Valley Filmmakers Hit Home With ‘Aaron’ Documentary

Hammerin’ Hank Aaron kneels in the on-deck circle, a lone figure on television, waiting for a chance to break Babe Ruth’s home-run record. Images flicker like ghosts across the screen. A winking Ruth. A Ku Klux Klan rally. Hate mail from people who cannot bear to watch a black man overtake the Babe.

“He had the burden of a whole race on his shoulders,” says Andrew Young.

Aaron swings two bats, loosening those lightning-quick wrists. There is footage of Martin Luther King Jr. A burning cross. Don Newcombe, the former Dodger pitcher, says: “Look what he had to go through. Look what he endured.”

The greatest home-run hitter of all time was not anxious to see his life turned into a movie.

“I wasn’t going to do it if it was strictly a baseball film,” Aaron recalled in a telephone interview from his Atlanta office. “If people wanted to know about me as a baseball player, they could go to a library and look up the statistics.”

Filmmakers Mike Tollin and Brian Robbins had something more in mind. Brainstorming in their office, a converted house on a quiet North Hollywood street, they saw baseball as an entree into the weightier issue of race in America. They wanted to tell the story of an athlete who performed historic feats amid taunts from the crowd, whose home runs could not keep pace with death threats that arrived each day by mail.

“You start scratching the surface and you find layer after layer,” Tollin said. “You find more than you ever imagined.”

Monday night, “Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream” stands to win an Academy Award as one of five nominees for best feature documentary.

On their journey to the nomination, Tollin and Robbins had to travel the country to confront old ballplayers with old demons. They had to sell a major cable network on 96 intense and often somber minutes that, as Robbins put it, “did not smell like a ratings winner.” And they had to face critics who scorned the unorthodox documentary techniques they used to portray Aaron’s ordeal.

But first, and perhaps toughest of all, they had to convince Aaron that they could do justice to his story.

*

There is footage of a smiling Jackie Robinson celebrating with teammates after a victory. There is footage of grim black soldiers in a segregated battalion during World War II.

“Most of all,” says Harry Belafonte, “the integration of baseball meant that we had struck a severe blow against American mythology that black people were genetically inferior.”

*

Alabama was still segregated during Aaron’s youth. Major league baseball was still, as he says, “a white man’s game.” It wasn’t until 1947, when Aaron was 13, that the Brooklyn Dodgers broke the color barrier by adding Robinson to their roster.

So Aaron’s career, which began with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro League, would thereafter mirror the civil rights struggle. In 1953, as a prospect in the Boston Braves organization, he and two teammates became the first black players on a minor league club in Jacksonville, Fla. On Sept. 23, 1957, the same day that white mobs attacked blacks at Little Rock Central High School, Aaron was carried off the field by teammates and fans after hitting an 11th-inning homer to win the National League pennant for the then-Milwaukee Braves. A newspaper noted the coincidence in a story headlined, “Negro ‘Mobbed’ in Milwaukee.”

But the most dramatic events were reserved for the early 1970s as the right fielder approached 714 career home runs. After Aaron received a number of death threats, the now-Atlanta Braves hired a bodyguard to stand on the field with a .38 snub-nose pistol in a binocular case. Aaron remained in semi-seclusion, using code names to communicate with his family when traveling. He tied Ruth’s record on April 4, 1974, the anniversary of King’s assassination, and complained afterward that baseball officials had denied his request for a pregame moment of silence.

Tollin and Robbins yearned to put all this on film. They had just finished “Hardwood Dreams,” an hourlong Fox special about the basketball team at Morningside High School in Inglewood. Before that, Tollin won an Emmy for his 1990 CBS documentary, “Let Me Be Brave,” about a dozen mentally disabled Californians who attempted to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. Videotapes of these movies were sent to Atlanta in hopes of convincing a skeptical Aaron.

“The inquisition,” Robbins calls it. The filmmakers sent references and Aaron’s assistant called every one of them.

