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.