By now, you’ve seen pictures from the event and you probably caught some of the behind the scenes making of the event. Here’s the full recap of the most magical event we’ve ever done.
In 2024, the Vols won a national championship. Coach Tony Vitello’s dad gave an interview. We began referencing that interview as proof that movies are important. For example, it is referenced in this blog.
Watch the clip with Greg Vitello here. We sent a copy of the letter we are reading to him.
In the complicated landscape of NIL, I wasn’t sure where to start bringing this idea to life. Initially, the thought was celebrating the team. Inviting them, privately, to have a movie night with each other. So, I approached one of the support staff with the general pitch of “Hey, so, my dad and I both went to UT and would love to host you guys for a movie night.” Maybe I should have included some more details, but from personal experience, I have found that keeping it short is usually best. Details can be shared if there’s an interest. I got a “Sounds great. Let me talk to coach and get back to you.” Now. That was the end of that. I don’t know if this guy ran into Tony’s office and said “Can we go to the movies?” without any context and Tony looked up, buried at his desk, side eyed the guy and gave him the same look I give my staff when they want to do weird things…
My hope was that the team would come for a movie, have a great time, and then love the idea of doing it with the public. The disadvantage I have is that none of these people know me or what the Palace is capable of doing. I’ve seen some of the things “celebrities” get asked to do and I can see why there’s a cause for concern, but I knew this would be different. I just needed to get to the right people. But WHO ARE THE RIGHT PEOPLE?! By this point, it is December 2024. I send a followup message “let us know if there’s anything we can do to help make this happen. We would still love to host you guys!” Thinking if it was something like getting them there, we could find a way to bus them down…
While I knew we had the opportunity to use this as a fundraiser, I didn’t want to set all the details and that be the deciding factor. I reached out to everyone & started playing 6 degrees of Tony Vitello. But I didn’t really need to get to Tony Vitello…. I needed to figure out what this event needed to look like. My hope was by asking “Can you get me to Tony Vitello?” I’d get to someone in the circle with answers. (In hindsight, being a 40 year old female added an element of challenge to this request)
Would a fundraiser for the team work? What about through the UT Scholarship fund? Where do we start cossing lines into it looking like an official event? Would inviting them to come watch a movie plus sign autographs take up for time than they are allowed to spend at an appearance? Can I invite the whole program? How does the NIL come into play if some of the team just watch movies with people?
Look… this rabbit hole was deep.
One week in April, I started hearing the voice in a cornfield. It started with a dream Monday night. It was a combo movie theater/baseball game situation. Tony and I were sitting on the couch looking at a magazine (maybe the Torchbearer issue that had been on my desk for months?) and I asked a coworker to bring me one of the things they were putting away. It was some sort of elephant thing. The next day, I was telling a friend about the dream and she says “we just have to get you to a game.” She pulled up the schedule and said “looks like we have to go to Alabama.” On the drive home, it hit me… elephant… Alabama. Alabama’s mascot is an elephant. Wednesday, I received a text from a college friend asking about going to a game. I told her I could make any game work and to get tickets for whatever made sense. She gave me a date. When I later looked at the schedule… it was for Auburn. Auburn is in Alabama… Thursday of that week, I bought.a Kendra Scott necklace with a baseball. I said I would wear it every day until the event happened. Friday, at work, I googled Field of Dreams and somehow ended up on an article about Ken Griffey Jr. at the Field of Dreams field asking his dad to have a catch. I decided to go home and watch Field of Dreams. If I was going to throw an event around it, seeing it would help with the details. It was eerie… the connections. You can see some of them here.
I decided to start doing something every single day that would benefit the event or make it happen. Sometimes, it was big, like finding a new person to contact. Sometimes, I dropped hints on Facebook- asking for favorite baseball movies.
In May, I went to the baseball game with a thank you note attached to a Movie Palace gift card for the assistant I had spoken with earlier. Having exhausted dozens of other approaches, I thought that maybe if he came to the theater on his own, he would see that we are a real place. I also gave him a note for Coach that simply said “Hope someone has asked how YOU are today. sending good vibes from Athens Movie Palace.” With the idea that if a proposal went across his desk, it wouldn’t be the first time he was seeing “Athens Movie Palace.”
Back at my seat, heart pounding, I was somewhat terrified that I would get escorted out for stalking. (Even though all three of us at that game together were licensed attorneys) I had to keep reminding myself that while this event was ALL I talked about and I had made countless attempts to contact these elusive “right people” …. unless all of these people were talking to each other about this… no one knew. My messages were singular and professional. I wasn’t sending endless messages after I was told No.
The problem was…. I wasn’t being told No. I felt like I had to keep going until I was given “No, because…” that I couldn’t work around. (At that game, TV was tossed and my biggest fear was he would see that message after it happened and it would inflame him)
A couple days after that game, a whole fluke of events transpired… we are talking voice in a cornfield type coincidence…. someone threw a first pitch… when I looked up the person, I found a small podcast talking about the team being involved in community events… (I was going to link that podcast, but I can’t even find what it was now). The podcast was pre-covid (and pre NIL) but it gave me an idea to contact some people who had served in different capacities with the team over the years.
