by Logan Miller
FIRST SHOT: Capture the sunrise over the baseball fields.
The camera was set, the sun peaked over the mountains, the dew sparkled in the first rays, and we rolled film. Our first shot as directors was complete. We rolled a second take for insurance. It was intoxicating. We had seized destiny by the throat and strangled the courage out of it.
We loaded our gear onto a golf cart that we had borrowed from the grounds crew and sped over to the stadium clock for our second camera position. An hour later it was time to put actors into the frame.
LOGAN:
I had never been in front of a movie camera before. I was nervous, same as before a big game. But I wasn’t hesitant, wasn’t afraid. There are two types of nervousness: one that wants to delay the action and another that’s eager to get it on. I was eager to get it on, eager to confront the challenge.
“Action,” Noah said.
I walked through the center-field gate with my equipment bag and onto the damp field. “Cut.” There was a technical error. So we shot it again. After a few takes my nerves calmed.
I also made a valuable observation at that moment, one that would inform our decisions not only as actors, but perhaps more importantly, as directors: The actor isn’t the only person who can screw up the scene. Any number of technicians can butcher the take and render it unusable. It’s a bracing concept. It mitigates your stress. What’s even more emancipating is that you shoot more than one take per scene. You get more than one try. If you don’t get it right the first time, try again. If you can bat three hundred in filmmaking, you’re kicking ass. (Similarly, the actor can pull off the greatest two-minute performance of his or her life and it can be unusable for the above-mentioned reasons, be they man-made or machine-made.)
Then the Rockies came out of the locker room. I sat on the grass and stretched with them. They started giving me shit. A guy in the back row, in a girlie voice: “Oh, he’s pretty. I bet he’s an actor. I wanna be in the movie. I wanna be in the movie.” He stood up and pranced and skipped and paraded around the grass like Pippi Longstocking. “Weeeee.”
Fifty guys laughed. A few started mouthing off.
By their estimation, I hadn’t earned the right to be out there. For all they knew I was some Hollywood dick pretending to be a baseball player. These guys had worked their entire life to get here. I hadn’t suffered through eighteen-hour bus rides, slept in one crappy motel after another, traveling so much that you don’t even know where you’re at, what town you’re in, bloated on shitty food that’s been sitting under a heat lamp at a gas station for two days, eating this fried jerky-thing because it’s late and all the restaurants are closed, battling diarrhea the next day as you try to survive the game in the blurring humidity of some southern state, sleeping on buses, forced to live with guys you just met whose mama never taught them how to pick up after themselves.
Nevertheless, all that cruel and unusual punishment still didn’t give them the right to be assholes. But it’s easy to understand why they were. If you had an ulcer at nineteen, you’d be in a bad way too.
I kept my mouth shut. What they didn’t know was that I was a former minor leaguer. I had been in the same position as them years earlier, fighting for a job, fighting for the dream.
I knew that once we started playing catch they would shut up real quick. I could still hold my own on a baseball field, could still throw better than 75 percent of them.
The laughs played off the other laughs. Every guy was now funny and tough. We couldn’t play catch soon enough.
Even the biggest pussy in the group was talking smack.
Finally, we stopped stretching. Everyone grabbed a partner and started playing catch. I grabbed a ball, but nobody would throw with me.
Noah, pissed off, surrounded by shit-talking ballplayers and a skeptical crew, yelled at me.
“Logan, play catch with someone! Let’s go! We need a shot of this!”
But I couldn’t find anyone to play catch with. All the players were standing on the foul line throwing with other guys. Noah spotted a catcher playing three-way. He ran over to him.
“Hey, will you help us out and play catch with my brother?”
The guy nodded grudgingly. Having to play catch with the Hollywood dick was humiliating for him.
I stood on the line and he started backing up. He said something smart as he walked backward into the outfield. Then he threw me the ball. I caught it and threw it back with a little speed on it. It nearly hit him in the chest. His eyes widened, surprised.
