Vanessa and Kobe Bryant at the 2018 Vanity Fair Oscar party, where they celebrated Kobe winning an Academy Award for his short film Dear Basketball. Mike Coppola/VF18/Getty Images Kobe Bryant didn't like what he was seeing. It was the fall of 2019, and the NBA legend was tucked inside an editing bay at an office in Irvine, staring at a roughly assembled two-hour cut drawn from tens of thousands of hours of footage he'd commissioned during the 2015-16 Lakers season - his farewell tour. The material captured everything: the dunks, the jumpers, the no-look passes, yes, but also his life away from the court. Moments in the locker room at Staples Center. Evenings at home with family. And, in several haunting instances, scenes aboard his helicopter. But the cut didn't measure up. According to a source present at the screening, Bryant was visibly frustrated. "Kobe was like, 'Yeah we're scrapping that and starting over,'" he recalls. Related Stories Business The Producer Who Hoodwinked Half of Hollywood Lifestyle Los Angeles Lakers Land Revolve Sponsorship Deal Even so, everyone in that office must have understood the significance of what was being projected on that screen. Its working title was 20th Season, and it was an intimate record of the final year of one of the greatest athletes in modern history. At a moment when demand for prestige sports documentaries had been booming, it was more than gold - it was a Hope diamond. Just a few months later, of course, it would become even more valuable. After the tragic helicopter crash that killed Bryant, his daughter Gianna, and seven others, the footage would take on a sacred sheen, transformed into arguably the most precious sports footage in the world. Indeed, to those few aware of its existence - Bryant's inner circle as well as a small group of Hollywood insiders - those thousands of hours of footage have become something like a holy shrine to a mythic figure. A slew of prominent producers and directors, including two Oscar winners, have lined up with offers to shape it all into the documentary Bryant once imagined creating for himself. So far, though, none have signed on. According to the filmmakers and others familiar with the talks, they've all run into the same stubborn obstacle: Vanessa Bryant, Kobe's widow, who, it turns out, has her own very specific vision for what sort of movie should be made. And it's not a film anyone else seems interested in making. "It's the white whale," says one top producer of Bryant's final footage. "But it can't hold a director, and it's been sitting out there with this eternal promise that never seems to materialize." *** Bryant's offices at Granity Studios did not look like what you might expect. There were no jerseys or trophies decorating the walls, or even photographs of other historic sports icons. Instead, there were framed images of Walt Disney, Steve Jobs and John Williams. Bryant placed them there intentionally to signal - to himself and to those around him - that he was pursuing a different kind of greatness. Bryant's ambitions were not unusual among sports figures - plenty of athletes have chased Hollywood after retiring - but the scale and seriousness of his pivot were different. He wasn't looking to do cameos, brand deals or vanity projects. He wanted a second career as a creator and producer, something that could stand on its own apart from basketball. Inside Granity, he treated that goal with the same intensity he once brought to Lakers practices. On THR's Awards Chatter podcast in 2017, Bryant was asked what his life would've looked like without basketball. "I'd be writing stories," he said. "That's something that's just part of me and something that I love every bit as much as I have ever loved basketball." His first major Hollywood collaboration was Muse, the 2015 Showtime doc he made with Gotham Chopra, co-founder of the documentary company Religion of Sports. "Working with Kobe was both exhilarating and exhausting. He was as intense off the court as he was on," Chopra tells THR. Muse wasn't just Bryant's first serious Hollywood project, it was also the beginning of his relationship with Jake Bloch, the young director of photography he later hired to oversee the embedded crew filming his final season. Bryant discussed his doc Muse with co-producer Gotham Chopra (center) and Showtime's Stephen Espinoza in 2014. Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images His next project, the animated short Dear Basketball, pushed him further into the creative world he was building - and in a big way, winning a 2018 Academy Award. To Bryant, it was confirmation that the stories he wanted to tell - and the way he wanted to tell them - could resonate beyond the court. From there, he scaled up. He expanded his team at Granity Studios, developing multiple projects. ESPN ran his basketball-analysis series Detail. His scripted children's podcast, The Punies, was headed toward an animated TV series. "He was world-building and trying to win the pub