When Cody Gifford first saw “Requiem for a Running Back” – a film by fellow USC film school alum Rebecca Carpenter commemorating her family’s life with NFL player and coach Lew Carpenter – he realized it might as well have been about his own family.

“I got goosebumps,” said the former Trojan football player and son of one of the all-time great college and NFL players, Frank Gifford, not to mention one of the most famous broadcasters ever.

Cody recognized and related to so much of what happened in the Carpenter family, including the difficult – and at the time – mysterious passing of Lew Carpenter from what they later learned was chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

It’s a story Cody and Rebecca Carpenter will share with the USC community at a special screening at 7 p.m. PST Tuesday at the Albert & Dana Broccoli Theatre, George Lucas Building Lobby, USC School of Cinematic Arts Complex. There is no charge for admission but reservations are required. (Full details about making reservations here.)

“We know what we all went through,” Cody says of the intimate portrayal of the struggle of Lew Carpenter – a powerful 6-foot-1, 220-pound running back out of Arkansas who helped Vince Lombardi turn those early Green Bay Packer teams into a dynasty before finishing up his football life as a revered NFL coach.

“I’m kind of uniquely positioned between the two poles on this spectrum to tell this story,” says Cody, an independent film producer and founder of the film company Gifford Media Group after his magna cum laude academic career at USC with a Master’s from Oxford in creative writing and a stint as a 6-4 walk-on wide receiver who made the USC football team in 2011 when, thanks to the NCAA’s draconian scholarship sanctions, USC needed players.

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Although not necessarily at his position. Cody joined a wide receiver group headlined by Robert Woods, Marqise Lee, George Farmer and freshman Nelson Agholor on a Matt Barkley-led USC team that started the season ranked No. 25, finished No. 10 with a record of 10-2. Banned by the NCAA from the Pac-12 title game or a bowl, that USC team beat Notre Dame and No. 4 Oregon on the road and finished with a 50-0 romp over UCLA, setting up USC’s preseason No. 1 ranking for the 2012 season.

Cody had taken off two years from football after suffering three concussions back in high school in Greenwich, Conn. “I saw there were roster spots and I thought I was as good as some of those guys who made it, so I went out,” Cody says from back home in Greenwich where he’s a one-man show with Gifford Media Group while managing the Gifford family business.

When he saw the original cut of the documentary back in 2017, just two years after his father’s death “just a week from his 85th birthday,” Cody says, he knew this would be a story he’d like to help tell.

“It’s hard not to be moved by it,” he says of seeing the clip of his dad’s interview in the documentary at an early screening at UCLA.

“My dad’s name still matters,” Cody says of his College and NFL Hall of Fame father, “one of the original founders of the NFL Players Association,” who suffered from CTE starting in his mid-1970s. “That’s one of the reasons I moved home,” Cody says, “to help take care of him.”

Like Lew Carpenter, Frank Gifford had played high school football in the 1940s and in his early years in college in a leather helmet, then changed over to those early Riddell hard plastic suspension models at USC and for the New York Giants and finally, with the face bars attached to them.

But “I have two little boys now,” says Cody, 34, and some decisions to be made about football and their future. “We know what we all went through.”

“The NFL gave my father a life,” Cody told People magazine. “But at the same time, there were dangers.”

There are no simple answers, Cody says, although contact football should be out for young kids. “Flag football is great for them.” One of the companies his family has invested in is involved in helmet technology, Cody says.

“We’re a football family just trying to ask what does this all mean,” Cody says. “It’s not a controversial take.”

But one that has a near-perfect rating on the Rotten Tomatoes film review site. And an Amazon distribution deal now, that Cody made for the re-cut, updated version of the 93-minute film “that we made a little more current,” he says.

His co-producer for the film is former Wisconsin All-American and NFL linebacker Chris Borland. After the screening Tuesday, Cody and Rebecca will be joined for a Q&A session by USC Keck School of Medicine’s Dr. Michael Jakowec, whose primary research focus is understanding better the molecular mechanisms involved in the neuroplasticity of the injured brain.

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About Requiem for a Running Back

A confounding father. An ever-curious daughter. A myth-shattering search for truth. And a heart-breaking discovery that challenges everything she thought she knew about him and the sport that defined her family.

In this searingly beautiful father/daughter film, documentarian Rebecca Carpenter investigates the origins of the insidious chasm which grew between her and her father Lew, a World Champion Green Bay Packer and NFL coach, who passed away with a mysterious disease in 2010.

Executive Produced by Chris Borland and Cody Gifford—son of legendary New York Giant and Monday Night Football anchor, Frank Gifford, himself a victim of chronic traumatic encephalopathy— and Produced by Sara Dee, the film has garnered a near-perfect rating from Rotten Tomatoes.

Provided courtesy of Gifford Media Group. Running time: 93 minutes.

https://www.requiemforarunningback.com/
 

About the Guests
REBECCA CARPENTER (Director, Producer, USC Alumna)

Requiem for a Running Back is Rebecca Carpenter’s first feature and fourth film as director. In addition to being awarded a Golden Telly and a Golden Remy, her work across media as both producer and director has been critically acclaimed nationally and internationally in theatrical, festival, and special event screenings. Executive Producer Max Mayer notes that “Rebecca’s body of work reveals her big brain and her even bigger heart. Her need to understand the complicated nature of the individual within a community shows up in really intriguing ways. She captures moments of ordinary heroism and discord in Susan Rows and Detached; the ways in which community beliefs can be self-limiting in Free Angela and (re)birth; and the mechanics of emotions in conflict in the painting series Energy. Her delight in discovery is palpably captured throughout her work. Requiem is no exception – the work of a mature storyteller who turns the camera on herself and her relationship with her father, bravely documenting their difficulty connecting with all its messiness and ferocity.”

CODY GIFFORD (Producer, USC Alumnus)

Cody is the founder of the Gifford Media Group. A producer of film, television and new media, he has sold, developed and executive-produced content for some of the world’s most recognizable brands including HBO Films, Warner Bros. Television, MGM and the Hallmark Channel. A Magna Cum Laude graduate of the University of Southern California and an alumnus of the University of Oxford, he is also a media consultant and a Black List-featured screenwriter represented by the Agency for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills.

As a private investor, Cody serves as partner and advisory board member to several companies including Tate Technology, LLC, an energy and material science think-tank in strategic partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy developing solutions to the destructive neurological effects of traumatic brain injury.

He is a member of the USC School of Cinematic Arts Leadership Circle, the Oxford University Angels Network and an advisor to Boston University’s Concussion Legacy Foundation.