“Back up,” I said after a few throws. Then I started throwing bullets. The players started glancing at me, trying not to show too much interest. They could hear the ball whizzing out of my hand, the pop of the glove I was throwing into. Hollywood dicks aren’t supposed to throw like that.
We played catch for about five minutes. A coach called everybody in from the outfield. One of the players asked, “Did you used to play ball?”
“Yeah…I played in the minor leagues for the Toronto Blue Jays.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah, no shit.”
I jogged over to my equipment bag and started putting on my catcher’s gear. For the next couple hours, I traveled from station to station, running through the drills with the catchers, grinding it out with them in the dust and the heat, blocking balls, throwing to bases, working as hard as I could as the camera rolled.
By the end of the drills, I had earned their respect. The next day, I was one of them. They turned out to be a terrific group of guys, and we’ll always be grateful to them for helping us out. We had a lot of fun. My arm is still killing me. Thanks, fellas.
NOAH:
My day started off unexpectedly smooth and pleasant. But the earthquake, tornado, and hurricane were on their way, galloping in all their career-ruining glory alongside the Four Horsemen—the perfect storm of personal disaster. But that’s still a couple hours away.
Back to the smooth and pleasant morning.
We arrived at Reid Park at 5:50 A.M. The parking lot was empty, just us and our film crew: fresh coffee, muffins, doughnuts, songbirds greeting the dawn.
All was at one, the world in harmony—fat pills and caffeine in every belly.
We rattled off a few beauty shots before the minor league players took the field. All was still calm.
In the preceding weeks, we had composed a detailed shot list and taken hundreds of photographs with our digital camera to demonstrate the movements of each scene. We were prepared. We knew what we wanted. However, this brilliant plan was soon to be thrown out like so many other brilliant PLANS the moment it met reality. The turbulence of the day would impose its own style of shooting: improvisational, unrehearsed—all instincts from here on.
There are two preconditions to narrative filmmaking: time and control. Time to set up your equipment, and control of the environment, that is, your actors, props, and crew.
We operated under the conditions of time and control for the first hour of filming. But they were about to evaporate.
Now, the average day of spring training consists of drills in the morning followed by a game in the afternoon. In the morning session, the players move around the field to various stations: fielding ground balls, taking batting practice, base running. The players are typically divided into groups according to their defensive positions. Each group spends roughly fifteen to thirty minutes at each station.
Today, they were spending only TEN.
And that’s where the moviemaking equation starts to fail. The movie needs FIFTEEN minutes. That’s right, FIFTEEN. The Rockies were only giving us TEN. Square peg, round hole. The beginning of chaos.
If you’re operating at light speed, you can execute one camera position, “a setup,” every FIFTEEN minutes. Anything faster than that is assumed to be physically impossible. You can’t just point and shoot. There are numerous measurements and calculations that need to be performed before you can successfully roll film through the camera. If not, the image will
be unacceptable; the audience will laugh your movie out of the theater.
Even more troubling, sound is recorded separately. So you need to have both sound and camera departments, with all their accompanying gear and personnel, operational before you can film. It’s an interdependent relationship—unless you want to shoot a silent movie.
Sure, a few movie crews have moved faster than FIFTEEN minutes. But they are not human. We humans need FIFTEEN.
I was getting massacred. I felt like Custer at Little Big Horn, the players—the Lakota and Cheyenne—circling me on their warhorses, howling, dizzying, as we tried to follow and capture them in the camera.
Lenny, our skinny first AC, lugging around the eighty-pound camera, straining under the weight, was the first to become unhinged. “Where’s the camera going next, Noah? You’re the fucking director! Where’s this fucking thing going?!”
His feet were sinking into the greasy grass, a tomahawk in his back, about to lose his scalp. No wonder he was pissed. I’d led him into a trap.
“Wherever he goes,” I said, pointing to my brother, who was now reliving his dream of professional baseball as I was being riddled with verbal arrows from our crew.
