Ateam of extraordinary editors banded together amidst a global pandemic to create a one-of-a-kind sports documentary using unprecedented access to Earvin “Magic” Johnson and a deep dive into archival footage spanning multiple decades of his life. They Call Me Magic, the Apple TV+ fourpart miniseries that premiered this spring was edited by Derek Doneen, Wes Lipman, Salman Syed, Dirk Westervelt, ACE, Monique Zavistovski, ACE, and Will Znidaric, ACE.

For Syed, it was a thrill to be asked to craft a project about the cultural icon and Los Angeles Lakers legend. “I’m a lifelong Laker fan and I had always wanted to do something like this,” he says. “I was lucky because I had met Dirk [Westervelt] and Rick Famuyiwa [who directed the series] like 10 years ago and then lost touch. I reconnected with Dirk in 2019 and became Facebook friends in 2020 [the year the Lakers won the NBA finals]. … He saw I was posting a lot about the Lakers so he
literally sent me a Facebook message saying, ‘Hey I’m gonna do a docuseries and I know you’re into basketball so let’s chat.’”

The miniseries features multiple intimate interviews withMagic Johnson, his wife Cookie, his family, NBA all-stars and archival footage that spans Magic’s life from his time as a child in Lansing, Michigan, through his meteoric rise as an NBA legend, entrepreneur and activist. “Rick had a personal relationship with Magic and it was super important for Magic to work with a director that he trusts implicitly. This was a huge project. It’s the life story of Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson,” Zavistovski explains.

“Rick just unified the whole project. The public thinks they know who Magic Johnson is, but he’s got his private persona and his public persona. And the vision
of the piece is to really be able to dig deeper and discover each chapter of his life.” This dichotomy of the two personas (Earvin vs. Magic) became the source of story conflict that the editorial team leaned into in order to corral all of this footage into a unifying theme. “One thing that I think we found challenging in telling Magic’s
story is just that he was so good at [what] he was trying to do.

He made obstacles seem insignificant, and that’s not always the most interesting story, right?” Westervelt notes. In order to create that drama and conflict, Doneen describes how the team had to focus on visual storytelling and expand beyond the interview transcripts. “Often as doc editors we live in the transcripts because we’re looking for things we want people to say to paint a picture and tell a story. I think often though, it’s what is in between the lines or what is not said that speaks volumes.” One particular part where this is true is the opening of the miniseries. It features rare footage of Magic

Johnson at a Michigan State press conference announcing that he will be going pro after winning the NCAA Men’s Basketball National Championship. After spending months of searching, the video was unearthed by lead assistant editor Kevin Otte who discovered it in a Michigan State Jenison Fieldhouse historical film. “I find that true in that [Michigan State] press conference. …There’s so much storytelling happening between the actual words that he’s saying. It’s the way he laughs nervously and looks around and talks about the weather,” Doneen explains.

“It’s those human moments that might say struggle or might say tension. That’s what differentiates the work that we do from what’s on the page or in a podcast. We lean on the visual story.

Finding that struggle and that humanity is looking sometimes for those moments in between that aren’t so obvious.” Due to the large amount of archival footage and the scale of the project, this team of editors really came to rely on each other both creatively and emotionally. As Znidaric (tasked with supervising editor duties) describes, “Part of my role was to take the 30,000-foot view and keep everybody talking. I helped unify the editing language across the series and make sure we were planting, setting up, paying off, establishing motifs and just keeping everyone working together. We were disconnected from each other which made it challenging.”

Despite the whole team only meeting in person once during the editorial process, the communication was constant. “I think it’s always key to check in with people. I would certainly call Monique. We found that [Episodes] 1 and 4 often mirrored each other because you were starting up the big themes aswell as having to close them down or resolve them,” Lipman recalls. “I’m a huge vérité fan. So when addressing an archive documentary like this, it quickly became apparent I needed to go deep into the archive. …I think in talking with Derek too, there [were] some amazing sections where we were allowed to sit on the archive and let it play. And in that way, repurpose it for our own kind of emotion that the show needed at different points.”

As the team looks back at the work, it’s evident that the enthusiasm of Magic Johnson did rub off on them. “He [Magic] is such an optimist and that’s such an editing philosophy of mine,” Znidaric exclaims. “It’s such an embodiment of what it’s like to be a successful doc editor. You’ve gotta be an optimist.

There’s always a solution, no matter what. Even if it’s a black screen with VO that you’ve recorded on the street. And that will keep you going when it gets tough. If you start feeling like there might not be a way to cut this, you’re just going to drown.”This optimist approach helped this team not only craft a sports documentary, but something they hoped would go beyond basketball and the Lakers.

“It was interesting to me the way his [Magic’s] life just took him to these key junctures in the history of the U.S. over the last several decades,” Westervelt observes. As the team emphasized through their archival search, Magic Johnson grew up near Malcom X and was part of the first generation of basketball players to be dealing with race relations in the midst of the fledgling NBA. “The thing that surprised me, and the younger generation of viewers, is before Magic was drafted the NBA was on life support,” Zavistovski notes. “I took for granted the NBA was always this incredible, huge, money-making organization.

It was shocking to see the extent to which the NBA was on the verge of folding.” Magic’s journey would take him beyond basketball to the inner city after the Los Angeles Riots and the AIDS epidemic with his HIV-diagnosis announcement. “I just never quite put it together [until this documentary] how much he [Magic] is this figure that swims in the current of recent American history,” Westervelt recognizes.

As the team reminisces about their feelings from this experience, Doneen sums up their collective thoughts: “I think at the end of the day, we aim to tell stories about people that might make the audience think a little bit more about their own lives and about the world around them. I’m proud that we didn’t just tell a basketball story. We told a human story that I think you don’t even need to be a sports fan to appreciate.