There were more movies and filmmakers than we could possibly fit into our Sundance coverage. Luckily, South by Southwest is just around the corner to help us. No No: A Dockumentary premiered at Sundance and will show again in director Jeffrey Radice’s home turf of Austin at SXSW. The film chronicles Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis and his troubles with drugs, including pitching a no hitter while on LSD, and later becoming a counselor himself. We spoke with Radice by phone about his Dock Ellis films, which will be playing four times at SXSW, beginning Saturday morning at 11:30 at the Paramount Theater.
CraveOnline: I also saw The Battered Bastards of Baseball at Sundance. Why do you think there were two baseball documentaries this particular year at Sundance?
Jeffrey Radice: I don’t think that there’s any correlation there. I saw their film as well. They had a double feature with that and my film in Salt Lake. I don’t think there’s any particular reason why there were two this year as opposed to any other year. I think it was just that they had two good baseball films this year. It turns out that a number of the programmers are baseball fans, which I found out. I didn’t know, but I think it actually made their choice more difficult in the sense that they probably didn’t want to program two baseball films.
There were at least three music dramas and two internet documentaries too, so there are always a few connections and patterns at Sundance.
Yeah, I couldn’t speak to that so well. I don’t know. I thought it made a pretty good double feature, Battered Bastards and us. I might have programmed them opposite so that we were first and they were second, since theirs ends on a little bit more of an upbeat note.
How long were you working on No No?
I probably started developing, at least the initial research was probably around 10 years ago, but there were years when I wasn’t working on it. You could say it started 10 years ago and then it kind of was done in fits and starts. We went into production in 2010 and then the path to production was definitely set by fundraising. With documentaries you kind of raise money as you go, so we raised money to shoot some interviews in Texas and then leveraged those to go to Pittsburgh and do a number of interviews there. Then we had to raise additional money to go to Los Angeles and do those interviews, so it was bits and pieces.
10 years ago, was Dock still alive when you began?
He was. He died in 2008. He died at the end of 2008, December and I think he went public with his illness early 2008. We were in touch with him, I was told, my memory was kind of hazy too, I was told we talked to him in 2005. I thought it was later than that.
So you began with his cooperation?
In a manner of speaking. He was interested in having a film made about him. There were other attempts to do so. I certainly wasn’t the first person to start working on a documentary on him. I’m not even including the short that was at Sundance, the James Blagden one. There’s another feature length documentary, or at least pieces of one that I know had been started and I know that there were a number of screenplays, but Dock seemed to be interested in having his story told. He was willing to talk. He said, “Let’s make a movie.” He wanted his story told, it was pretty clear to me.
How did you do that interview with Dock?
We never even did an interview with Dock. It was just preliminary phone conversations with him. Then after he died, a year later, in 2009, I went and met with his widow Hjordis, who does not appear in the film, but I went and talked with her just to get her blessing and make sure that I wasn’t going to be stepping on her toes or the estate’s toes in making the film. None of the interview audio or video with Dock was anything I captured. There’s some audio from a couple of different sources, one of them is Peter Golenbock and another is Donnell Alexander who recorded the other stuff that was on public radio that turned into that short. Then the video interview where Dock is on the screen, the primary one there came out of HBO archives.
So what was the context of Dock reading the letter Jackie Robinson wrote him?
The context of that is that that is an outtake of the Minnesota public radio interview that Donnell Alexander and Neille Ilel recorded. It’s an outtake of that particular piece that turned into the short that’s on YouTube and that showed at Sundance. The letter itself was one of my Holy Grails. I was told Dock read pieces of it out of the book, his biography by Donald Hall. I’d been looking for the letter. Then when I was going through the archives at the University of New Hampshire, there it was, the original, signed. That was quite a gratifying find in my research. So we paired them up. I had a former collaborator who I’d worked with who worked with animated documents. That’s what ended up on screen.
Do you have more contemporaries of Dock who did not make it into the film?
There were a few interviews that we shot that didn’t make it into the film. There were a number of people that we would have wanted to interview. Part of the problem for us was financial. As with any independent documentary I’m sure, going to visit some of the people who were isolated as far as not being around a bunch of other people or weren’t able to travel [would have been unfeasible]. So Dave Parker I would say is one that we definitely wanted to interview. He lives in Cincinnati and it was just a little too far out of the way. We just couldn’t justify it in the end.