We finally got a shot of Logan stretching with the players, kicking his leg in the air, a shot that made it into the movie. All these shots are called “oner’s,” that is, you only get one chance to get the shot. If we didn’t get the shot, we’d be screwed, no going back and reshooting. This was a one-time opportunity. We didn’t have the luxury of multiple takes or video playback, standard for narrative filmmaking.
The ballplayers were moving around the field too quickly for us to follow, working for only ten minutes at each station. We needed fifteen. The crew was witnessing disaster.
Adapt or fail.
So I started predicting where and what drills the players would do next, anticipating their movements, gambling, giving up one set of drills to capture another. Not trying to film everything. Being selective. If it paid off, we’d get a shot. If not, oh well, same outcome as if we tried to move with them. Had to gamble. Had to risk everything.
The environment became exhilarating for our crew. It was novel. Here we were, running around the spring training complex, five fields in all, with a full-access pass, throwing the camera in the middle of the action, shooting a narrative film in a documentary fashion.
Ricardo knew less about baseball than any American we’d ever met: pitcher, hitter, third base were all foreign words. But this was a good thing for us. He’d put the camera wherever we wanted. His ignorance made him fearless of the destructive powers of a screaming line drive. He did a great job, a brave job.
We threw the camera behind the pitcher’s mound during batting practice, alongside the catcher’s in the bullpen, extremely hazardous and yet fantastic positions to film from. An errant line drive or throw would have ended the shoot. But the stakes made it all the more exciting. If we were going down, at least we’d go down with our balls on the anvil.
By the time the Rockies broke for lunch, we had twenty-five setups in the can, the equivalent of a day and a half of work. At 9 A.M., the crew had no confidence in its directors. By lunchtime, they’d follow us anywhere.
THE STADIUM AND A MAN CALLED HONCHO
IT WAS A dramatic set piece; finely manicured grass, stadium seats, towers of lights, and a wooden outfield wall with old-style billboards painted on it. We saw it and had to shoot it. We wrote a scene for it on the spot.
It would add considerable production value; make our little movie look like a big movie, or at least not an impoverished one.
We phoned Peter Catalanotte at the Tucson Film Office.
“Peter, we wanna shoot at the stadium.”
“It’s gonna be expensive, guys.”
“We need it for free.”
He laughed. “I’ll see what I can do, see if they’ll waive the fee for you guys.”
“Give us the phone number and we’ll tag team them. We don’t have much time.”
Peter gave us the number.
We phoned the guy in charge of the stadium. Let’s call him “Honcho.” He wasn’t in his office. We left a message. Honcho returned our call at 6 A.M. the following morning. No joke. That’s right. 6 A.M. on the nose. This guy was tough, ate cow teeth and vampire piss for breakfast. We were working out at Gold’s Gym in Tucson and the call went straight to voice mail. Here’s what he said:
“This is Honcho. I got word you wanted to film inside the stadium, wanted some kind of discount. No discount, guys. You either come up with the money or find a way to make your movie without it.”
The stadium cost $1,500 for the night. Sounds cheap. But on our budget, impossible. A studio would have written a check for ten times that amount, without so much as a chili dog burp from one of their accountants.
So we called back Honcho and persuaded him to meet us down at the Rockies spring training complex, in person. This was no easy task, even though his office was a hundred yards away. It took fifteen minutes of pleading over the phone.
“You must be the movie guys,” Honcho said as he stepped out of his golf cart. His sunglasses were huge.
“Yes, sir,” we said, shaking his hand.
“I know you movie guys. You cry broke when you’re swimming in cash.”
“We are broke.”
“Sure you are. I know you movie guys. You roll into town like you own the place. Well, guess what? There’s no red carpet here.”
“We’re not a studio, sir. We’re an independent film company.”
It didn’t register with him. All movie guys were the same.
