FEATURE
“Just Show Up. Don’t Ask Questions” An Oral History of the “Please Stay, LeBron” Video Was Cleveland’s version of “We Are the World” inspiring or depressing? More importantly, does it even matter? By Marah Eakin PICTURE IT: CLEVELAND, SUMMER 2010. A 25-year-old LeBron James, coming off backto-back years as the NBA’s MVP, had instilled hope that the franchise was close to breaking the city’s long championship drought. But his contract was almost up, and he was considering his options.
enlisted a who’s who of Cleveland whos. But how did TV lawyer Tim Misny end up crooning next to exCleveland Crunch goalie Otto Orf, and did participants actually think that singing Polk’s goofy song was actually going to play on James’s sense of regional pride? You’ll find all the answers in this, the oral history of “Please Stay LeBron.”
All across the nation, cities and teams clamored to be part of the next phase in James’s career. New York City’s then-mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had released a video asking James to “come write the next chapter in N.Y.C. basketball history.” There were billboards in Chicago with the URL SendLeBronToChicago. com. Behind the scenes, agents were working to create a superteam in Miami in an effort to get James there. (Spoiler alert: It worked.) But in Cleveland, the city and Cavs staff held out hope that surely James would do the right thing and stick around. Right? Right? Comedian Mike Polk was all too familiar with Cleveland’s air of cautious optimism and/ or lurking disaster. A Warren
Mike Polk, comedian: At the time, I was briefly employed as a producer at website called Break.com that mostly trafficked in user-generated nut-kick videos, skateboard accident videos, and videos where dudes pulled pranks on their girlfriends by doing stuff like jumping out of laundry hampers while wearing the mask from Scream. It was based in L.A. but I remained in Cleveland. At the time, they were trying to move away from the user-generated content that made them popular, so they wanted to start producing their own content. The short-term results were mixed at best, and based on the fact that I just now tried to check out the site only to find that the domain is for sale, it appears the long-term results were worse.
8
| clevescene.com | July 13-26, 2022
native who graduated from Kent State University, Polk first came to regional prominence in 2009, when his “Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video” poked fun at the city’s civic pride and jokingly asked tourists to “come and see both of our buildings.” In the summer of 2010, he was working at the now-defunct Break. com and was tasked with producing something about James’ impending decision. The result was “Please Stay LeBron,” a video satirizing 1985’s “We Are the World,” which found mega-celebrities like Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and Bruce Springsteen teaming up for a charity single in an effort to raise money to combat hunger in Africa. For his hyper-local version, Polk
The LeBron free agency was obviously a massive story at the time and anything LeBron-related was getting a lot of traffic. During a conference call meeting, one of the L.A. producers suggested making a video of random Clevelanders asking LeBron to stay. That morphed into someone suggesting that it be a song featuring recognizable Clevelanders. That turned into it becoming a “We Are the World” parody angle, probably because it was easier than writing an actual song. Once that was decided, I was tapped to produce it, less because of my producing skills and more because I was already in Cleveland and they wouldn’t have to pay anyone to travel. So it became my project. They allowed me to hire an onthe-ground field producer for the project. I had worked in the past with a really competent producer named Christina Grozik. She and I came up with a list of people we wanted and she tracked down as many of them as she could. She was a dynamo and enormously effective. Christina Grozik, producer: Everything came together very quickly. I don’t recall what the
