And that, metaphorically speaking, is “Baseball” – Burns’s gargantuan, avidly awaited follow-up to “The Civil War.” When this 181/2-hour documentary (premiering on PBS Sept. 18) doesn’t overreach, when it goes with what comes naturally, it delivers plenty of strikes. The problem is that Burns, never one to underrate the breadth of his acuity, has succumbed to a case of Heavy Meaningitis. To a filmmak-er who has compared himself to Homer, baseball can’t be something so frivolous as a game. It’s nothing less than “the American “Odyssey’ . . . the Rosetta stone . . . a Blakean grain of sand that reveals the universe.” Whew. At its most ponderously pretentious, “Baseball” offers the best reason yet for banning intellectuals from ballparks.
Burns has packaged the sport’s 200-year history in nine two-hour episodes (yes, he calls them “innings”). “Civil War” buffs will quickly recognize the recipe. The obsessive research (4,000 photos, 70 on-camera interviews). The eclectic chorus of readers (Gregory Peck, Tip O’Neill, Julie Harris, Anthony Hopkins, Keith Carradine) and commentators (Mario Cuomo, George Will, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Bob Costas, Billy Crystal). The evocative music (fiddles, piano and 250 versions of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”). Even the choice of narrator: in tapping John Chancellor, Burns has found someone who sounds almost exactly like “The Civil War’s” David McCullough.
Burns’s strongest suit remains his imagery. The documentary trick of bringing still photos to life by panning and zooming within their frames is getting awfully tired, but rarely in this filmmaker’s viewfinder. Burns calls himself an “emotional archaeologist,” and this time he’s not blowing smoke. Watch how he isolates a dozen minute details in a Polo Grounds crowd shot to unearth reaction to a rookie’s pennant-blowing boner. You don’t just look at Burns’s photos. You listen to them.
Burns knows how to get a life, too. “Baseball” teems with portrait-quality profiles of the game’s gods, dunces and scoundrels, each illuminated with small, surprising touches. Like Christy (“the Christian Gentleman”) Mathewson, so virtuous he refused to speak to sportswriters who cheated on their wives. Or Ty Cobb, so vicious he “would climb a mountain to punch an echo” (and actually charged into the stands to brutally pummel a heckler who had no hands). In fact Burns knocks dents in lots of the sport’s monuments. Abner Doubleday, we learn, had as much to do with the invention of baseball as the Piltdown Man, and the legendary double-play combo of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance got along about as well as the Bundys. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis? Baseball’s sainted first commissioner was an implacable bigot who labored diligently to keep the game white.
So why does this documentary seem so interminable? Just listen to its creator on what “Baseball” is about. “It’s about race, class and assimilation,” Burns breathlessly explains. “It’s about labor and management, the role of women and the growth and decay of cities. It’s about the rise of popular culture and the media. It’s about the nature of mythology. It’s about the essence of democracy.”
This is hubristic humbug. While Burns explores every crevice of the game itself, his determination to make “Baseball” a metaphor for virtually the entire American experience leads him to confuse the intersections in the sport’s evolution with its main drag. It’s a classic manifestation of the if-I’m-making-this-it-must-be-cosmic syndrome – and the strain shows. Not only in all the socio-blather about baseball’s meaning but in the juxtapositions Burns uses to lead off his innings. As the screen shows a new bat being lathed, Chancellor intros baseball’s ’60s by name-dropping the Cuban missile crisis, Woodstock I, the assassination of JFK, the moon walk and the Vietnam War protests. Then the segue: “Winston Churchill and Ernest Hemingway died . . . Dwight Gooden and Roger Clemens were born.”
It could be argued that 181/2 hours are too many for any documentary. After all, Carl Sagan needed only 13 hours to tell the story of the entire “Cosmos” (in which, by the way, the national pastime received no mention). The writing in “Baseball” rarely soars and, at its worst, drifts between the banal and the overripe. There’s also too much sportspage tick-tock and not enough of the homespun eloquence that made “The Civil War” so moving. Some of this isn’t Burns’s fault. To do the war, he could draw on trunkloads of achingly poignant letters and diaries – not to mention Lincoln and Longfellow. Baseball gave him “Casey at the Bat.” Nor does it help that much of the material is already familiar, even to a casual fan. The 1919 Black Sox scandal, for instance, packed more emotional wallop, if less fidelity to fact, in the big screen’s “Eight Men Out.”
