The Atlanta Braves were a baseball team on the on the rise in 1984. They were managed by future Hall of Famer, Joe Torre, and they had a two-time Most Valuable Player in centerfielder Dale Murphy. They were still owned by Ted Turner and their games were televised on his cable TV Superstation, TBS, my employer at the time.
Two seasons earlier, TBS had produced a marvelous documentary about the Braves and their surprising emergence as a National League West contender. Glenn Diamond, with whom I worked at TBS on The Coors Sports Page, produced this behind the scenes look at the Braves and their division-winning season and called it A Long Way to October. Its host was an icon in the world of baseball play-by-play broadcasting, Red Barber, who was about 115 years old at the time. Through hidden mikes and closed-door access, Glenn and his crew cobbled together an inside look at the game unlike anything else previously done. So naturally, it needed to be topped and I was called upon to write it.
I was still doing features as a reporter for The Coors Sports Page but though this new assignment was behind the scenes, it was a great opportunity to bring my writing skills into the light for a bigger audience. It made me a more versatile commodity and, as a result, more valuable. That could only help me in the future.
We were going to follow––and sort of pester––four players from different aspects of the game from the starting lineup to the bullpen. We started in spring training and stationed a crew at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium for almost every game of the season. Since TBS also aired the games nightly, we had that additional footage to mix with the original behind the scenes stuff for which our cameraman, Jack Frost, and director, Rohan Backfisch, were responsible.
I felt that as the writer of this epic, my job was simple; simple but not easy. It just looked that way, and in the early stages of the project it pretty much was. I observed the season unfolding, usually from the comfort of the press box and I spent the bulk of the summer dining on press box food, drinking press box coffee, and contemplating story lines we wanted to pursue as we saw them develop.
We made a few road trips with the team, which for a baseball fan of long standing like me, was like snagging backstage passes to The Beatles North American tour. Though I tried not to show it, I was giddy whenever we boarded a charter plane, rode the team bus to another ballpark, talked to players at their homes, or stood at the end of the dugout during a game. I may have been older than most of the players on the team, but I was emotionally only 14 years-old when it came to baseball, so this was heaven to me.
As the season waned, the Braves didn’t look as though they were going to make the playoffs. That made no difference for our purposes. We still had two hours of television to put together and we needed to decide on a host. Would we get another broadcasting legend? A former player? How about a Hollywood celebrity? They didn’t necessarily have to have a connection with baseball, though it might help.
We finally landed on Kirk Douglas, who watched the Braves frequently on TBS. He said that whenever he saw a shot of Joe Torre and his pitching coach, Bob Gibson, side-by-side in the dugout, he was reminded of another black and white power couple, Bill Cosby and Robert Culp on the groundbreaking TV show, I Spy. That was apparently enough to at least get Kirk onto the short list of potential hosts. That and the fact that he was one of the biggest names in Hollywood, even though his most notable career achievements were behind him. He wasn’t just a great actor; he was a movie star. He was Spartacus. He was Vincent Van Gogh and Einar the Viking. He was a movie star before movie stars started flaunting their movie starness on reality TV. He was perfect.
During the second half of the season Glenn and I headed to the West Coast to meet with our host and were ushered into Kirk’s surprisingly modest home in Beverly Hills. I say modest because it wasn’t a stately mansion like the Clampetts’ from the outside, but upon entering, you could see that the one-level floor plan extended back approximately four miles. Original artwork lined the walls and every room was accessorized with at least one large ashtray, and each ashtray held a different brand of cigarettes, this in spite of the fact that neither Kirk nor his wife, Ann, smoked.
We started our first meeting in one of the front rooms. Kirk, 68 years old at the time, was dressed in a blue velour running-suit and looked the picture of health. I was just 31 and Glenn 26 so despite his energetic appearance, we felt we were talking to a fossil from Hollywood’s golden age, a well-preserved and vital fossil to be sure, but a senior citizen nonetheless.