We pitched him on the merits of the project, about our sponsors and endorsements: Panavision, Kodak, FotoKem, yada yada yada. Surely he could flow with the spirit of the film—the spirit of giving. We needed to shoot inside the stadium, at a discount—the 90 percent-type discount.
“Find the money,” he would say. “I know you movie guys.”
“If we could, we would, sir. The stadium is worth ten times what you’re asking. We’re not a studio. This is an independent film, a grant project.”
“Find the money.”
“We used to live in Tucson.”
He didn’t hear that one. No matter what we said, he repeated his mantra: “I know you movie guys.”
We continued pleading.
He wasn’t budging.
It was looking bleak.
And then our dad intervened again.
Jon, the head groundskeeper, walked over. “Hey, Honcho…Hey, Logan, hey, Noah.”
Honcho hadn’t felt a shock like this since the lightning storm of ’92.
“Jon, you know these guys?” Honcho threw up his hands. “You don’t know any movie guys, Jon…How do you know these guys?…Why didn’t you tell me you knew these guys?”
“These are Anthony Sander’s friends. He named one of his sons after them. My dad is married to Anthony’s mother-in-law. Logan and Anthony played ball together with the Blue Jays.”
Anthony is a Tucson legend, an all-American high school football player, major leaguer, and Olympic gold medal winner. His name is high currency. It’s backed by gold, literally.
Honcho paused. He turned and walked a few paces, looked down at the green grass and then up to the blue sky, mentally wrestling with colors. He wasn’t in the charity business. He had a reputation for being a hard-ass, was paid to be a hard-ass. He needed to maintain that image.
He took a deep breath, held it in, then sighed. His sunglasses were huge.
“Can you make your film without the stadium?” Honcho asked.
“No, sir.”
“C’mon! Why not?! A field is a field.”
He knew this wasn’t true.
Then Noah said, “At this moment in the movie, sir, the brothers are living their childhood dream. They’re on their way. Just imagine it, alone in a stadium under the lights, taking batting practice with your brother, a dream that you’ve shared together your entire life. Every
kid dreams of practicing in his own private stadium. It’s a magical scene…We need that stadium, sir.”
“The stadium does look pretty damn good right now,” Jon added.
Honcho sighed, looked down at the green grass again and back up at the blue sky.
“Let’s take a walk, Jon.”
They walked and talked. We watched them for five minutes. They came back. Honcho spoke.
“You guys are lucky that Jon is a good man.” Honcho had found a way to save face and be a nice guy at the same time. He had to maintain the perception that he was a hard-ass. And Jon could rescue him from his reputation.
“Can you guys afford five hundred dollars?” Honcho asked.
“No, sir.” It was the truth. We couldn’t.
Honcho shook his head. What can I do with these guys? He looked down to green, looked up to blue. Make them go AWAY. He frowned, put his palm on his forehead. Then he said:
“Fine. Here’s what I can do for you. You’re lucky Jon likes you two, ’cause I don’t. The only reason I’m doing this is because of Jon. He’s a great worker…Jon said he’s willing to stick around Saturday night and open up the stadium for you. You gotta be out of there by eleven-thirty. City ordinance.”
“No problem,” we said.
“How much can you guys pay? I’m not going to let Jon do this for free, you hear me?”
“That’s all right, Honcho,” Jon interrupted. “I don’t mind helping these guys out.”
“No way!” Honcho said, slamming the heel of his cowboy boot into the grass. “These guys are gonna come up with something to pay you, Jon. They need to pay you something.” Honcho pointed at Jon, then at us. “I know you movie guys.”
We stood there silent.
Honcho threw his arms in the air again, exasperated. “You’ll pay Jon two hundred and nothing less. You hear me, Jon?” He looked hard at Jon. “I don’t care if you boys have to sell Kool-Aid to come up with the money. If anyone asks, I don’t know about this. I don’t know who you are. If someone calls me about a film crew inside the stadium, as far as I know, you guys are trespassing…I don’t know any movie guys.”