Rich Feinberg
VP & Executive Producer,
IMS Productions
All eyes will be on Indianapolis in a few weeks, as history is made with the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500. For me, the operative words in that sentence are “all eyes” be-cause I have spent my professional life telling visually compelling stories to sports fans. During my career with ESPN, I led productions of the Indy 500 and IndyCar series, X Games, Winter X Games, ESPY Awards, NHRA and NASCAR. Each of those events presented their own challenges and rewards, but the Indy 500 was another beast altogether. In this new chapter of my life at IMS Productions, I have the chance to see the race from a different perspective, all while continuing to work with the Verizon IndyCar Series, the Speedway and media partners to make sure it lives up to its names as the “greatest spectacle in racing.”
The first time I ever got to experience in person the behemoth Indianapolis Motor Speedway was in 1986. I had landed a job as a production runner for ABC Sports and upon entering the gates of the track; I was instantly taken back to Memorial Day weekends at my grandparents’ house in New Jersey. We would have barbecues in their backyard and the race would always be on inside. We weren’t a big sports family, nor would any of my family members consider themselves a race fan, but I was about to become the first. I remember sitting there thinking how cool the IndyCars were, how big the track was and of course, how fast those racecars could go. Add to that my childhood fascination with the mechanics of TV, film and photography. I was the kid who ran the projector on Movie Fridays at school, a regular card-carrying member of the A/V Club. It would only make sense that I would eventually merge my budding interest in sports with my already-cemented love of visual arts and try to make a career out of it.
Back in ’86, I was just learning the business and couldn’t really appreciate what went into the actual broadcast production of
the Indianapolis 500, with so
many moving parts, literally and figuratively. There was no HD, no surround sound, no panning in-car cameras and no super slow motion. Everything was analog; there was no digital video or audio. Feature content and replays were done off tape machines rather than servers. Team audio was limited. Timing and scoring interfaced with graphics did not exist, so we did all that manually. The Internet did not exist. Neither did cell phones. We used two-way radios to talk to each other. By today’s standards, it seems almost impossible that we were even able to pull it off back in those days.
The Indy 500 is one of ESPN’s largest single-day yearly sporting event productions and by 2006, I was ESPN’s Vice President, Production and in charge of broadcasting the race. There were even more moving parts by then and they were
500 Memories
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