Surviving Ohio State is an HBO Original that tells the story of the male victims of Dr. Richard Strauss, a sports medicine physician and serial sex abuser employed by the university from 1978 to 1998. The documentary was directed and produced by Oscar- and Emmy-winning filmmaker Eva Orner and is streaming on Max.
Charlie Oliver helped edited the project, and says he was initially brought in at the request of the producers and network to provide a fresh set of eyes on the initial cut.
"What was immediately apparent to me was that this story, however told, was stunning, in the most gut-punching possible sense," says Oliver. "And, tragically, in a familiar sense as well; thousands of young university athletes had been sexually abused over decades by a team doctor. And so, as I watched the film as it had been previously cut, I never once wondered about the story and its depth. But I became more and more interested in the fact that this story was very different from others. The victims here were all young men and, incredibly, the adults around them, the ones that were supposed to take care of them, knew very well who this doctor was and what his proclivities were. These boys’ coaches knew, their school administrators were routinely informed, other doctors knew. I mean the full gamut of trusted authority figures who made up these boys’ lives knew, and they did nothing."
Oliver says the story resonated with him and he knew he wanted to be involved in its editing process.
"This documentary is a mix of timelines," he shares. "You have a line that follows these athletes as they recount their wrestling careers in roughly the 1980s and 1990s, and you have a timeline that follows their journeys decades later as they finally begin coming forward in the wake of the Larry Nassar gymnast trial. But, beyond those lines, you also have these incredibly powerful interviews that the director Eva Orner had captured. It’s hard to get across how special these interviews are. These athletes came to trust her, and they let her in. You have to understand that one, these are big guys, wrestlers, hockey players, gladiators essentially, largely from the Midwest, I mean these dudes are steeped in guy code. And each one of them had been systematically betrayed by those they most trusted."
The athletes describing their abuse, says Oliver, is somewhat cathartic and he wanted to give that footage the space he felt it deserved.
"I told everyone from Smokehouse, George Clooney’s and Grant Haslov’s company, and 101 Studios, David Glasser’s production studio, and Eva, that I thought the film could really shine powerfully if it were reconceived and re-told with all of that in mind," he recalls. "And I told them that doing so would extend post production by quite a bit. Accounting wasn’t thrilled, but George, Grant, David, and Eva all wanted to do it. Varying aspects of all of that is what had pulled them to this story in the first place."
Editor Charlie Oliver
The documentary was initially cut in Adobe Premiere, and Oliver, along with his assistant Michael Safarian, agreed to continue it as a Premiere project.
"I honestly really like the Adobe universe, especially for big archival docs," Oliver shares. "This is a film made up of so many disparate assets: 4K interviews and B-roll, recreations, and a slew of archival that spans film, VHS, beta, 16mm, you name it. I'm not such a techy, and I find Premiere to be a really user-friendly platform for handling that kind of variety of source materials."
Beyond Premiere, Oliver used the Freeform app to lay out cards on his computer, as well as Scrivener to create cards as well.
"In addition, I use Scrivener to build out outlines into more descriptive detail," he notes. "I'm also someone who has to have a bunch of big cumbersome white boards in the studio to get up and jot outlines and ideas down."
From the beginning, Oliver says he considered the film's pacing as a means of communicating the underlying story.
"Like a lot of editors, I come from a musical background, and so I’ll often think of films more in musical composition forms than in classic dramatic terms. As far as a film’s overall pacing and composition, I often look to classical music, symphonies in particular. It’s not necessarily my typical go-to music, and this often has nothing at all to do with the actual score, but symphonic composition helps me with structural approach."
Oliver says there were several key areas of the story that he felt could and should develop dramatically in order to convey the story’s horror. One was the sheer scale of this doctor’s abuse on the athletes - an open secret within the university. Another was the victims and how their perspectives evolved throughout their lives. He also watched Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight about the abuse by members of the Catholic Church, and found inspiration there.
"Taking a page out of Spotlight, I looked to anchor this sprawling story in one character, which in Surviving Ohio State is Dan. Then through Dan we’ll meet our co-protagonist, his best friend and teammate Mike. From there that friendship will be a spine through the story’s telling. On that of course would come the many other survivors’ stories, but those two, Dan and Mike, drove the turns."