Michael Mahaffie served as the editor on the Netflix documentary series Starting 5, which follows NBA players Jimmy Butler, Anthony Edwards, LeBron James, Domantas Sabonis and Jayson Tatum throughout the 2023-24 season. For over three months, Mahaffie collaborated closely with director Peter J. Scalettar, spending 12-hour days in his garage, meticulously shaping the series. The close synergy between the two was key to the project’s success, which, at its core, is about presenting the players as individuals and not just athletes. The production team made a deliberate choice to shift the focus away from game outcomes, opting instead to explore the personal journeys of the stars, both on and off the court.
Starting 5 began streaming back in October. Here, Mahaffie shares insight into his experience working on the series.
Michael, how did you get involved in editing Starting 5?
“I have known our showrunner Peter Scalletar for a few years at this point. He was the first director to give me a shot in the TV world. I had been working primarily in the independent feature documentary scene for about a decade before that. He hired me to lead the edit on the Showtime documentary series directed by Karam Gill called Supervillain about the infamous rapper 6ix9ine. Peter and I really bonded and became good friends during that edit, because a pandemic will do that to you. Ever since then, we have been trying to work together again, but the timing never worked out.
“Peter hit me up about this project he was showrunning about five basketball players in the NBA. I was interested because I was excited to work with my friend again, but I was upfront about not being the most knowledgeable about basketball. Of the five players, I only knew LeBron James. He said that he needed that because he was trying to tell a story of these five men as men first. Telling a human story was something that I knew how to do, and I was more than ready to join the Starting 5 team.”
Tell us about your editing setup?
“Avid Media Composer! People, especially in online spaces, love to hate on it, but there is a reason that it is the industry standard. Funny story: When Peter first hired me to cut Supervillain, the job was in Avid, and I had never used it because all the gigs I had up to that point were on Premiere. I kept that information to myself, though. I spent the four weeks before I started that job recutting a short I had done in Premiere from start to finish to teach myself how to use Avid. I struggled, but after about two weeks, it clicked. I knew how to tell a story, but I just needed to learn new software. I say this because I have friends or hear stories of people turning down work or being ‘afraid’ of Avid. Now, I primarily work in Avid and actually prefer it for its stability. With multiple editors and AEs all over the country, this job would have been impossible with any other software.
“I hear productions in Premiere are getting better, but I recently used it on a job I was consulting on and found it was wanting Avid, especially on the NEXIS, which is the gold standard.”
Where were you working on this project?
“I worked primarily in my garage/office here in Glassell Park. Los Angeles is littered with editors and other people in post holed up in a garage or home office. I have a home computer, and I use Jump Desktop to pilot a computer connected to a NEXIS server. As for my setup, I rock four monitors. Three of them jumped into my work computer at the office, and it's a simple double-monitor edit with a full-screen playback of the third monitor. The forth monitor is an ultra-wide one that I have positioned vertically to have all my personal things that I need to be logged into on my home computer. Sometimes, it feels a little hectic, and you forget which computer you are piloting, but it’s not that hard.
“I did this before the pandemic, but it has become the norm now. There are plus sides, such as no commute and the freedom to work alone, but there are downsides. The feeling that you are always available since you are at home is something I see people let themselves get sucked into. It is important to turn off the computer and engage with the world outside the edit. It is hard to do, but it not only helps with your mental health, but also helps creatively in the editing process. Overworking yourself is easy when you work from home, but it comes at a price.”
Did this series present any specific or unique challenges?
“Starting 5 had many scenes that were difficult to get just right, but the scene that was the biggest challenge was telling the story of Jimmy’s father passing. No one in public media, besides our team, knew this story. Jimmy trusted Sami Khan, one of our directors, with this story. Jimmy trusted our editing team to cut this story. Losing a parent is one of life’s hardest things we must endure. It may happen in 20 years. It may be tonight. Jimmy experienced it during his season and felt comfortable sharing. Cutting that story was something that we needed to do right by. Whenever I take on a scene that is heavy, I cut it until it makes me feel like an emotional wreck. I usually warn my wife because I'll be depressed all day and drained from crying at my computer. Once I get myself to consistently sob, then I feel like it's at a decent spot to hear from others and keep refining, but that first part is important to get the tone right. Taking the viewer on a journey to get them to cry but not feel hopeless.
“The moment that sticks with me is a long shot that I held on to Jimmy telling the story of him finding out his father had passed. It’s a long take, and I don’t cut away. You could cut to other things to make it look pretty or clean up his bite, but I wanted to force the viewer to watch Jimmy’s face and look into his eyes as he recalls one of the darkest moments in his life with all of its humanness. There is nowhere else the viewer needs to be other than looking into Jimmy's eyes as he stumbles through his words to get the story out.
“He was being vulnerable with us, and I wanted the viewer to just live in that moment as long as we could. Then we get a nice release where Jimmy then looks to the future of himself as a father and how he is going to be the best dad to carry on his father’s legacy, and cutting to beautiful shots of him with his children at home. The contrast does a lot for the viewer in letting them know when to cry, if that makes sense.
“The first person I showed was one of our assistants, Vanna Negron, and she just replied on Slack with, ‘I need to go call my dad.’”
Do you have any other scenes or highlights that you would point to?
“My favorite scene in Starting 5 is in my favorite episode for purely selfish reasons, as it was a Christmas episode. I have always wanted to cut a Christmas movie or episode of TV. The scene from ‘104 - Father Christmas’ that meant the most to me was our cold open about the James’ family opening up about Bronny James’ cardiac arrest and recovery journey to his first college game at USC. This was a storyline that we knew fans wanted and were expecting.
“We tried to do it many ways, teasing it through many episodes and doing it as a cliffhanger, but it always felt unsatisfying. I told Peter that we should treat it as its own short film with a beginning, middle and end. I also suggested that it might be best to have it at the top of an episode as a long, cold open.
“Most documentaries have a cold opening, and they usually are just a couple of minutes long. This was an almost nine-minute long cold open, which was about a quarter of the whole episode. Once we treated the Bronny story as a standalone short film, it had the gravity that the story warranted. It gave LeBron and Savannah James the space to really express their emotions - high and low - in a powerful way. Once we cut it that way, there was no going back, and it really became a highlight of the whole series.”