Celluloid dreams: local documentarian gets 'nothing wrong"™

The life of a documentary filmmaker has its downsides.

The days of continuous work can be exhausting, with time off a rarity until the project is finally completed. Traveling through various parts of the world without having the time to actually see any of the attractions can be frustrating, but that's not the worst part. Sometimes it takes years to finish an hour-long documentary, and there's the threat of dwindling finances. Funding can dry up, leaving a product languishing in development hell.

With more than 25 years of experience, Craig Davidson has seen it all. Things are a little easier for documentarians now, with the advent of digital videos taking over for costly film, and the Internet aiding in research. When he started off, there were no such luxuries.

"It was a very, very expensive process and there was a point where I had shot all these interviews with the film and we couldn't afford to get them developed," Davidson said. "I had a big freezer in the apartment I rented, and the whole freezer was filled with this film. People said, `When are you going to get rid of this?' and I said, `I'm trying to get a grant.'"

In three words, Davidson summed up his career path.

"Complicated. Hard. Wonderful."

Davidson has created his own independently financed documentaries, and also had the financial safety net of being what he called a "hired hand" for projects that other people were producing. His subjects have included Lamborghinis, Nobel-prize winning author Pearl Buck, and most recently, he's writing the script for a NASCAR documentary. The latter is a subject he previously knew little about, so he credits Google for help in the project.

Still, there's one subject that he always comes back to. The one subject that kick-started his career and put his name on the map. That topic is America's pastime: baseball. As a historian of the game, particularly the Negro leagues that existed before the integration of pro baseball, he inadvertently created a little of his own history when he and a friend tried playing for the Staples baseball team.

"In those years, we decided we were going to grow our hair long, as was popular at the time, but did not bode well with the coach of the baseball team who I think was a former military person," said Davidson, a pitcher and graduate of the class of 1970. "We were thrown off the team."

The local media outlets got wind of what happened, as did the national media. Davidson shied from the spotlight while his friend relished it. Eventually, the student council voted to have the two players put back on the team.

"Initially he threw us out because of our hair, then he had to let us try out and we were cut for a so-called lack of talent," he said.

About 10 years later, Davidson was in Tucson, Ariz. working on segments for a morning news show. He played some baseball in his free time, and one day a teammate's grandfather came to the field and talked to the players. He told some stories about Satchel Paige, a Hall of Fame pitcher who spent decades in the Negro leagues before making it to the majors.

"He had all of us sitting in a circle listening to him," Davidson said. "Whether the stories were true or not, who knows? It was just great storytelling."

Soon after, he began a four-year journey across the country to get all the footage and interviews he needed for his first documentary, There Was Always Sun Shining Someplace, narrated by James Earl Jones.

The hour-long documentary chronicles the Negro leagues, where young black players who weren't allowed in the pros would travel from state to state to play baseball. In the '20s, '30s and beyond segregation was prevalent and the teams had to deal with racism in the north and the south. They played for teams such as the Cleveland Buckeyes, New York Black Yankees and Kansas City Monarchs, all of which no longer exist.

During his research for his first documentary, he accumulated 5,000 negative images. Before the advent of the Internet, he had to hunt down photos, film footage and any other materials he could find throughout the country. He would hear about a former player with a collection of photos, so he'd fly out to St. Louis to see what he had. Same thing happened when he heard about another former player in Chicago. A fan with a collection photos in Philadelphia led to another flight. Cross-country trips were the norm.

For his 2009 documentary Pitching Man: Satchel Paige -- Defying Time, he called "every historical society in Alabama."

"When you do a documentary, it's almost like doing a Ph.D thesis," he said. "It involves so much research and the volume of paperwork you generate between the research, the grant writing ... after the filming finished I wanted to rent billboards because I figured all the paperwork could take up about 10 billboards. It's just extensive."

In Davidson's home, a short walk from Compo Beach, a wall is steeped in baseball memorabilia. Autographed baseballs from legends like Mickey Mantle and Hank Aaron are a part of his collection. His dog is named Satchel, after the baseball player, and the most eye-catching attraction is his fence outside. A historically accurate, detailed mural, painted with the help of his friends, depicts a 1955 World Series game between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers at the long-since-demolished Ebbetts Field.

It's the bottom of the fifth inning and the Yanks are up 5 to 3. Jackie Robinson is shown stealing third base at the day game. Vintage advertisements, such as the one for Schaefer beer boasting "A real hit! Real beer" adds to the atmosphere.

"If you pick a subject that you love, it is so easy in certain ways to be a documentary filmmaker," said Davidson. "It's all about passion. You find something you love."

He has some other documentary projects that have been put on hold, and right now he's about halfway done with a screenplay for a movie, not a documentary. It's a love story revolving around -- what else -- baseball in the '30s.

At the start of his career, the release of There was Always Sun Shining Someplace was a momentous occasion. About 30 friends gathered around a small TV in his Westport apartment to see it. PBS ran the program for years, and even recently Davidson saw it shown on Starz. He won numerous awards when he hit the festival circuit and after the documentary was first shown, his phone was ringing constantly with people offering kind words.

Soon after the premiere, he showed the film to an audience of former Negro league players in Ashland, Ky. If anything was wrong with the documentary, the people in this audience who lived through that experience would know.

Buck Leonard, a Hall of Fame first baseman, got up to the microphone after the screening was over.

"You got nothing wrong," Leonard said.

To Davidson, those four words were better than all the rest.

"It just made us feel that everything -- all the hardship -- that we went through in trying to bring that film to fruition, it was all worth it," he said.