR: Yeah, there’s definitely that element of being a historian or caretaker for these entire organizations.
JB: Alex, do you want to go for a second on the sheer ridiculous amount of history that’s compressed in Vikings? Like the title screen?
AR: Like the soaring over the fields? Jon spent 15, 20 seconds showing basically every single play of every playoff game—and some key regular season games—in the history of the Vikings. The amount of work that went into each one of those, whether it’s watching the game and recording what happened on every single snap or Jon spending hours upon hours building it for just one game…like, I’m sure to most people, it might get lost, but you wouldn’t even believe the amount of manpower that went into those 15, 20 seconds.
JB: It’s crazy, yeah—to finish this tangent—it’s funny because a lot of those games don’t have preexisting play-by-play on record, anywhere. So what Alex did is he went back and pulled the tape and manually recorded. Okay, this was a three yard gain, and this was a four yard pass. He did that for entire games pre-1994, where, at the time, we didn’t have play-by-play. So once he actually went through the incredible work of compiling all of that, he then sent it to me, where I literally drew it by dragging my mouse one click at a time, one polygon at a time. It kind of almost makes me sick how much time we spent doing that.
FF: There’s something very moving about coming to grips with that amount of labor. It’s a good echo for what Dorktown does with raw data: here’s a basically too-vast amount of number, but once humans work to put it into shapes, stories emerge. Scorigami is always coming to grips—or trying to come to grips—with a nearly-unimaginable, basically speculative number of football games. And then beyond that, every game implies a broadcast crew, a booth of announcers, a field of camera operators and a truck of game directors. Your work feels like a tribute to all of that as-yet-visible labor that emerges in the shaping of the data.
JB: I’m glad it does, and it kind of ties into something that Alex and I were talking about earlier. I guess the modern day version of the anonymous hero who operates the camera is the anonymous hero who bothers uploading all these treasures to YouTube, which is where we find almost all of our footage. It’s not that I would expect the leagues to, but past a certain point, they don’t have any official video archive of 99% of their stuff. So it falls upon these anonymous heroes, usually different people. One person in 1987 bothered to record it, and a second person bothered to save their dad’s old stuff in a box in the attic, and then they decided to rip it and upload it. And a third person collects it from some forum where all of these files were located and drops it on YouTube. And we will never know any of the names of anybody who does that heroic work. And then it falls upon me and Alex at the end to take all the credit, and be the ones who quote unquote found it; meanwhile, we’re standing on the shoulders of these heroes who, who knows, if it wasn’t for them saving it, perhaps none of us would ever see it. So we have a lot of people to thank.
FF: What does archival work look like on the parts of the leagues themselves?
JB: So dating back to 2012 or something, NFL+ does have a service where you can look up basically any NFL game. And then some of the other leagues have limited functionality to that end, but past a certain point—not too far in the past, I think it’s probably 2010 or 2015—no sports league really has any official archives beyond Super Bowls or memorable moments. We’ve been told that NFL Films does have an enormous vault, but it’s not one that people have access to.
AR: With MLB, the last time I would have been trying to get deep into footage would have been our Dave Stieb documentary, but as of then, I was able to kind of figure out a YouTube search code where you could find basically full games of every single MLB game going back to 2011 or so. Before that, it’s an abyss, for sure.
JB: Then again, especially with baseball, they play about 2400 games a year. Some poor beleaguered intern is probably manually uploading games from like, 1983, over and over. Can’t wait until he’s done!
FF: Speaking of endlessness, there’s an almost Beckett-like sense of absurdity, especially with scorigami. And Part IV ends with the word “stupid”, which is a word that has come up in your work a bit, always with affection, and sometimes with real consequence. Why do you think “the stupid” is so important?
JB: I don’t want to monopolize too many of these answers, but I do have a good answer for this. I think it was sort of a theme that I started in a baseball episode we dropped earlier this year called God Hates a Coward. It’s about a guy in the 1940s who tried to break the record for ‘baseball caught from the greatest height,’ and he catches a ball dropped from a blimp like 1200 feet above sea level. It’s this whole thing, and the video goes in a lot of directions, but I sort of explored the idea and value of pointlessness, of doing things for the sake of themselves, and not doing it for any greater point or any particular reason. Just because you happen to enjoy it. And Scorigami was kind of a continuation of that.
At the outset, Alex and I didn’t even have to have a conversation, like, You know this is stupid, right? We both realized how trivial it is—it’s almost the definition of trivia. But there’s no need to build a case or develop a justification or pitch to yourself why you should care about something. If you do, then you do. Just be happy in that.
FF: And as that thread was going along in Part IV, my first thought was about sports betting, especially modern sports betting, and how overwhelming a presence it has in broadcasts and online. And your film sort of ends with a reflection on that betting, especially in so much as these companies have built a game on a game, and scorigami—as well as Dorktown’s cinema of “the odds” behind the data—offers a less optimizable alternative. Do you ever worry about the extent to which sports betting has morphed and optimized itself, and is being sold to fans?
JB: I can say for starters that when we talk about betting specifically on scorigami, Alex and I had a pretty good laugh. Like if anything, Alex, I think you said it’s better to bet the “no” on scorigami most of the time?
