Chutin’ The Bull
Jen Scoville interviewed documentary filmmakers Harry Lynch and Jeff Fraley.
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Ranch: Tell me a little bit about the unknown guy, Ronnie Kitchens, who in the film wins the big money at the finals. You didn’t expect that, did you? I could tell because you guys didn’t follow him like you did the other riders, there were no setup interviews with him.
JF: We regret that. We literally did meet him in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, and I said to Harry: “Look, there’s a kid going out to watch the bull riders.” And then we’re in Las Vegas and with Troy Dunn who says “come on mates, come with us,” cause we had all this gear and they were getting free rides to the MGM Grand, and he points to this kid and says “and you too,” and we ask him “who are you?” and he says “I’m Ronnie Kitchens.” He made it by injury, which means riders were hurt so he got in.
HL: They take 45 riders, but 4 were injured, so they pull guys up from the lower ranks and he was one of the relief guys.
JF: He said to us, “Do you know they’re paying me $5,000 just to be here? And they’re paying for my room…and we get to ride in a limo.”
Ranch: How old is he?
JF: He was 19 or 20 then. We ruined his limo experience because we had so much equipment they had to get a van. We regret not interviewing him then, we were going to get the rookie point of view. He came right out of nowhere.
Ranch: The finals are a pretty fast sequence in the film. You really only show everyone getting there, Tuff Hedeman’s defeat, and a couple of other incidents. What is the momentum like at the event? How long does it last?
HL: There are 4 performances in 3 days. All 45 riders ride in each performance. The first three have just one round each. In the last round everyone rides and then the top ten guys go on to ride again.
JF: Ronnie’s advance wasn’t spectacular. Basically to be in the money you have to ride all 5 bulls—just like they recruited the top 45 athletes, they recruited the top bulls all year. It came down to he and Adriano Moraes, who had one of the most amazing rides I’ve ever seen. Adriano, hands down, is the best bull rider living. He’s amazing. But Ronnie just stayed around. He kept making the rides.
HL: All the rides are scored, and he became like a consistent batter in baseball. He’s not always going to get home runs but he’s always going to get hits. Ronnie was scoring 79, 82, 83, and we were always watching him cause we liked him. But generally he wasn’t scoring high enough to go anywhere unless he rode all five bulls. So he was kind of in the middle of the pack, but as he continued to ride, other people were falling by the wayside. As soon as you don’t ride one bull you know you’re pretty much out of it. It became more and more likely that he was going to be the guy to ride all five.
JF: It was unbelievable. I mean, we were so personally excited. You can actually see—it’s in a TNN shot—Harry and I in the back saying, yeah. He was such a likable kid, and we watched him round by round emerge as a star there. And by the end you could tell that this guy had practiced his victory speech in his living room or in his back yard hundreds of times.
HL: You had said it was kind of a surprise, but actually we had a lot more footage of him that we didn’t include. In the edit we tried to carefully balance the amount that you could see him, and remember that he’s there, and see his number, but we wouldn’t give it away. Because if we showed too much the audience would think “there’s that kid again, he’s gotta win.” We wanted him in there just enough so his win would seem like poetic justice.
JF: Do you know the other Ronnie story?
Ranch: No.
JF: The kid was born to ride. His mother won the State Bull Riding Championship competing against boys when she was 16 years old. And she was 3 months pregnant with Ronnie. Ronnie was in the womb winning buckles.
Ranch: I guess women riders would constitute a whole different documentary?
HL: We interviewed a woman and tried to fit it in. It made it in an earlier edit, but it happened at bull school and it interrupted the momentum we were trying to get with Jeff riding and we had to drop it out. There’s a women’s professional rodeo circuit, but they ride with both hands, and this woman didn’t ride with that professional circuit. She rode with one hand—she was tough.
JF: And she was good looking. All the guys just loved her.
“Bodacious is going to be on country music radio and on rock’n’roll television. You won’t be able to be online without seeing him.” —Bob Tallman, Bodacious’ marketing manager
Ranch: I had no idea the bulls are so revered.
HL: Like Jeff was saying, they watch these bulls all year around. The PBR has 18 events all year before the finals. So they tally all the scores of all the bulls as they go through the events. The bull is scored as well as the rider. And every time a rider rides he’s going to be ranked between 1-100, and the bull gets half of that rating. After tallying the numbers they can figure out which bulls are hardest to ride and those are the ones they bring to the finals.
Ranch: Where do they come from?
HL: Most are not purebreds, most purebreds are used for food. These great bucking animals are crossbred, which seems to make them particularly athletic. Bodacious is half charolais, a type of huge blonde French beef cattle, one-quarter Brahma, and one-quarter Hereford.
Ranch: Did either of you have any prior filmmaking experience?
JF: Harry produced TV commercials and I had a theater background. How that translates I really don’t know. We had to learn a lot.
HL: I’d handled a camera before, as sort of a hobbyist. So learning about the camera—composing shots, focusing fast, holding the camera steady—that stuff was almost second nature when we started. But all the other stuff as far as production, pre-production and post-production goes, we read up on it. We probably checked out 10 books from the library and went from there.
JF: The one week film school…
HL: And we called people around Austin who were really great: George Ratliff, Layton Blaylock, Vance Homes, Fred Miller, all people who are accomplished filmmakers. We invited them out to lunch so they would tell us what they knew. I remember we went to lunch with George [Ratliff] pretty early on and after awhile he just said, “You guys don’t know anything do you?”
JF: Half of it was not pretending that we knew what we were doing.
Ranch: What kind of obstacles were you up against as first-time filmmakers and how did you compensate for your lack of experience?
JF: We tried to safeguard by over-preparing in a lot of ways. We had hours and hours of strategic meetings all the way through the editing process. We overthought everything but that was probably what has made it a success.You can’t afford not to plan things out, particularly if you’re a first-time filmmaker.
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