Part of my email read: How could we go about hosting a movie screening for the public where they would watch a movie with the team? There are licensing obstacles we would need to address with the studios, but the thought would be baseball movies with team members scattered in the audience? We could have them talk for a couple minutes about a movie that stuck with them.
I received responses within 48 hours. The first one said I am going to pass along the information. I think this could be a great idea in the fall!
It’s May. While I was excited… this felt like another obstacle. It’s being passed along, but to who? Will that person contact me? How will I follow up to push things along? Fall was what we were thinking, too, but we are entering post season baseball time… if the team wins again… will this get lost? Is my timing all wrong?
The second response was much more concrete. Thank you very much for reaching out. That sounds like a very fun idea that could benefit everyone involved! Are you available for a phone call next week? I would love to brainstorm some more to make this work!
Done. This was May 7th. We had a great call May 10th. The general sentiment was that this was 100% possible. I had asked about Tony serving popcorn but there was concern this could be outside his skill set and it was suggested that he put ice in cups instead. I didn’t have any reason to think this wasn’t going to happen.
The next few weeks were so emotional. What if this person wasn’t as influential as he said? What if I was being catfished? There was a lot of fight to remain calm and have faith that everything was fine. I tried to stay focused by working on the event details. Luckily, when it comes to these things, I see the event in its entirety. It’s not just an idea, so I was already thinking ahead to the flow of people, how we’d structure the day, decorations, etc.
At some point in this process, I had written in my planner. I keep a section with “events” listed for the theater. I wrote BaseVol Movie in September. The date we decided on was 9/7. So when I went to write it down… it was already there.
Baseball became my entire personality. We wouldn’t know what players were coming until later in the summer after the draft and the transfer portal closed. I began the process of recruiting experts to help with the details. I might be able to see the event, but I cannot build things. I commissioned a set of bleachers to look like the ones in Field of Dreams. We planted and cared for corn.
I knew we didn’t want this to feel like a generic signing where you hand a player something over a table and it’s very stiff. We created personalized backdrops for the players so they’d each have their own area in the auditoriums. You’re watching movies with the players… everything needed to reflect the theme of this event. Celebrating the way movies and baseball bring us together.
With the recruiting schedule, we couldn’t know if Tony would be able to make it until much closer to the event. It wasn’t going to change much about the event fundamentally, but we would have incorporated him in a way that added to the atmosphere, not distracted. I wanted everyone to feel like it was worth their time so we started working on the details. The general vision for the event had always been the same since the beginning and can be viewed here.
The memories were going to stick with people. The photo ops we created would add to the ambience and celebrate this special moment. I sat with these details for so long, I can’t even remember a time where this wasn’t always the plan. The Sandlot fence we had for photos started as a text to a friend on May 20. “So. I’m thinking I’ll need a sandlot fence for photos. Do you have any suggestions on how to make this a thing.” After receiving confirmation (“That there’s some good cardboard.”) that I had acquired the supplies, Stef and her art degree led the effort to create the fence. Watch it come to life. We even had a friend build us a dugout fence so we could take photos with a Daddy hat and fur coat. (the team’s homerun celebration)
We started creating activities that would add to the experience. There were a couple I was particularly excited about. The Pencil Talk Fan Mail Center and the autograph training. Originally, we were hoping someone like Kirby could teach kids how to give their own autographs. We were able to announce Evan Russell.
When I got the list of players who would be attending, my friend Ben was still fanboying about Evan. I was excited about the timing of this event. It was before the season starts, and with so much of the team changing (mostly because Tony Vitello is single handedly supplying the MLB with draft picks) we don’t know who the “big names” will be. Every single one of these guys could be the ones making the big plays. All of them had already done that in the previous season. This player highlight post was one of our favorites. I was really excited about our announcement video. Bringing Hollywood stars and the TN Tri-Star together. Maybe It was the length, or the algorithm, but It didn’t get the attention I had hoped. Watch it here. That made me a little nervous. Ticket sales had not been as high as I had expected. We did sell 25 more MVP tickets than planned and those sold out before players were named. I had hoped we’d sell 300-400 regular tickets. I knew the audience was there, but this was an incredibly difficult event to market.
I get it. A sports signing at a movie theater? What? People were skeptical. I even ventured on to TikTok. We had less than 30 followers. Mostly my friends because the account was connected to my phone number. But, this one video, taking about the event received 18,000 views and lots of interaction. I was hopeful it was reaching the right peo0ple.
We kept building on the idea of this being a core memory so we brought in some items for souvenirs. See some of them here. The staff got jerseys to wear for the event, but we liked them so much, we wore them in the weeks leading up to 9/7.
