STERLING PRODUCTIONS OSMOSIS FILMS AND NHL ORIGINAL PRODUCTIONS

Present VALIANT The Story

Publicity Contact: MSophia PR | Margarita Sophia Cortes | 917.474.7292 [email protected] “Vegas Born” is an identity — one that shows its resilience and pride. Like Las Vegas, in the wake of the Route 91 Music festival tragedy, we rose from the chaos, reborn. VegasStrong is not just a war cry, it was a term that brought people and fans together in a time we desperately needed healing. Las Vegas latched onto the Golden Knights, like a child would hold a security blanket. With each and every game we won, our hearts swelled with pride. We all watched together as the players carried an entire city on its shoulders. Our heartstrings were pulled and tugged as we inched closer to what was almost as impossible as it was unimaginable.

Las Vegas bleeds black and gold. We have rallied around a team whose players have inspired us and have given us hope, and most of all, helped us to heal.

Sterling Productions, Osmosis Films and NHL Original Productions have teamed up to produce “Valiant,” the epic story of the 2017-18 Vegas Golden Knights Inaugural Season.

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VALIANT

SHORT SYNOPSIS

The documentary film VALIANT is the powerful story of a desert-based team that, in its very first year of existence, helps heal and unify its home city after a heartrending tragedy. The story opens with the creation of the Las Vegas Golden Knights – who defy the odds to make their home in the Mojave Desert as a expansion team. The team is enjoying pre-season success when Las Vegas experiences the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. On October 1, 2017 – just days before the Golden Knights’ home opener – 58 people are killed and nearly 500 others are wounded at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival. In the face of this devastating loss, the Golden Knights – the only professional team in the city – makes it their mission to help unify and heal the community. This driving force takes them on an unprecedented streak to the Stanley Cup Final. Ultimately, the team wins gold by winning the hearts of the people.

LONG SYNOPSIS

The documentary film VALIANT begins by chronicling the creation of the National Hockey League’s expansion team the Vegas Golden Knights by billionaire businessman Bill Foley. Following the awarding of the franchise in 2016, Foley announced that former general manager George McPhee would be the franchise’s first general manager. The subsequent expansion draft (and NHL Draft) landed the team a star player in three-time Stanley Cup champion goalie and future Hall of Famer Marc-André Fleury from the Pittsburgh Penguins, as well as winger James Neal from the .

After a couple of preseason home games that introduced the Golden Knights’ razzle- dazzle, Vegas-styled pregame show and theatrics, the city of Las Vegas was shattered on the evening of October 1, 2017 by an unspeakable tragedy: a man with a near-automatic rifle in the Mandalay Bay Hotel opened fire at a field below where thousands of music fans were attending the Route 91 Harvest Festival. The ensuring massacre killed 58 people and wounded nearly 500 others.

The Golden Knights had to confront this horrific event and to help heal their grieving home city. They went on to win their first home game, beginning a streak that earned them the auspicious title of the first team in NHL history to start an inaugural season winning eight of their first nine games. It was the first of many records the Golden Knights would break as the team. Defying expectations, the Golden Knights finished their season with 51 wins, becoming the first modern-era expansion team from any of the four major sports leagues and the first NHL team since the 1926-27 to win their division in their inaugural season. The team ultimately made it to the Stanley Cup Finals where they faced the McPhee’s former team, the Washington Capitals.

In one of the greatest Cinderella stories in the history of the NHL, the 2017-18 Vegas Golden Knights enthralled the hockey world with their historic performance while capturing the hearts of the people of Las Vegas and forging an indomitable connection between the team and its city.

#VegasStrong: The Making of VALIANT

Producer Virgil Price, a life long hockey fan, was talking to a friend about the Stanley Cup finals between the Washington Capitals and Vegas Golden Knights that were then occurring in May 2018. “My friend suggested that I make a movie about the Golden Knights,” remembers Price, who took the idea to heart very quickly. “It immediately made a lot of sense to me.”

It wasn’t the Golden Knights gameplay that intrigued Price but rather the whole Golden Knights story. The Golden Knights had the most successful inaugural season for an expansion team in the history of U.S. professional sports. But, they were also part of a community that suffered worst mass shooting in U.S. history. The tragedy unfolded in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, when a man with a near-automatic rifle in the Mandalay Bay Hotel opened fire at a field below where thousands of music fans were attending the Route 91 Harvest Festival, killing 58 people and wounding nearly 500 others. It occurred only days before the scheduled Golden Knights’ home opener.

