ANN ARBOR—With boom microphones, a fully-stretched parachute for shade, wires, cords, a monitor, some white cardboard, two folding chairs and even an orange traffic pylon all in position on the University of Michigan’s Diag, a California director and Michigan videographer set up shop for an interview with U-M classics Prof. David S. Potter.
Potter, whose research and most recent book concentrates on “Life, Death, and Entertainment in Ancient Rome,” was the star of the filming scheduled to air as an hour-long special on “Blood Sports: The Life of a Gladiator” on The Learning Channel in February. John Pattyson, producer, director, writer and researcher for Los Angeles based Pattyson Meadows Productions, found Potter via the Internet while searching for the world’s leading experts on ancient Rome. Potter’s expertise on the entertainments prominent in the ancient city made him a natural for Pattyson’s project, geared to coincide with the release of Stephen Spielberg’s Dreamworks production, “Gladiator.”
“Studying the entertainments is the best way to find out about a culture,” Potter says. “It tells you what made them tick.”
And those great gladiatorial events held around the Roman Empire were staged entertainments not unlike professional wrestling of today, Potter says. Price controls governed how much could be spent to put on the games, with the amount varying with the geographic location and the projected audience, Potter says. The number of events scheduled for Rome’s Coliseum depended on the whims of the current emperor and how many he wanted to stage. As today, the large crowds used the events as a means of ridding themselves of inhibitions with behavior that never would have been considered as an individual, but fully accepted in a large crowd.
Through a stop-and-start recording process attempting to avoid the beeps of construction trucks running in reverse, a crane working on a nearby building and the Westminster chimes of the campus’s landmark Burton Tower, Northville’s Riddell Television Productions gets the interview on tape, ready for editing before next year’s television airing.

classicsThe Learning Channel