BS High, a new HBO documentary premiering tonight, is ostensibly a sports story. The film, from Academy Award-winning filmmakers Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe, tells the tale of Bishop Sycamore, the Ohio high school that played a football game on ESPN two years ago. Except, oh wait, Bishop Sycamore wasn’t a real school at all, and not only did they lose that game 58-0, the man in charge of the whole scheme was revealed to be a prolific scammer.
And it does so through Roy Johnson, who coached Bishop Sycamore—despite not having a brick and mortar school, athletic trainers, or a real playbook. Johnson is a remarkable documentary character: he managed to draw the national spotlight to a made-up school, but he also draws real-life inspiration from the fictional worlds of The A Team and superhero movies, lies through his teeth at nearly every opportunity, has had over 30 lawsuits filed against him, admits to killing a wild animal, and, despite having an internship with the Bill Parcells-era Jets, does not seem to possess any of the actual qualifications one would need to be a football coach.
While the film centers on a fake football team and their fraudulent coach, BS High also touches on parenting, coming of age, and true crime, with elements that will remind some viewers of infamous figures like Caroline Calloway and Elizabeth Holmes. Free and Roe sat down with GQ to discuss the origins of this project, the experience of hearing the players’ sides of the story, and what it was like to conduct three days of interviews with a smiling swindler like Johnson.
Roe: We learned about it at the same time that everybody else did. We are very online, and Travon was sending me the memes. We were laughing and enjoying it like everyone else. On that day, Travon tweeted that there was going to be a documentary about it and it would be called BS High. He was manifesting our future together. Three or four weeks later, we got a call from an old producer friend of mine who said he got in touch with the guy and he wanted to talk. We were like, “Really? The guy, the guy?” A few days after that we got on a phone call with him. We both knew we had to find out how this all happened.
Free: We thought it was funny like everyone else did. That also kind of played into our experience with making the movie. No one knew how sad it was behind the scenes until we started poking around and asking questions. At the time, it was just this crazy, fun-ish story, kind of like a bad version of The Bad News Bears. It turned out to be way worse.
Free: It’s very similar to the overall Roy game. He uses the charm offensive to try and get you to like him. He’s just saying what he thinks you want to hear. Eventually that’s going to wear off. The beginning [of our conversations] felt like how the movie feels. This guy is a little charming and a little funny! Then reality sets in and you get a taste of who you’re actually dealing with. The way you see his emotions change throughout the movie is how it happens in real conversation with him. He can tell you a happy story and then the next minute he’s angry and pissed off at whoever he’s talking about, then the next minute he’s crying about who he let down. It’s the strangest cycle of emotion. You can almost feel, for some people, what would be master manipulation.
Free: I’ve never met anybody with a brain like his. All the instincts that we have in terms of what you’d do or say? He does not have those! He wants to do and say everything you’d think a person wouldn’t.
Roe: We kind of couldn’t believe it. The first thing he said when he sat down in our chair for three days of interviews was, “Do I look like a con man?” This guy’s on a different level. We knew we had an extraordinary subject by the end of the first day. This guy thinks he can charm his way through everything and no one will care. Because he’s funny and witty, he can ignore the consequences of his actions and everyone will forgive him. Part of this strange code he has is that if you catch him, he feels like he has to admit it? I don’t know. It’s hard to understand him. We had to be a little pushy to get some stuff out of him, but he wanted to say it! He’s proud of it!
Free: As the saying goes, every villain is the hero of their own story. Roy very much believes that he’s the hero of this story and everything that he’s doing is for a noble and well-meaning cause. Then he’ll tell you the opposite of those things ten minutes later! He’s a really tricky interview subject for that reason alone. He does not believe that he did anything wrong. That was a strange experience. Even after seeing the film itself, he still thought it made him look good! I don’t know how to wrap my brain around it.
Roe: He says he’s the most honest liar he knows.
Free: Con man-ish.
Roe: He says he won’t lie about anything you can prove. So we asked, if we can’t prove it, you’re happy to lie? He took a pause to think about it and then said yes! It doesn’t make logical sense. Our job is not psychotherapy or analyzing people, so we try to be careful about throwing these words around. But, can he help himself? Can he control himself? No, clearly. One of the things we didn’t put in is him saying he’s not a details guy. There’s so many great Roy-isms that we couldn’t find homes for.
It was important for us to differentiate—because there’ve been so many good con man and con woman stories in the past few years—we wanted to make sure that ours didn’t fall into, “Hey, this is really funny!” because there’s a trail of devastation he left behind. That’s as important to us as all the spicy fun. We could have made a two-hour joke montage.
