Bobby Fischer Against the World, which kicks off HBO's "Documentary Film Summer Series", was directed and produced by Liz Garbus, who's worked in one capacity or another on a string of excellent feature documentaries, many of them journalistic examinations of contemporary social and political issues. Compared to some of those, making Bobby Fischer must have been something of a breeze. The trickiest part was probably locating still-living witnesses to Fischer's life who'd be willing to sit down for talking-head interviews. Describing the young Bobby, Larry Evans, a chess master who is seen here providing commentary on the Fischer-Spassky match for ABC's
The middle section covers the Fischer-Spassky match in detail, using clips from the TV coverage and excerpts from the evening news shows that place it in the context of its cultural moment. That arrogance is a handy quality from the filmmakers' point of view, because it helps make Fischer fascinating, at every stage of his life. Far more mysterious, from a contemporary point of view, is the film's distillation of the match between Fischer and the Russian world champion Boris Spassky that captivated the world for a few months in 1972. Henry Kissinger tells the camera about how he encouraged Fischer to play Spassky because he thought that having an American world master would be "good for democracy", and we see an old news clip of some guy in the park saying that he expects Fischer will win because, unlike his Commie opponent, he'll have the incentive of getting to
For a while, without the cameras rolling, TV viewers were tuning into Wide World of Sports to watch a man in an ABC logo jacket holding a telephone to his ear, listening to a man on the other line describe what he'd seen. Neiman concedes that he thought watching a "chess match would be like watching grass grow", but that it turned out to be "Ali-Forman all over again", and produces a picture purportedly showing "Bobby Fischer leaving the hotel for the fight, like a matador leaving the Palace Hotel in Madrid." Soon Fischer was a point away from winning the title outright, when Spassky, forty moves into the twenty-first game, announced his retirement. Fischer returned home to a chess-besotted America the world champion, talking about how he was looking forward to playing many more games. Finally world officials declared Karpov the champion by default and stripped Fischer of his title, which must have seemed like a small price to pay for slipping off LeRoy Neiman's radar.
, featuring a psycho killer (played by Robert Carradine) clearly modeled on Fischer.