Film to focus on Bill’s Mafia superfans

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?

This annual bout of hopeful agony is familiar to Buffalo football fans, known as the Bills Mafia. Polowy, a Los Angeles-based entertainment journalist and filmmaker, is teaming with his fellow native Buffalonian, the writer and filmmaker Addison Henderson, to spend this football season – and possibly beyond – capturing their stories in a documentary, “Just One Before I Die .”

The pair will spend football weekends in Buffalo this fall directing the filming, which will follow several Bills superfans, both in their football lives and at home – which, quite possibly, may be a distinction with few clear lines.

“No amount of losses or heartbreak is ever going to turn us off from being Bills fans,” Polowy said. “It’s impossible. You’re born into it. You die with it. And that sparked the theme of our film, which was: Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we invest so much emotionally in something we have so little control over? Knowing that almost on an annual basis, our hearts are torn out of our chests.

“And will it ever be us?”

The project was born from a phone call Polowy received that Super Bowl Sunday evening last February. It came from his cousin Clayton Polowy, who – like Kevin – grew up a Bills fan in Buffalo and then left. Left the town, not the fandom.

Kevin, in Los Angeles, 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 collaborator Addison Henderson.

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.” As is heartbreakingly familiar to so many families who embrace the Bills as an extension of themselves, Polowy’s father died before seeing the team win.

“He died without ever seeing the Bills or Sabers (win),” Polowy said. “The (NBA) Braves left town. We never got the baseball team. He died without ever seeing Buffalo win a championship.”

Polowy showed a photo of his dad wearing that shirt to his cousin Clayton and to Henderson, who said, “That’s our title: ‘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 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 as familiar to Bills fans.

“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.”