Bobby Fischer against the world

Originally produced as a documentary in 2010.

Special features: Featurettes: The fight for Fischer's estate (6 min.); Chess history (2 min.); Text features: Filmmakers bio; About Docurama; Docurama trailers (9 min.).

tSetting the stakes -- The lone American -- Training in the Catskills -- Hiding away -- Regina Rischer -- To destroy a genius -- "And that's when chess exploded" -- A new world champion -- Bobby disappears -- Getting back in the box -- Icelandic citizenship -- End credits.

Produced and directed by Liz Garbus ; Produced by Rory Kennedy, Stanley Buchthal, Matthew JustusEditors, Karen Schmeer, Michael Levine ; cinematography, Robert Chappell ; original music, Philip Sheppard ; featuring the photographs of Harry Benson.

Commentators, David Edmonds, Anthony Saidy, Susan Polgar, Henry Kissinger, David Shenk, Gudmundur Thorarinsson,Garry Kasparov, Russell Targ, Larry Evans, Shelby Lyman, Sam Sloan, Malcolm Gladwell, Fernand Gobet, Dick Cavett, Harry Sneider, Harry Benson, Paul Marshall, Fridrick Olafsson, Saemi Palsson, Clea Benson, Lothar Schmid, Nikolai Krogius, Asa Hoffman, Paul Marshall, Anatoly Karpov, Kari Stefansson.

In the '70s, Chess was a Cold War sport. Since the end of WWII, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had been locked in mortal combat for supremacy of just about everything, and Bobby Fischer was America's hope. Chess prodigies aren't that rare, but Bobby Fischer made chess sexy, an almost impossible task. He captured the world's imagination, and he proved that the U.S. could produce a champion in a game where the winners always seemed to be Russians. Chess would seem to make a terrible spectator sport, but somehow this man ratcheted all of it up to new heights. Chess fans will find it short on details on what made his game unique, but most will find this a great portrait of a man who was so brilliant that it made him intensely unhappy. He couldn't handle his own genius, and in the end, that was what destroyed him. He wasn't a man against the world, but rather a man against himself. That was the one opponent he could never best.

DVD