In an effort to create more connection between baseball and movies, we reached out to Chinook Seedery… The official seed of USA Baseball. In another serendipitous sequence of events, one of the guys with the Texas based company had actually been to the Palace! Tell me this event wasn’t meant to be!!!!
Our team helped keep the social media momentum up by participating in random videos. This Is one of our favorites.
Our extended team stepped up in the days leading up to the event. Friends came from out of town. In Town friends helped me dig myself out of the stacks of supplies in my office and created the perfect backdrop for the professional photos.
The morning of 9/7 was weird. I got to the Palace early to have a few moments to print some things and gather my thoughts. I felt sad. It was over. This event had been living in my brain for more than a year. While I often said it was an elaborate scheme to meet the coach… this was about more than that. The world has been so heavy and hard. Our jobs are stressful.
Personally, I spend a lot of time feeling like an object. I’m not a person. I’m the movie theater. My phone does ring a lot and it gives you the illusion that people care about you, but the majority of the communication is people who never speak to ME asking for theater things. When “I” give them an answer they don’t like, they decide they don’t like ME… even if it was the theater that answered the question. It’s a weird space to exist in. This event was an escape. A place we could all exist in for a couple of hours.
I think the stuff I deal with made me more protective of the team. I wanted them to know they were not expected to do anything that made them uncomfortable. If being “out” in the open with people was too much, we could get tables. If there were too many people at once, we could slow them down. If someone asked too much of them, we had “adults” handy to step in. I didn’t want them to feel like they were only useful to us because they were UT baseball players. This event was FOR them as much as it was ABOUT them. I baked them and our volunteers cookies… they could get snacks for the movies. It was supposed to be a fun day.
We had planned several special touches to again add to that memory making. Before the movie started, we had a paper rock scissors (Yes, I know that’s not right. I will die on this hill. Paper Rock Scissors makes more sense.) You can watch Evan showcase his competitive spirit here. But also, look at this album to see some special moments like before we started- one of the kids walked up to the players and challenged them to paper rock scissors. Tegan takes him on.
We also planned to have someone throw out a first pitch to start the movie. As with anything new, you can have an idea, but in practice, it not be what you had hoped. This was not the case with the pitch. It ended up being more special than we could have expected. Evan had suggested letting the fastest pitch from the radar gun outside throw the ball. When I saw who the fastest was, I knew we had to do that. Ethan is a huge Vol Baseball fan. In 2024, he had spontaneously driven to Omaha for a game and then home for work the next day. Look it up… it’s really far. I knew this would be a really cool moment for him. Especially, throwing to Evan. Watch the moment.
The most unexpected moment of the day was during the first session. This video explains, but essentially. I asked a player to toss a ball to have something to write down on our scoreboard. When the pitcher jumped at the chance, I immediately wished we had an adult from the team to tell me it was okay. After throwing only 91 (ha!), Tegan asks to throw again. Cody tells him no… that we can’t have him blow his arm up here. I’m screaming in the background that I will never meet Tony Vitello if we hurt his pitcher. He threw anyway, hitting 98. I planned to keep this quiet, knowing that the team would see our social media. However, Tegan shared some footage on his page and the Knox News Sentinel mentioned It In the opening line of this artcile. What I didn’t know was that Tegan had thrown earlier in the day and was probably fine to throw this ball. The question I get asked is “Did you really think he wasn’t going to throw all out?” Honestly, No. I thought they’d’ think I was ridiculous and humor me with a light throw. I also have no concept of how hard something can be thrown. Do baseball players have another speed? Like if I ask Tegan to toss me my phone, is it coming to me at a speed I can catch? I don’t know these things.
That’s also how I ended up outside with Evan and Mike (the Sentinel Reporter) throwing at the radar gun- because Evan said he would be impressed if I could throw 71. (I can’t.)
The whole day just felt magical and happy. There was an energy outside- helped immensely by Boggess Videography’s amazing playlist. This video captures the vibe perfectly. The coolest thing is that looking at photos from the event just makes you smile. Even if you don’t know the people. We’ve had many people tell us they love seeing the photos from the event. It’s a huge bright spot in the dark times. See for yourself. Bryson66 captured a lot of great candid moments. Those always tell you what people really feel about an event. There are even pictures of me laughing, and with as many moving parts as we had… that’s amazing.
The guys from the Sentinel even had fun. They had no idea what they were walking into when they got the assignment. Here is more from them.
The DPA also made an appearance and captured some great photos.
This event wasn’t just for kids or baseball fans. Adults came without kids and just enjoyed the moments. People watched these movies for the first time or for the first time on the big screen. The players had a good time, too. Some of their parents thanked us for having the guys down. Manny wanted one of our jerseys (I mailed him mine- it was the last one). I thought Reese and I were cool because he thanked us, but I am now seeing he voted the wrong way on our Paper Rock Scissors poll. You can revisit a lot of those moments including the poll and the Kav can’t throw on our Instagram Highlights and Part 2
It was everything we hoped for…well… except for the part about meeting Tony Vitello. Maybe next year! 🧡