The first thing Kirk wanted to know from us was the answer to a simple question: “What’s your theme?” Neither Glenn nor I seemed shaken by a question we would have been wise to ask ourselves, oh, I don’t know, seven months earlier. Neither were we prepared for it. So we babbled on about the concept for the show––we’re following these four guys, you see––but Kirk kept at us.
“Get your theme,” he urged us as if to say that before doing anything, we needed to lay a foundation, which would give direction for every frame of footage we were going to shoot and every interview we were going to conduct. That was great advice…if we were having that discussion/lecture in February instead of June.
Kirk, not one to mince words, said after a brief discussion with these apparent halfwits from Atlanta, “Do you guys know what you’re doing?” We assumed it was not a rhetorical question and answered that yes, we two products of the California State University System were very confident in what we were doing. Come on, I had almost ten years experience as a reporter to go along with my seven months as a writer of documentaries. But we were willing to concede that someone who had been in 74 movies to that point, had produced ten films, directed two, and written, uh, a documentary, might have one or two insights worth listening to. So we did. And we tried our best to “get our theme.”
We met Kirk again at his office a few weeks later with a first draft of the script. Seated at a table with our host, I was waiting for him to tell me this was either the greatest thing he’d read since Lust for Life or that, despite his instruction, we had obviously not gotten our theme, this so-called script was pure dreck, and he would assign the writing to one of his minions. But he actually liked it.
“‘Grace under pressure,’” he read thoughtfully from the pages before him. “Who said that?” I thought the answer was obvious.
“I did,” I proudly crowed.
“No, I’ve heard that somewhere else,” Kirk mused.
So not only had I not gotten my theme, now I was a plagiarist. How was I to know, with Google still 14 years away, that “grace under pressure” was Ernest Hemingway’s description of Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea? I never even read it.
All in all, Kirk was pleased. Our next step was to head back to Atlanta, polish up the script, and prepare for the arrival of our on-camera host. The show now had a title: Baseball: Behind the Seams.
We had saved the last weekend of the season for Kirk to do his eighteen stand-ups at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. That’s a lot of set-up and a lot of equipment, equipment more suited to shooting movies than the kind of news stories I was used to producing. We rented a crane, laid down tracks in the outfield for dolly shots, and even rented a motor home and parked it inside the stadium for our host’s personal use. It was in that Winnebago where Kirk told me over lunch of ham and potato salad that yes, he was Jewish, but obviously not observant. (That would change several years later after a near-death experience in a helicopter, when Kirk––born Issur Danielovitch––returned to his ancestral religious roots.)
The one area of the production that we gave short shrift to was wardrobe. Kirk showed up in a casual khaki jacket over his sport shirt and jeans and as we were doing a run-through on the field, our executive producer (and my boss), Don Ellis, asked, “What will he be wearing when we actually shoot?” After we said, “That,” our next job was to get our production manager, Teresa Buoch, to dress him up. Kirk’s own wardrobe that he brought to Atlanta was every bit as nice as what Teresa had bought, so they settled on his pink golf shirt and blazer. In reality, Kirk possessed an air of authority that wasn’t dependent on the right threads. He was Spartacus, after all.
Turns out that Spartacus, while accomplished at freeing slaves from captivity, wasn’t all that great with cue cards. These days, we have the capability of putting a teleprompter over the lens so talent can speak directly to camera while reading every bit of his script. Three decades ago we were still––on location, anyway––stuck with cue cards. We tried to get as close to the lens as possible, but the occasional subtle glance off-camera was a dead giveaway that the words coming out of his mouth weren’t necessarily from the heart or the result of concentrated study and memorization.
As the scriptwriter, I had every confidence that if anyone could bring my words to life, it would be Kirk Douglas, bad cue card reading or not. And he didn’t disappoint. But though he was a baseball fan, he wasn’t a baseball authority. So when, during one stand-up, he strolled among the empty stadium seats emoting about the tension of a baseball game and said, “It’s the ninth inning, the bases are loaded, and the count is three to two,” I cringed.
“That was great, Kirk, really good. But actually, it’s three and two, not three to two.” So we did it again. But Kirk was not big on re-takes. If he had a good take, it was his opinion that it was time to move on. “Next shot,” he’d bark.
