Liz Garbus Tells Imus About Her Film "Bobby Fischer Against the World"

Documentary filmmaker Liz Garbus had zero interest in chess whiz Bobby Fischer until the day after he died. “I was sitting on an airplane, and the cover story was his obit in the New York Times,” she recalled. “I had always, like all of us, known of Bobby Fischer, but I had never appreciated the full story of his life, and his impact on our culture, and his impact on the game of chess.”
 
Officially “infected with the bug,” as she put it, Garbus decided to make the movie Bobby Fischer Against the World, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and will air on HBO on Monday, June 6, hopefully to the same fanfare Fischer’s matches garnered in his prime.
 
“It’s hard to imagine that in 1972, chess was front page news,” Garbus said, explaining Fischer’s widespread support as he took on Russian Boris Spassky in that year’s World Chess Championship. “It was the perfect storm: the Soviet Union was our mortal enemy, had for decades always beaten all the other countries in the World Championship. And then here comes this lone American kid, who was beating everybody. He was invincible.”
 
The match, she insisted, “had monumental cultural meaning.” For instance, Grabus noted that the news broadcasts each night would report on Fischer’s successes ahead of news about the Watergate scandal. Before making “Bobby Fischer Against the World,” Garbus’s impression of Fischer was that he “existed in a sweet spot between remembering and forgetting.” Meaning, essentially, that while many people knew about him, few were intimately familiar with his story.
 
“For a certain time, Bobby inhabited that ‘rock star’ role: he was incredibly charming, he was good-looking, he went on the Cavett show and laughed, and had a sense of humor about himself,” Garbus said. “He kind of inhabited that role of the great American hero/Cold War icon.”
 
After the 1972 World Championship match in Iceland, where Fischer beat Spassky in what has been dubbed the “Match of the Century,” Fischer began to fall apart. Said Garbus, “He crumbled under the pressure of his own celebrity.”
 
Fischer took his match against Spassky so seriously that he hired a personal trainer to improve his handshake grip and intimidate Spassky right off the bat. “This was the fight this man brought to the table,” Garbus said. Though Fischer lost the first match and forfeited the second, he won the third and ended 24 years of Soviet domination at the World Championship.
 
“The first game is a subject of great debate, because he made a beginner mistake, maybe a mistake that I might not even make,” Garbus said. “Some people say he was trying to psych out Spassky.”
 
Imus, a self-described novice chess player who actually plays all the time, wondered if Fischer was too much of a genius to ever have been normal, and Garbus believes that some of Fischer’s eccentricity toward the end of his life was the result of being angry at the United States.
 
“I think that Bobby, at a certain point, just became kind of an uncontrolled sort of spillage of negative ideas: anti-American ideas after 9-11, anti-Semitic ideas, anti-everything ideas,” Garbus said. “I think it was sort of what was most provocative at the moment.”
 
Garbus is hoping to seize her moment today in Bryant Park, where HBO has arranged for a “chess happening” that offers a chance for players of any level to take on some grand masters, or to learn the game from scratch.
 
If Garbus’s last name sounds familiar, it’s because her father Martin is part of the I-Man’s legal team. Giggling, Garbus said of her dad, “We go way back.”
 
-Julie Kanfer