In the meantime, Denzel Washington came aboard as an executive producer and flew east to talk with Aaron. “Any time someone wants to do your life, well, the guy has been burned and he might have been gunshy,” Washington said. “I wanted to hear what he had to say. I wanted to know how he felt.”

Months passed. Ultimately, it was a face-to-face meeting with Tollin that proved persuasive.

“I guess I’m a pretty good judge of character,” Aaron said. “After sitting down and talking with Mike, hearing him talk about his family, I knew he had his head on right.”

*

Willie McCovey, former San Francisco Giant: “People could actually see us out there, hand in hand, side and side by the white players, and they could see us intermingling. They know that that wasn’t going on in the neighborhood.”

Former President Jimmy Carter: “It was sports, racially integrated sports teams, that brought about the change that I think has saved the South. And I would not have ever been considered seriously as a presidential candidate had that not been done before I ran for office.”

Newcombe on Martin Luther King Jr.: “Martin said to me a month before he died, at my home, at my dinner table, he said, ‘Don, you and Jackie and Roy [Campanella] will never know how easy you make it for me to do my job.”

Richard Cecil, former Atlanta Braves executive: “Henry was at 650 [home runs] with a great shot at going ahead, you know. So the writers and everybody started writing a lot more about the assault on Ruth’s record. And, you know, the mail started coming.”

*

There were more than a hundred interviews to be conducted in four months. The task fell mainly to Tollin, who crisscrossed the nation to meet with Aaron’s family, political leaders and players both past and present.

These people were eager to speak of Aaron as a friend and an athlete. As a result, the film seems--appropriately or not--like a testimonial at times. But confronting racism proved trickier. Some players, including Willie Mays and Stan Musial, had given considerably more thought to Aaron’s ability to hop on a fastball than to the significance of his struggles. Warren Spahn used the opportunity to discuss his own reputation.

A teammate of Aaron’s in Milwaukee, Spahn had been the subject of unflattering newspaper reports, including one that had the Hall-of-Fame pitcher spotting a cockroach on its back and telling the team’s trainer: “Hey, Doc, come turn Hank over.” When approached by Tollin, Spahn defended himself energetically. Little of what he said was germane to the film.

“These things are hard,” Tollin said. “You have to keep digging and digging.”

But as time wore on, more and more people addressed the social issues. Everyone from Ken Griffey Jr. to Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) agreed to speak on camera, as did the usually reticent Sandy Koufax. Carter showed up for his scheduled interview just 24 hours after returning from negotiations in Haiti.

Good fortune arrived in small ways, too. Tollin hustled television and newspaper interviews in every city he visited, publicizing his search for mementos from Aaron’s playing days. In Phoenix, a retired television producer dug up old 2-inch videotapes from his garage. A New Jersey collector offered the use of vintage Milwaukee Braves uniforms. And when Tollin spoke on a radio talk show in Jacksonville, Fla., he received an unexpected tip about two men who had run onto the field after Aaron’s record-breaking homer.

“Someone called to say that he had a friend who played golf with the brother of one of those guys,” Tollin recalled.

On film, the pair chuckle and thank Aaron’s bodyguard for having shown restraint when they jogged beside Aaron from second to third base. They provide a lighthearted moment amid the 3,000 pages of interviews and 60 hours of videotape culled for the movie.

*

The scene is shot in black and white. A young actor, portraying Henry Aaron as a boy, delivers a block of ice to a country filling station. A crowd gathers around a radio to listen to the Brooklyn Dodgers play the New York Yankees in the World Series.

“Because of Jackie,” the voice-over explains, “black folks all over America were suddenly Brooklyn Dodger fans.”

The men wear snap-brimmed hats. A woman in a summer dress fans herself.

“Listening to that radio, we felt like the Dodgers were playing for all of us.”

