Seniors Chloe Goodwin and Nicki Fleischner, veteran members of Stuyvesant’s speech team, will be subjects of a documentary on the National Speech and Debate Tournament.
The untitled documentary will be similar in format to the 2002 film “Spellbound,” a documentary of the 1999 National Spelling Bee. The filmmakers will follow seven teams, including the team of Goodwin and Fleischner, on their journey to the National Tournament in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The filmmakers tracked down the duo through Ryan Hubbell, who has been a Stuyvesant speech team coach since last year. Hubbell is a friend of one of the filmmakers, and recommended Goodwin and Fleischner for the documentary. The filmmakers are students at the University of Southern California, and took a year off to make this film. Their production company is called Not Just Dead Bodies, Inc., which is a play on the word forensics, which refers to both speech and criminal science.
Goodwin and Fleischner are the only all-female speech team at Stuyvesant performing Duo Interpretation (Duo for short), in which performers must complete a scene without looking at or touching their partners. The filmmakers, who had themselves performed Duo as students, chose this event as the focus of the film.
“It’s very rare to find two girls doing a funny Duo,” Hubbell said.
Goodwin and Fleischner practice every day after school for an hour. Before tournaments, they “could be at speech until 8 p.m. or 9 p.m.,” Fleischner said.
Cameras followed Goodwin and Fleischner for a week as the directors of the documentary filmed the girls in class and at home.
“They filmed us one morning as we were waking up,” Fleischner said. Assistant Principal English Eric Grossman gave the directors a tour of the school and allowed them into his Advanced Placement Great Books class, which both girls take.
The girls’ parents were equally hospitable. Goodwin’s parents spoke with the producers until almost midnight, before letting one of the filmmakers sleep over. Otherwise, he would have “had to go all the way back to his hotel near Coney Island and be back here by 6 a.m.,” Goodwin said.
Fleischner’s parents had reservations to her appearing in the film. “My mom even hired an entertainment lawyer,” she said, to scour the release form Fleischner had to sign to appear in the film. Members of the speech team were also asked to sign waivers.
Goodwin and Fleischner have high hopes for the film, but are worried about the slight chance they will be cut from it.
“[The filmmakers] expect Chloe and Nicki to go to nationals, which isn’t easy to do,” said senior and speech team member Mubashir Billah. “It is a lot of pressure on them.”
MTV has shown interest in the film, and the duo hopes it will awareness about speech. The producers intend to set up a scholarship fund with the film’s grosses.
