Michael Jordan’s The Last Dance is Not Yet Complete, Reveals Director Jason Hehir

ESPN’s docuseries on Michael Jordan, The Last Dance, has had a great response so far. With no sporting activity around the world, The Last Dance is the closest the fans could get to sports during the time of the pandemic.

It is hence, not an overstatement to say ESPN’s decision to prepone the release of the documentary turned out to be a masterstroke. The initial plan was to air the documentary in June- when the NBA Finals would have been.

But with no major sporting activities around the world amidst the pandemic, the broadcasters decided to air the documentary earlier than its original schedule.

Crew followed hectic schedule for early release of The Last Dance- docuseries on Michael Jordan

While the decision might look simple from the outside, it takes a lot of hard work from the film crew and other people involved in the documentary to make it ready. In an appearance on The Boardroom, The Last Dance’s director Jason Hehir how his staff had to work amidst the lockdown to make the early release successful.

“It’s a bit of a crazy time because we’re still at work on the end of the doc, and normally you don’t really get to see people responding to it until you’re completely done with a finished product,” he said.

The NBA suspended its league on a Friday with the news that Rudy Gobert had become the first positive coronavirus case in the NBA. Hehir and co. thought that they would get back to their offices on Monday, but it never happened.

“We had to create a new workroom quickly,” he said. “And we had some world-class editors with world-class studios in their apartments already. Otherwise, we never would have been able to get up and running.

“They delivered a 32 TerraByte drive to me after the shutdown and that has thousands of hours of footage on it. I had to do a bit of editing myself. But anything they sent me, I would be able to link up to that drive because I had all the footage that they had. We used to work that way.

“What used to be ‘a walk across the hall’ conversation of three minutes, now it sometimes would take up to three days.”