Director Jimmy Jenkins had more than 130 years and literally thousands of players, games and big moments from which to choose in making his new Alabama football documentary “Nothing But A Winner,” but you can’t fit all that into a little less than two hours.

So Jenkins had to be selective, he said in an interview with AL.com on Tuesday. In the film — which has its invitation-only premiere Wednesday night in Birmingham followed by a wider theatrical release on July 31 — Jenkins seeks to tie together the Paul “Bear” Bryant and Nick Saban eras of Crimson Tide football, while spotlighting the experience of Alabama’s pioneering Black players and their relationships with their famous coaches.

“This story could be told a hundred different ways, so there’s so many different ways you can take it,” said Jenkins, a Maryland native who played small college football in Illinois before becoming a full-time filmmaker. “We had to find one through line and tell it that way. Now, if we were doing a four-, five-, six-part series, we would have time to dive into everything. There was so much of this story that deserved to be in it, but we just didn’t have the time to do it.

“… One of the things that I wanted to kind of really focus on was the African-American experience through the Alabama football program and through the state. And so we were able to talk to a lot of those guys who integrated the team and to see how the doors they opened helped Alabama football to become what it is today. … We also wanted to show how Bryant and Saban had a very similar process that they put their players through and how the ingredients for winning never change.”

“Nothing But A Winner” — which takes its name from Bryant’s famous quip about how he’d like to be remembered — packs in interviews with more than two dozen former Alabama players and archival footage from Crimson Tide games and practices, as well as major news events of the last half-century-plus. Among those featured in the film are such Crimson Tide legends as Sylvester Croom, Gene Stallings, Wilbur Jackson, Bobby Humphrey, Antonio Langham and Jeremiah Castille, along with more recent stars like Jalen Hurts, CJ Mosley, Jonathan Allen, Jaylen Waddle and HaHa Clinton-Dix.

Jenkins and his team, which includes former Alabama star Marlon Humphrey as executive producer and former Crimson Tide walk-on-turned-actor Caleb Castille as a producer, also secured a rare, lengthy sit-down interview with Saban. Caleb Castille — whose father starred on Bryant’s last Alabama teams and whose older brothers Tim and Simeon preceded him in Tuscaloosa in the early 2000s — said his former coach’s participation in the film is a “shining example of humility.”

“He’s somebody that’s done it all at the highest level — winning championships, setting all the records,” said Castille, who began his acting career portraying former Alabama football star Tony Nathan in the 2015 feature film Woodlawn and later co-starred for four seasons on the CBS series NCIS: Los Angeles, “and to see him sitting there and saying that he believes Coach Bryant was the greatest of all-time is really amazing. It was super-special having him to just even agree to be part of this thing.

“I was a walk-on there, it’s not like I contributed anything majorly to his success. I was just a role-playing guy. But as soon as I called on Coach Saban to be a part of this, there was no hesitation from him. That is him being a coach that will always root for and celebrate and support his guys.”

The Saban era at Alabama gets a full treatment in “Nothing But A Winner”, from the Crimson Tide’s re-emergence as a national power in 2008-09 to the program’s run of perennial dominance in the 2010s. Saban and Hurts provide keen insight into the story of how Hurts won the starting quarterback job as a freshman in 2016, lost it to Tua Tagovailoa during halftime of the national championship game in January 2018 and then had his redemption while filling in for the injured Tagovailoa in the following season’s SEC championship game.

However, many of the more poignant moments in the film come from the older former players. Jackson relates the story of how he became Alabama’s first Black scholarship player in 1970, while Croom tells of growing up in segregated Tuscaloosa and later becoming an All-America center and a long-time assistant coach to Bryant, who had such an effect on him that he is still moved to tears when discussing his former coach’s 1983 death.

“Croom talked about where he had to sit in the back of the bus (growing up) or he was being spit on or he couldn’t even talk to white men,” Jenkins said. “But what encouraged me so much is that this man is breaking down about the impact a white man had on his life. And it shows that Alabama is a great state and that there are great people in that state.

“And even with Jim Crow and all that, there are people like Coach Bryant, who opened so many doors for these Black players to give a life that they’re living now. It’s rare to see players cry about a coach. You really have to mean something. And for me to be able to see that, it touched my heart.”

The teaser trailer for “Nothing But A Winner” is posted above, with a more extensive trailer available HERE. For more information on the film, including a list of future showings, visit Fathom Entertainment’s website.