“The story of the team and its origins and the year they had following the tragedy— with the community of Vegas, all two million people, coming together, with the team supporting the community after that horrible night—I knew it was the kind of message that I wanted to share,” says Price.

Price contacted Eugene “Boo” Corrigan, director of Athletics at West , where Golden Knights owner Bill Foley had graduated in 1967. (West Point’s Black Knights football team provided the inspiration for Foley naming his team the “Golden Knights”). Corrigan loved the idea and arranged a phone between Price and Foley. After speaking with him for less than an hour, Price had a signed commitment from Foley to work with Price’s Sterling Productions to produce a film on the Golden Knights.

Even before the Stanley Cup Finals were finished on June 7, Price approached and secured his previous collaborators, writer/director Cruz Angeles and producer James Lawler, to be a part of the project. Price had previously worked with them as the producer of “Fernando Nation,” a 2010 installment of ESPN’s sports documentary show 30 for 30 on Mexican-born pitching sensation Fernando Valenzuela, which was co-produced by James Lawler of full-service production studio Osmosis Films and written and directed by Cruz Angeles. Along with 30 for 30, the three had also worked together in a similar capacity on Cruz’s Don’t Let Me Drown, the filmmaker’s 2009 feature film directorial debut.

“I had no clue about hockey or who was in the Stanley Cup Finals, but the story of the team combined with the shooting—it didn’t feel good at first,” remembers Angeles. “But then I read the tweets during the last game of the Stanley Cup, and I saw that regular folks were tweeting about it, talking about how the whole town came together, and I realized what we had was more than just a movie about sports.”

Angeles got on board, as did Lawler and Osmosis Films, who immediately went into pre-production and took on all the logistics, including development and research, managing the budget, communicating with the team, and provided line producers and the creative people necessary to begin production in late July.

The Osmosis team began scheduling interviews with nearly 50 subjects whose insights and comments would fuel the film’s narrative, including Golden Knights players and staff, sports analysts and broadcast personalities, Las Vegas residents, law officers and first responders to the tragedy and more. Osmosis’s research department also began the weighty task of compiling footage and other media materials.

“One of the hardest parts was sourcing all the media—we’re basically trained to tell a story that we didn’t have first-person access to,” says Lawler. “Our job was to re- create the drama and excitement of that year through material that other people had .”

Meanwhile, Price negotiated with the NHL for Golden Knights game footage (“You can’t make a hockey film without hockey footage, right?”). The NHL ultimately became a partner in the film and discounted its archival materials.

“NHL Original Productions was a great partner in terms of the material—all that amazing game footage of the entire season was them,” says Lawler. “We sourced all the other material through a number of other partners. It was quite a major process to aggregate that and sift through it.”

“We have a group of producers and researchers who supported Cruz during the entire process,” he added.

In late July, Angeles, Price and the production team headed to Las Vegas for what would be the first of four trips to conduct the interviews. They sat down with 26 people on that first trip to Vegas, which represented nearly half of the subjects on the schedule. Next, the filmmakers traveled to Montreal and Quebec in Canada to speak with Golden Knights star player Marc-André Fleury (a three-time Stanley Cup champion goalie and future Hall of Famer) and other players on the team. Finally, they went to Montana to speak with Bill Foley, meeting with him several times— once on his ranch, where they captured footage of him fishing.

“Bill Foley told us that it was important to create a culture within the Golden Knights organization that would fit into the community—he wasn’t just going to spend all that money without making a team that the community could be proud of,” says Angeles. “[We learned] that it was always part of the plan, and it intensified when the tragedy happened. Vegas is often seen as a disjointed or transient place, but after October 1, they needed something to bring them together and raise up their spirits, and the Golden Knights were definitely part of that.”

The filmmakers made a fourth and final trip to Vegas in September for a handful of additional interview and pick-ups, which wrapped up the film’s ten-week production schedule.

Editing began in the fall, led by principal editor Malcolm Hearn of Osmosis Films and along with two associate editors. Though the film was initially focused on Bill Foley and the Knights’ remarkable season, it was clear that story was as much about the relationship between the team and its city.

“There was a sort of love story between the two and there was the hockey story on top of that, and it was all very connected,” says Lawler. “It was a realization that may have started as an inkling at the beginning, but we all realized it more and more as we moved forward with the interviews. So, we ended up pivoting from the initial focus.”