Yet just when you’re hoping for the fat lady to sing, Burns really connects – with the one metaphor that truly fits. His exhaustive portrayal of baseball’s apartheid era comprises a documentary in itself, and it is flat-out brilliant. Instead of treating the Negro Leagues of the ’30s as “some treacly nostalgic tragedy for bleeding hearts to expiate their guilt,” Burns opts for an irresistible celebration of the exuberance – and nobility – of black culture. He also shows us how the black-organized teams demolished the claim that players of color lacked managerial talent: they rolled up such profits that white businessmen tried to form black leagues of their own.
Our Shelby Foote for all this is 82-year-old Buck O’Neil, a former Negro League first baseman and raconteur perfecto. O’Neil takes us inside the lives of black superstars like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell and, most memorably, Jackie Robinson (to Burns, “baseball’s greatest hero”). Most heart-tugging moment: Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s widow, recalling how she used her body to shield her husband from the racial epithets hurled by fans sitting behind her in the stands.
The racial passages are so powerful you can’t help wishing PBS had told Burns at the outset: “This should be your documentary. And do it, please, at six hours.” In our dreams. Though Burns, now 41, still looks like the frat-house wonk, he wields Roseanne-size clout. No PBS sachem is going to challenge a filmmaker who attracts so many viewers, not to mention underwriters. As for the press, Burns has enjoyed so much hagiographic gush he’s begun providing it himself. The press kit for “Baseball” offers no fewer than 34 advance testimonials, from academia to the jock beat (“Positively Ruthian” – Sports Illustrated writer Steve Wulf).
Actually, Ruth isn’t a bad analogy. Like the overstuffed Bambino, Burns’s mega-doc represents an exercise in excess. Still, the Kid should be proud. If “Baseball” isn’t “The Civil War” – and what is? – it certainly gives us everything we ever wanted to know.
About a game.
When Ken Burns was 11, his mother died of breast cancer – after battling the disease for eight agonizing years. “While all that horror was happening,” recalls Burns, “baseball became my sole refuge. It was the only thing that gave me peace and pleasure. I really didn’t have a childhood . . . except playing baseball.”
“Baseball” (the documentary) took four years of Burns’s life. Originally he planned to hold it to nine hours, but decided, “I needed more time to open the moments up.” Burns did more than 50 interviews himself, including one with this lifelong Red Sox fan’s major idol, Ted Williams. Among colleagues, Burns is regarded as an obsessive perfectionist, and he gladly agrees: “Poor John Chancellor expected to narrate a two-hour episode in three hours. It took him over five days. Sometimes I’d want 17 different takes of a paragraph.”
“The Civil War” brought its maker fame as well as acclaim and, four years later, he’s still dining out on it. In fact Burns has eaten at the White House a half dozen times. At one gathering President Clinton “took me aside for the most knowledgeable dissection of “The Civil War’ I’ve heard. I sat there with my jaw on the ground.” Burns is so hot he’s received feelers from both parties to run for office, while rebuffing passes from virtually every Hollywood studio. The only downer: Burns’s 12-year marriage to his college sweetheart unraveled. “It’s completely unrelated to my work,” he says.
The filmmaker’s unprecedented deal with General Motors is in better shape; the corporation has agreed to underwrite whatever Burns does until the year 2000. His next project: a PBS biography of Thomas Jefferson. In the meantime Burns is monitoring the baseball strike, which, he feels, should boost “Baseball’s” audience: “It’ll be the only game in town.” Still, he’s been doing his bit to bring back the real game. “I’ve run into the representatives for both sides,” he reports. “And I told each the same thing: “You guys are the custodians of something a lot more important than the bottom line’.” Like, for instance, Ken Burns’s childhood.