AR: Right, based on just the odds that they would give you. Like the odds that they would give you for a scorigami are like, 10 to 1, or 12 to 1, and really, the odds are that you should at least get a 40 to 1 payout. Not only for the reasons Jon voiced is scorigami a ridiculous thing to bet on, but just on a pragmatic basis, your payout is horrible. It’s not a good thing to bet on.
JB: It’s not. It’s not “scandalous,” no one’s committing fraud, but the odds are just not as fair as they should be, even if you know that the house obviously needs to turn a profit. They should give you odds that let them line their pockets a little bit, but even by that standard, it’s a little egregious.
More generally, I was worried about coming across as puritanical in the film. I don’t have any kind of problem with gambling itself. I myself might go to Churchill Downs when I go back home to Louisville, do a little betting. I like going to Vegas. I like playing house poker games. I do worry about our society increasingly—and you’ve seen this spin up in the past 5, 10 years specifically—trying to shake the lunch money out of the pockets of the most vulnerable people in our society. And that includes those dumb “Free to Play” iPhone games that you see celebrities hawking. And you wonder like…what’s their business model? I read an article recently about it, and it talked about how 99% of the people who pick up the game and download it aren’t really going to spend much money in the game. But there’s a slight percentage of obsessives, like people who are inclined, due to who they are, to being hooked in by the game. So they’ll catch these “whales” who end up spending like, $20,000 on this iPhone game. I don’t know: it feels vindictive, it feels targeted, and it feels ruthless.
Sports betting apps give me the creeps too. I think you should at least have to go somewhere physical in real life, in public, to do it. There should be some kind of social component, and there should be some sort of physical barrier. Again, it’s not for me to say whether people should or shouldn’t do it, I just felt entitled to say my two cents about it, and something about it doesn’t smell good.
FF: Maybe moving past the bad-smelling present to the possibilities a future affords: these movies, and especially Scorigami, has you going back through history, back through all of this data, but this film is also thinking about the future, about years and centuries that we cannot yet comprehend yet. Did you think about science fiction? It really feels like you wanted to show us something we could not comprehend.
JB: Yeah, I think I can speak for both of us when I say that just saying words like “the 692nd Century” is just really, really funny. Especially in terms of centuries: if you say something like “the Xth century,” it sort of implies that people are going to be there, and we’re still going to have the same calendar that we currently observe, and we’re still going to be counting 365 days a year and humans will still be doing it. It’s fun to say “the One Millionth Century.” I can’t wait for the one billionth NFL season. Alex, I’m curious to know: once you first realized that the odds of a 10-1 game were climbing into the trillions, did you believe it at first?
AR: Two things most struck me. One was from the initial Scorigami video from 2016, stating that the 4-4 score will occur “not quite when the sun will burn out,” but in that time frame of speaking. This film goes orders of magnitude beyond when the sun will burn out. Taking what was such an outrageous portion of the 2016 episode and then blowing so far beyond that was kind of fun.
The way I calculated the odds of having a 6-1 game wound up much smaller than what Jon calculated even 4-4 to be. In reality, it wouldn’t even be true, but we have to assume it’s true, because we had to pretend an 85 yard safety occurred. Just from that, that would imply how much of an impact that kind of pretending had. I think we could agree that 6-1 is much more unlikely than 4-4, but it doesn’t even come out that way. You have to apply the additional constraints to get to 10-1 to even blow beyond the 272 billion. The outrageousness of playing around with those kinds of numbers, with the implications of what they all meant in comparison to each other…weaving that tapestry was very, very fun.
JB: That was such bizzaro math that you had to invent, just to pretend that such a play happened. Usually, if you have to pretend that something happened—even if you do it transparently and honestly—it usually means you’re trying to exaggerate something. But you were trying to pull those numbers more conservatively. You were trying to keep it outside of the realm of infinity.
AR: I really wanted to hammer that home: these are just numbers that we know it’s even bigger than. It was certainly something to behold.
FF: And the way it plays out in the film, the Alex voice figures those numbers out, does the math that nobody’s ever done, and then hands it off to the Jon voice. How do you show it? Can you show it? And the film does, but it can only do that by looking at your other films and by showing all the other images in this history of your own films, simultaneously.
JB: I kind of felt like I was crawling up my own ass there, like I was the meme of Shia LeBeouf watching all of his own films in a row. It felt a little close to that, but it was literally the only idea I had left. And I thought it would be such a funny payoff. I knew it was going to be funny when I first described my idea to Alex and he cracked up, and then I showed it to him, and I’m pretty sure he laughed his ass off. What else would we have done? It’s the only idea I have to show a number as high as 10 or 20 trillion.
FF: It feels like you’ve truly earned your own unit of measurement here, which of course can only be expressed via Google Earth cinematography.
JB: It still works! I am still on that quest, in terms of how much in the way of imagery and polygons can I dump in there? If I turned all of Dorktown on at the same time, neither of my computers would be able to function. I think they’d probably just crash out entirely. Once, I turned it all on, when we were doing Vikings, and it took, like, 20 minutes to turn them all on. I probably won’t try it again. But maybe if the future of computing power catches up with Alex and I’s state-of-the-art CGI modeling system, maybe one day it’d be possible.