Hollywood Steps Up to the Plate

In the wake of the recently ended baseball strike, attendance at major league games is down more than 26% while interest in professional basketball and football has surged.

In Hollywood, however, baseball has seldom been more popular. In the past few weeks, the Walt Disney Co. has bought a one-quarter interest in the California Angels, while three major baseball-themed film projects have moved closer to fruition.

Disney has already committed to a film on the life of the late Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente, while deals reportedly are near on a Jackie Robinson biography and a film adaptation of Roger Kahn’s highly acclaimed 1971 book “The Boys of Summer.”

Spike Lee is pitching the movie on Robinson, who broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947 when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers and became the first African American to play on a major league team in the modern era. Lee said recently that he expects to reach agreement with an unnamed studio shortly.

“We’re about to sign with someone,” he said, “but I don’t want to jinx it by saying anything before the signatures are on the contracts.”

Lee, who spoke from a New York location shoot for his current project, “Girl 6,” has spent several months researching Robinson’s life and hopes to begin work on the script this summer. He plans to release the film in the spring of 1997 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Robinson’s big-league debut.

The film is “going to cost $40 million, at least,” Lee said, a prediction that apparently scared off some studios. Denzel Washington, who played Malcolm X in Lee’s 1992 film on the African American leader, is expected to be cast in the lead in this movie as well. And as he did with “Malcolm X,” Lee promises that his portrait of Robinson will not ignore the baseball pioneer’s more controversial moments, such as his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee and his son Jackie Jr.’s drug use and violent death in a perhaps suicidal car crash.

“We believe in our heart of hearts that this will be the definitive film on Jackie Robinson,” said Lee, who is working with Robinson’s widow, Rachel. “We don’t want to do this film on the cheap. We think that Jackie is one of the key figures in history in the 20th Century. Jackie was much more than a baseball player. This is not going to be a baseball movie.”

Nor, apparently, will it be the only Jackie Robinson project. Ken Burns, creator of the acclaimed PBS documentary “Baseball,” has been talking to screenwriters about a feature film on the late Dodger star. “He’s always been intrigued by Robinson’s life,” said a spokeswoman for Burns.

Nely Galan and Reuben Gonzalez, co-producers of the Clemente film, will be joined on the Disney project by “Hoop Dreams” producers Steve James and Peter Gilbert.

“I don’t see it at all as just a baseball story. He could have been doing something else with his life,” the Cuba-born Galan said. “My God, it’s so not a baseball story.”

Gonzalez, who has written and directed a variety of projects from “The Cosby Show” to the American Folk Theater, will write the Clemente screenplay. A first draft is expected by September, and barring extensive rewrites, casting could begin shortly afterward.

But major projects on Clemente’s life have reached this stage before, only to be derailed before one frame was shot.

“Way back, maybe six months after his death, [Columbia Pictures] wanted to do something. Roger Kahn was going to write the script, and he spent a week with me researching,” said Puerto Rican journalist Luis Mayoral, now the Latin American liaison for the Texas Rangers. “But nothing happened.”

And even as recently as two years ago, Arriba Films and novelist David Saperstein began work on a film they planned to release in time for the unveiling of a Clemente statue at the 1994 All-Star Game in Pittsburgh. But that project stalled as well.

In fact, Roberto Clemente Jr. said he has lost track of the number of suitors who have badgered his family for the rights to his father’s story.

It’s easy to understand why so many people are interested in the tale: Clemente’s life touched on virtually every classic hero motif.

The youngest of seven children born to the foreman of a crew of sugar-cane cutters in San Anton, Puerto Rico, Clemente rose from those humble beginnings to become the first Latin American inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. During an 18-year career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Clemente won four National League batting titles, won both a league and a World Series Most Valuable Player award, was named to 12 All-Star teams and was the 10th player in history to compile 3,000 hits.

Yet Clemente is probably best remembered for the way he died. On New Year’s Eve, 1972, a week after a powerful earthquake leveled Managua, Nicaragua, Clemente left San Juan, Puerto Rico, in a plane packed with relief supplies for quake victims. But the dangerously overloaded DC-7 plunged into the sea less than two miles from the airport, and Clemente’s body was never recovered. (He died just a few months after Robinson.)

The fact that Clemente’s short life--he died at 38--was so eventful has made his family cautious about selling the rights to his story, his son said. Cautious, that is, until they met Galan. When she knocked on the door of Clemente’s house in Puerto Rico last June, it soon became apparent that she had three advantages that set her pitch apart from previous projects: She had no preconceived image of Clemente, she spoke fluent Spanish and she had screenwriter Gonzalez, a Puerto Rican, at her side.

A nonstop talker with an infectious enthusiasm, Galan, who at age 31 heads her own production company, quickly won over Clemente’s widow, Vera.

“My mom is absolutely in love with this woman,” said Roberto Clemente Jr., who will serve as an associate producer on the film. And, “we feel very comfortable, very confident with Reuben.”

But the Clementes are not the only ones who have had uneven relations with Hollywood. Kahn resisted calls for changes to the Clemente project script he was commissioned to write, and as a result the film was never made.

A short time later, a screen version of his “The Boys of Summer” was being developed. The book followed many of the stars of the powerhouse Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s--which Kahn covered as a young sportswriter--into their uncertain, bittersweet and sometimes tragic retirements.

Carl Erskine, who exemplified the Dodgers’ tenaciousness when he continued to pitch despite crippling pain, is shown displaying a quieter courage trying to raise a mentally handicapped son. Roy Campanella, once the National League’s Most Valuable Player, is left a quadriplegic after a car accident. Robinson, an inspiration to millions, offers remorse for ignoring the only people who should have mattered to him--his family.

At one point, a casting director suggested a big-name actor for the part of Carl Furillo, who was renowned for his strong throws from the outfield.

“Can he throw?” Kahn asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” the casting director replied. “He’s bankable.”

“So,” Kahn remembers, “I suggested that Mary Tyler Moore could play Carl Furillo because she was bankable too.”

But Kahn is unreservedly backing the latest treatment of his book. He has reviewed the screenplay--written by close friend Ring Lardner Jr. (“MASH,” “Woman of the Year”), son of the legendary baseball writer of the 1920s and ‘30s--and calls it “terrific.”

Brad Krevoy and Steve Stabler (“Threesome,” “Dumb and Dumber”) of the Motion Picture Corp. of America, along with Jim Moskovitz, reportedly will produce the movie. Krevoy and Stabler were unavailable for comment.

“It’s in the middle of negotiations and it seems to be on the brink of fruition,” Kahn confirmed. “And I’m delighted because of the screenwriter.”