"Pep Banned" will be shown at Culbreth Theatre on Sunday. Chris Farina will be presented with the Governor Gerald L. Baliles Founder’s Award following the screening. Photo: Virginia Film Festival.
The University of Virginia is often described as Jeffersonian, as academically elite, as a public Ivy. Less often used: cool. The Virginia Pep Band, during its nearly three-decade heyday, was cool.
Pep Banned, a documentary that premieres at the Virginia Film Festival, captures the joyful subversion of the student-run band that took to the football field beginning in the fall of 1974 until it was drummed out of appearances for insulting crybaby West Virginia, whose governor complained after the Continental Tire Bowl in 2002.
Ron Culberson was in the band from 1979 to 1983. He was having dinner in 2014 with a former pep bander whose wife suggested the story of the irreverent scramble band would make a good documentary.
Filmmaker Chris Farina, UVA ’82, thought so, too. “I saw the pep band many times,” he writes in an email. “I was in the stands in 1985 at a game against West Virginia University at halftime. I felt like I was watching “Saturday Night Live” at Scott Stadium.”
Farina, who’s work includes West Main, Route 40, World Peace and other 4th Grade Achievements, and Seats at the Table, wanted to create a “nostalgic view of the past,” while capturing the comedic aspect of the pep band, he says. Farina will be presented with the Governor Gerald L. Baliles Founder’s Award at this year’s film fest.
Culberson had been in his high school marching band, and he didn’t really want to do a formal marching band in college. “I got a letter from the pep band that was funny and irreverent,” he recalls. He’d written a lot of humor in high school—and as an adult became a motivational humorist—so it was an easy sell.
The pep band was run by students who produced the shows and organized the band’s travel. Culberson was on the writing committee, which came up with the half-time shows and submitted the scripts to the athletic department. They weren’t always approved, but the relatively mild West Virginia finale, with its parody of “The Bachelor” and a pigtailed, overalls-wearing West Virginia contestant, was.
When the pep band first appeared on the scene in the ’70s, UVA football was abysmal and the half-time show was a reason to go to the game. “We were celebrities,” says Culberson, who went to the Final Four in 1981. “We walked in and our fans went crazy.”
For co-director Bill Reifenberger, the goal was for “members of the pep band to see their history,” he says. Culberson had scanned 6,500 archival documents and there were a lot of photographs, but “very little footage exists of the pep band performing,” says Reifenberger.
In making Pep Banned, he discovered a number of other issues, including the rights of students to shape their destinies, and what happens when free speech and humor run afoul of institutions trying to be “on brand.”
For a while, the pep band seemed to embody the culture that made UVA different from other state schools: the school’s nomenclatures—Grounds, for instance—and its lack of a marching band and homecoming queen. “A lot of our traditions set us apart,” notes Culberson. “Having a different band made us unique.”
For the members, it was just fun. “In every picture, everyone is smiling and having the best time,” Reifenberger points out.
As Fran Cannon Slayton, ’85, says in the last line of the film, “It was just a great way to be 18.” 10/26, Culbreth Theatre