*

Having collected the facts, Tollin and Robbins sought to tell Aaron’s saga in dramatic fashion. They commissioned a haunting musical score. Beyond that, their vision dictated several controversial choices.

First, they decided to portray key incidents from Aaron’s youth by filming actors in scripted reenactments. This technique proved particularly memorable in the case of the filling station vignette, combining elements of sport and race in a single visual tableaux. Yet some critics disapproved.

“The re-creations are disturbing enough to detract from Mr. Tollin’s good intentions and filmmaking abilities,” wrote Richard Sandomir in a New York Times review. “If eyewitnesses are abundantly available (and if actual locations are available to set the scenes for recollections), then re-creations are unneeded, especially when Mr. Aaron’s family and friends were such delightful storytellers.”

Even more controversial were decisions regarding Aaron himself. Washington convinced the filmmakers to use an actor--Dorian Harewood as it turned out--to read the ballplayer’s words for the narration. “My concern was to tell the story in the best way possible and let the chips fall where they may,” Washington said. Subsequently, Tollin and Robbins chose not to use on-camera interviews with Aaron.

“There was a sense of Henry as a mythical character,” Tollin explained. “Every time we saw him, there he was in the flesh and it took away from that mythic quality.”

Each word of narration, each reenactment, was carefully reported and corroborated, according to the filmmakers. But some vignettes were also made to look scratchy, like authentic footage, blurring the line between fact and fiction. Again, critics grumbled.

“Viewers can be excused for feeling manipulated, particularly since such efforts aren’t necessary,” wrote Jonathan Taylor of Daily Variety. “Aaron’s record speaks for itself, and when it doesn’t, real archival footage and the testimony of his peers do.”

*

Dusty Baker, San Francisco Giants manager and former Aaron teammate: “The chase, man, that . . . should have been the happiest time of his life, but it was probably the ugliest time of his life, really.”

Dorinda Aaron, daughter: “I couldn’t really go outside and play as much as I wanted to. I could only stay in front of the house. I was scared for him. I was scared because he was out there in the field and I didn’t know what would happen to him, if anybody would try anything while his back was to the crowd.”

Cecil, Braves executive: “We had an awful lot of unsigned Klan mail with very crude drawings.”

Television footage from April 8, 1974, shows Aaron hitting his record home run and trotting the bases to fireworks and wild cheering. Vin Scully, announcing the game, says: “A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South.”

During an ensuing ceremony at home plate, Aaron smiles.

“I’d just like to say to all the fans here this evening that I just thank God it’s all over with.”

*

“Surprisingly downbeat,” wrote Dennis Hunt in the Los Angeles Times. “Not the usual sports-documentary fluff.”

“Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream” aired last April on TBS, where Aaron works as a corporate vice president. The broadcast attracted a 2.8 rating, respectable by the cable network’s standards.

The Associated Press called the film “stark, chilling.” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette praised it for conveying “a strong sense of history.” In September, it was nominated for an Emmy. Then came last month’s Academy Award nomination.

“For the Emmy, we were jumping up and down, yelling and screaming,” said Debra Martin Chase, who was Washington’s partner on the production. “But the Oscar, that was just total and complete shock.”

For Tollin and Robbins, success confirms the idea that struck them two years ago, a vision they worked so hard to explain to a skeptical sports legend. If anything, they seem most pleased to have prevailed on Aaron, who may have been their toughest critic.

Since the Oscar nomination, Aaron talks about “walking around with my chest bulging.” But there is a deeper satisfaction for the man who retired in 1976 with 755 home runs, the last of the active Negro League players.

“My mother always said, ‘You’ve got a tongue, you’ve got a mouth, you’ve got brains. As long as you are telling the truth, you should always reveal it,’ ” he said. “If something happened, I will tell about it. That’s exactly what this film is about. It’s about the injustice I went through.”

DETAILS

* WHAT: “Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream.”

* WHERE: TBS.

* WHEN: 7 p.m. Sunday.