Editing continued for some five months and wrapped in the spring of 2019.

As the film neared completion, it was executive producer Price who came up with its title.

“You always have a plot and the main plot here was Bill Foley’s gamble on a team and the success of the Golden Knights,” he says. “The second plot, on the team and community healing together, is, to me, much more profound and it’s something the entire country needs—not just Las Vegas. What we saw was a moment in time where you can see the best of everyone. It was proud and it was strong and it was something that deserves to be called VALIANT.”

FILMMAKERS’ BIOGRAPHIES

CRUZ ANGELES – DIRECTOR/WRITER

Brooklyn-based filmmaker Cruz Angeles received an MFA from New York University’s film school.

Cruz’s first short film, 2001’s Abuela’s Revolt about a Mexican grandmother raising her grandson in the U.S., won a Best Latino Student Director award from the Director’s Guild of America.

In 2009, he helmed his directorial debut feature, Don’t Let Me Drown, a love story between two young Latinos set just after the events of 9/11. In competition for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, the film garnered a Gotham Awards nod for Best Breakthrough Director and won the Lee Marvin Best Feature Narrative at the Woodstock Film Festival, as well as the Audience Award at both the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Florida Film Festival.

Over the last several years, Cruz directed and produced a number of installments of the Investigation Discovery television series, including Murder Castle, The Mind of a Murderer, I, Witness, Deadly Devotion and the Emmy Award-winning A Crime to Remember. His past TV work includes directing an episode of ABC's Final Witness, the 2015 NBA All-Star Saturday Night Open and the Sprite Slam-Dunk profiles, which aired on TNT, and the 2010 sports doc "Fernando Nation," for ESPN’s Emmy nominated and Peabody Award winning 30 for 30 documentary series.

Cruz is a Sundance Institute Screenwriting and Directing Fellow, a recipient of the NHK/Sundance International Filmmakers Award and a United States Artists Fellow.

VIRGIL PRICE – EXECUTIVE PRODUCER/PRODUCER

Virgil Price is the founder and owner of Sterling Productions. He has executive produced such films as Don’t Let Me Drown (2009) and Lovely, Still (2008) starring Martin Landau and Ellen Burstyn, which he also produced. Virgil was the producer of “Fernando Nation,” an installment in ESPN’s sports documentary series 30 for 30 about legendary pitcher Fernando Valenzuela JAMES LAWLER – PRODUCER

A graduate of Harvard College, James Lawler is the CEO of Brooklyn-based Osmosis Films, which he founded in 2010, and has produced numerous projects for a variety of platforms, including documentary films, narrative features, theater, and television. Most notably, he produced the 2010 documentary The Lottery, about charter schools and the public school system and, the same year’s “Fernando Nation” installment for ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, directed by Cruz Angeles. He also produced the features Don’t Let Me Drown (2009), also directed by Cruz Angeles, and Lovely, Still (2008).

PRODUCTION COMPANIES

Sterling Productions

Sterling Productions was founded by producer Virgil Price in 2007. Prior to VALIANT, its productions include the feature films Lovely, Still (2008) and Don’t Let Me Drown (2009) and the ESPN series 30 for 30 installment “Fernando Nation.”

Osmosis Films

Based in Brooklyn, New York, Osmosis Films is a full-service creative strategy and production studio that brings stories to life through video, 2D and 3D animation, feature films, infographics and interactive media.

NHL Original Productions

NHL Original Productions is the in-house production arm of the National Hockey League, focused on documenting, preserving and promoting the game of hockey. Established in 2011, NHL Original Productions develops long- and short-form hockey programming and other original content for use by the League’s media platforms (NHL Network and NHL.com), as well as national and regional rights-holders.

PRINCIPAL PRODUCTION TEAM

Director/Writer Cruz ANGELES Executive Producer Virgil PRICE Producer James LAWLER Co-Producer Zachary RUSSO Cinematographer Axel BAUMANN Editor Malcolm HEARN Associate Editor Ann YAO Music Composer/Performer Michael LEVEY

THIS FILM IS DEDICATED TO THE VICTIMS OF THE SHOOTING OF 10.1.2017, THEIR FAMILIES, THEIR FRIENDS, AND THE HEROIC FIRST RESPONDERS.

WE SALUTE THE VEGAS GOLDEN KNIGHTS AND THE COMMUNITY OF LAS VEGAS FOR COMING TOGETHER IN THE FACE OF TRAGEDY.