As TV people who had seen our share of tape creases or something distracting in the background upon playback that we hadn’t seen while shooting, we were trained to shoot “safeties,” backups in case the money shot wasn’t as valuable as we originally thought.
“That was great,” Rohan Backfisch, our director, would say. “Let’s do a safety.”
“Why?” Kirk asked.
“Uh, we had an audio hit.” We’d generally blame it on our sound guy, Ken Noland. Better to have someone take a little heat than for us to lecture a three-time Oscar nominee on the nuances of location shooting.
Sometimes Rohan just figured that there were better takes ahead for both talent and team. It was after one of those third-take scenarios that Kirk, convinced the second take was just fine, ribbed Rohan: “No doubt one of these days you’ll be a great director…but not today.”
Kirk, who had worked under even bigger-name directors than Rohan Backfisch and more celebrated writers than Paul Ryden, is one of those larger-than-life characters that magnetically attracts attention. Riding with him on a golf cart on the stadium concourse between takes, I noticed that every head––I mean every head––turned to watch us pass. So unanimous was the attention that I told Kirk, “I think they recognize me.” Oh, how I dreamed that one day I would attract as many curious eyeballs.
So riveting was Kirk’s presence that he even was able to get Ted Turner to sit still for a few minutes. Turner, in his role as owner of TBS and CNN, would occasionally tape on-camera promos or internal messages in the TBS studios, and it was understood that the production crew would be ready to roll as soon as Ted put on the mike. When The Boss was headed their way, the crew was put on instant Ted Alert. Tie askew or a light out of place? Too bad. It was one take and done. Ted Turner was a busy and animated man. But during Kirk’s visit, it was as if Ted had eaten a bowl of Xanax for breakfast. He patiently waited as Kirk, during one of his stand-ups, approached him in the owner’s seat in the front row to chat about whatever it was I wrote for them to chat about.
Kirk commanded respect, but even he knew that as host, he still had to follow orders. On the closing stand-up, he was to address the camera and say, “And that’s baseball, pure and simple.” Then he was to walk away from the camera, down the stadium steps, onto the field, and down the right field line. Ro yelled “Action,” and off went Kirk.
He got to the field, took a right turn, headed down the line, and just kept walking. Then from off in the distance, we heard the distinctive voice of Kirk Douglas echoing through Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.
“Is anybody gonna yell ‘Cut!’”
A few days after getting Kirk on tape, Ted Turner yelled, “Cut!” on Joe Torre’s tenure in Atlanta, but by then we were well into post-production and Kirk, secured with a contract that called for more money in a week of work than I made all year, was already back in LA.
A few weeks later, three of us, Glenn, Ken, and I, returned to California to supervise the voiceover session with our host. The first day went off without a hitch and we scheduled a half-day to finish it off.
The three of us enjoyed a nice dinner that night and shared stories of working with a Hollywood legend. Then, knowing that there were some finishing touches to be made on the script, I wrote out some revisions. There weren’t that many changes, so I jotted them down on a piece of notebook paper and handed them to Kirk the next day. This didn’t sit well with our star, who apparently was used to reading off scripts that were actually typed out.
“I hope you guys had a nice time last night!” he barked from the other side of the glass. “You couldn’t find a typewriter?”
But much of what Kirk said was just Kirk being Kirk. He graciously posed for pictures with us in the booth, he signed our scripts, and we said goodbye. I told him at the end of the project that it was the easiest $50,000 he’d made in his life. I don’t know that he disagreed.
What I got out of the project was an education. By simply being at Kirk’s side, I got a taste of what it’s like to be so universally recognized the way I had always hoped to be. I didn’t see any downside to it and wasn’t opposed to enjoying a little bit of that myself some day. Soon, I hoped. I also learned that for all their quirks and eccentricities, and maybe because of them, movie stars can be both challenging and fun to work with if you don’t take them or yourself too seriously. Eight years later, we did it again on another Braves documentary, this time with actor John Goodman, who could not have been more cooperative. The key to success? Grace under pressure.
And that, Kirk, is my theme.