Roe: When he gave us the “I don’t value truth, I value loyalty” speech, as soon as we finished Travon and I were like, “That’s a mafia don line!” That loyalty doesn’t seem to run both ways. It’s “I’m the genius, I’m the power, and if you are loyal to me the ride will go well.” It felt more like a threat, and it’s even delivered relatively darkly. It’s one of the truer things that Roy said to us quite frankly. He expects to be the leader and for other people to follow, and he finds it very frustrating and confusing when people won’t do that.
Free: Every single time we talked to a kid, we felt worse and worse and worse. The fact that you then have to go back and talk to Roy about it—because we bookend it with him and get his take—it was so much harder to maintain that level of objectivity. We spent hours talking to kids whose lives have been ruined by this person and still have to walk that line and take your personal feelings out of it.
Roe: The one that really stuck with me is [a player telling] the story of watching Roy strike his partner, and then in the car saying, “Look what she made me do.” The gulf between what a parent thinks a coach is going to offer their child and what he offered that young man in that moment says everything about Roy.
Free: It was tough. We had to do a lot of unwinding and loosening up to get them to become as open as they did. It was hard for all of them. They started at negative ten. It took so much work to even get them to neutral because they were so guarded and hardened by it. They all felt like they had to be tough and be their own men. It was difficult for them to admit to being victimized the way that they were, because that felt like weakness to them. They trusted an adult, and they were taken advantage of. They weren’t necessarily tapped into the vulnerability that goes along with that. We had to open them up to the fact that it’s okay to be upset and to talk about it. We still talk to some of them. All the interviews were at least three to fours each.
Roe: We wanted to make the premiere about them. We wanted this to be a different experience, and offer some value and some pride and some uplift. So, we invited all of them to the premiere and HBO was really kind to make sure they all had the resources to attend. But Roy snuck in! Even though he wasn’t invited, he tried to steal the thunder. It was a public screening in Tribeca, so he just bought a ticket. He turned up with two bodyguards and caused a scene.
Free: I think the schools will still happen. There’s probably people trying right now. Getting on ESPN, I think, will be a lot harder. But I don’t think it’s going to stop people from doing what Roy did. It won’t even stop Roy from doing what he did! The upside is just too high, and the fact there’s no rules or laws stopping them is the reason why they’re going to keep trying. They have no incentive to stop chasing the dollars.
Roe: There were multiple stories—some of them very, very serious—that did not pass the [fact checking] test and we didn’t have the investigative bandwidth to more fully engage with. One that came out that’s not one of the serious ones, it’s a little funny, is done as a card at the end of the film but doesn’t capture the full majesty of what happened.
After we finished filming, Roy went to a Best Buy and tried to purchase two televisions on credit using—I can’t remember the name right now, but it’s very white and Jewish. [Note: Johnson is Black.] It’s definitely not a Roy sounding name. But he was getting away with it! He had the TV’s, he’d done the identity fraud, but on the way out he tried to pickpocket something. He got busted for that. The man walked in, did some pretty high level identity theft in person, and he got busted because he just couldn’t let that be enough.
Free: It’s so hard to think of something we didn’t include that I’d be allowed to tell you. There’s so much good stuff! But him talking about his admiration for Trump and how much similarity he sees in them, I was hoping we could find a place for that. There’s hours and hours and hours of Roy footage left on the cutting room floor. There was a moment at the end where he hugged both of us, crying, and asked if he was a redeemable person.
Roe: The biggest, hyper emotional bear hugs. Crying, saying “I’m gonna do better, this isn’t the real me.” It was so bizarre. The guy is truly wild.
Roe: [laughing] You saw the end of the movie, right?
Free: I don’t think he does in any real way. If you asked him at three different times of the day he’d give you three different answers. I think he genuinely believes that he did right by those kids. Like he says, win, lose, or draw, we win. I think that’s how he sees it.
Roe: We’d be curious about that sociopath test. One thing that we can definitively say after the many, many hours of questions we asked him is that he will give whatever answer he thinks is best suited for the moment. For example, at the end of the movie there’s this big rant about how people think they can take us down but nothing’s ever going to stop us. That came from a rage against the governing body, the Ohio Athletic Commission. He thought he had legitimate grievances against them and the media. He built himself up from this righteous kernel of truth and approached what we think is his deepest, most honest truth about this thing, which is that he won. Because we’re making this film about him, he matters.
One of my favorite lines is when he says he’s deeply insecure, very capable, and an extremist. Wow, Roy! Yeah! Those are the three key elements that keep getting you in fucking trouble! We also joked with him that he should have come worked in our industry. There’s plenty of places where those kinds of talent have use. Derailing the lives of children is, profoundly, not one of them.