The story of the Bills Mafia superfans is about to go Hollywood, thanks to a pair of Buffalo guys
A film called “Just One Before I Die” will tell the story of Bills Mafia superfans.
On Super Bowl Sunday in February, a series of thoughts were mish-mashing in Kevin Polowy’s mind: It had been 30 years since the Buffalo Bills appeared in a Super Bowl. Back when he was a Buffalo kid in the early ‘90s, the team went to four straight but won none.
Would the Bills ever make it back? Could this day – Super Bowl Sunday – once again belong to the Bills Mafia?
Would the Bills ever win one?
Buffalo natives Kevin Polowy, left, and Addison Henderson are co-directors on the feature film about the Buffalo Bills, "Just One Before I Die." Provided photo
His father used to wear a sweatshirt emblazoned with the words “Just One Before I Die” – and, as is heartbreakingly familiar to so many families who embrace the Bills as an extension of themselves, his father died before seeing the team win.
In the midst of his thoughts, Polowy’s phone rang. It was his cousin Clayton Polowy, an oncologist who, like Kevin, grew up a Bills fan in Buffalo and then left. Left the town, not the fandom. Kevin, now a Los Angeles-based producer and entertainment journalist, and Clayton, an oncologist in Arizona, had a bit of a cousinly Bills-fan therapy call, commiserating about Super Bowls lost and hoping for one to come.
Then Clayton shared an idea.
“I’ve had this thought,” he said. “I feel like this needs to be a movie. We need to tell the story of Bills fans.”
Clayton offered to finance the film. Kevin, whose producing credits include the Billy Crystal comedy “Standing Up, Falling Down” and the Buffalo-based Lance Diamond documentary “A Diamond in the Buff,” would direct.
Kevin promised to think about it.
“I went to bed that night,” he told The Buffalo News in a recent Zoom interview, “and it was all I could think about. I woke up the next morning and was like, ‘That’s a great idea. Somebody needs to tell the story of Bills Mafia, and it should be us.’ ”
Kevin called Clayton to say, “I’m in,” and added one person to the “us:” His friend and fellow filmmaker Addison Henderson.
Addison Henderson, left, and Kevin Polowy, co-directors of "Just One Before I Die." Credit Rob Szobski
Like Polowy, Henderson grew up in Buffalo before moving to Los Angeles, where the two get together on Sunday to watch Bills games. And also like Polowy, Henderson has done work that carries a Buffalo theme: He made the Buffalo-based documentary “The Forgotten City,” and later filmed his Showtime thriller “Givers of Death” in Western New York.
The three agreed to make the film, with Clayton Polowy as executive producer and Kevin Polowy and Henderson serving as co-directors. They enlisted fellow Buffalo-connected filmmakers Mac Cappuccino as a producer, and Trent Boling and Leah Cohen-Mays as co-producers, and started making plans to shoot in Western New York this football season.
They chose the name of the film based on the shirt Polowy’s father used to wear: “Just One Before I Die.”
“For me, it’s about the characters, right?” Henderson said. “(We can) dig into the psyche of what it is like to grow up in Buffalo, and the Bills Mafia and what our sports team represents to us. That fighter mentality. That underdog mentality.”
A late-spring and summer casting call yielded a series of fans – or “characters” – whom the filmmakers will follow throughout this season and possibly beyond. That includes some well-publicized Bills fans (Del Reid; Ken “Pinto Ron” Johnson; Joanie Podkowinski-DeKoker – better known as “Mama J”; Richard Peterson and Derrick Norman – the “Bills Chefs) and others who aren’t yet known.
“These superfans are watching these gladiators in their arena, but then you go inside and see what their lives are like,” Henderson said. “For me, that's interesting. It’s a character study.”
Cinematography will be led by Stephen Gerard Kelly, an Irish filmmaker with whom Polowy worked on the Oscar-qualified documentary “In the Shadow of Beirut.”
“You’ve seen Kenny Johnson get sprayed with ketchup and mustard a thousand times, but I think we're going to film it in a very poetic way that you've never, ever seen on film before,” Polowy said. “That’s the sort of approach we're taking to the whole film.”
No release date is set yet; that will, in part, be determined both by the story arcs of the fans featured and the on-field fate of the Bills themselves.
“We may go multiple seasons,” Polowy said. “We don’t know how this is going to end yet. I mean, hopefully we win the Super Bowl and we have our ending.”
He interjected a laugh. “But history is telling us otherwise.”
