Courier Journal Article

Saturday’s edition of the Courier Journal featured a great article in print and online about Red V. Blue. The story includes interviews with director Rory Owen Delaney and producer Wade Smith. Read all about it below!

Documentary captures universities of Kentucky and Louisville in title seasons
by Adam Himmelsbach

Rory Delaney is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker whose connection to his hometown of Louisville has endured despite the distance. He loves U of L basketball, detests UK, and feels at home when he meets someone with similar tastes.

So imagine his concern, then, when he was aboard a small prop plane in 2008, flying above swaths of contaminated wasteland for his documentary “Toxic Soup,” when he realized his pilot was a diehard Wildcats fan. He held on a little tighter and smiled a little harder, but ultimately he and Paintsville native Wade Smith forged a friendship that was hatched by the glaring polarity.

Smith, in addition to flying U of L fans over contamination zones, was also a film producer. The two stayed in touch, and each fall, as the annual U of L-UK basketball game approached, they’d fire off a flurry of text messages to each other, their jabs both playful and sharp.

In 2009, of course, first-year UK coach John Calipari started off a string of four consecutive wins against Cardinals coach Rick Pitino.

It was a crafty way to shift the focus from Louisville’s losses, but it was also a logical question. Delaney had tired of the incessant attention paid to the comparably sterile Duke-North Carolina rivalry, and he thought the nation deserved to know more about the Commonwealth’s simmering feud.

And so two years, two national championships, and too many barroom debates later, Delaney and Smith’s labor of love, “The Rivalry: Red V. Blue” is nearing completion.

To read the rest of the article, go here. To back our kickstarter campaign, click here.