I would have liked to have interviewed Pete Rose. I tried to reach out to him through various means and never could. I tried to show up at the memorabilia shop in Las Vegas where I know he still signs signatures, and just couldn’t get a hold of him. We had talked about maybe interviewing Joe Morgan but at some point in time, the project is moving at such a degree that you just have to say, “This is enough. Do we have everyone and are we covering all the territory that we want to?” Although I would have liked to have interviewed them earlier in the process, at a certain point late in the process it was too late.
At a certain point you must already have 100s of hours already.
We almost interviewed 50 people. I probably could have been more judicious early on, but a lot of them happen two or three a day. When we were in Pittsburgh, it was a reunion of the ’71 Pittsburgh Pirates. They were celebrating the 40th anniversary of that World Series win so they had some members of the Orioles team as well. It was easy because they were all in one place, and then the same thing in Los Angeles. A lot of Dock’s friends growing up stayed in Los Angeles, in the area. So we were able to access all of them fairly easily.
10 years ago, what made you want to start on a documentary on Dock Ellis in the first place?
Reading his biography. The key impetus is that I had produced a short documentary that was at Sundance and a number of other festivals about LSD. The title of it was LSD a Go Go. I think there’s something about LSD that certain people want to share their stories, usually people that are older, in their ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘50s had a very memorable experience on LSD. So I would get these anecdotes while traveling with the film to various festivals. It made me recollect Dock, having heard of this story about Dock, at the time I couldn’t remember his name. I thought I remembered it as a perfect game, so it was just something some baseball pitcher did.
I went back and did a little research and figured out it was Dock and picked up his biography. That was the main reason that drew me into the film because here was this baseball pitcher who had a biography written by a poet, and a fairly renowned poet. He became poet laureate soon after I started investigating the story. It was an extremely well written biography and it gave a very well rounded portrait of who Dock was. Quite obviously the two men had become friends even though they were from fairly different backgrounds and it drew me in.
Dock, the thing about him that I found is that his stories tended to be based very strongly in factual experience and he became more and more fascinating the more layers that I peeled back. He became an interesting character to me that I felt could hold up a feature length documentary film. I got a very good response whenever I shared the idea with other people. Friends of mine were like, “Yeah, I want to help you make that.” Just in general, whenever I bounced the idea off of people that I’m in, told them I was working on a film, I always got a favorable response. I think that’s what it takes to persevere.
If you started from the LSD angle, what did you discover were other equally or more important angles of Dock’s story?
I think the LSD is kind of like this window into the story for sure. The first thing that intrigued me about it was the investigation, because the only real source that there is for that story is Dock. So a common, I don’t know how common it is, but the only complaint that I’ve heard about it is, “Well, you’re only getting this story from Dock so he could have made it up.” Maybe he did make it up, so that was my first angle of inquiry. Did he make it up and how can we say for sure?
That led me to talking to, for example, Al Rambo who was there with Dock the days before the game. He said, “Yeah, I took LSD with Dock. I don’t know what happened after he left me, but we were doing LSD that weekend.” It led me to find the manuscript from Donald Hall in his archives that very clearly, it was originally typed up in 1974 I believe or ’75 with LSD in it. Then they got Tom Reich explaining that they excised that from the manuscript because it would’ve killed Dock’s career.
Also my first thought was, “Well, why would Dock say that?” To me, it seemed somewhat evident that it was part of his going through his 12 steps of coming clean and being honest about the wrongs that he’s done. That led me to Dock as a counselor and I found that the recovery angle and the fact that he spent all of these later years and even decades of his life in the trenches out of the spotlight, and felt I think most fully realized as a human being at that point in his life. I could identify with that a little bit and I thought that it was a really fine redemption story. I think that the Civil Rights angle to what he was doing in the press as a player came through pretty well in Donald Hall’s biography so I wanted to share that as well. For me it was really the redemption and his recovery and how he didn’t really change his personality so much but he changed his message at the end of his life.
Is there any indication in the footage of the game that he would have been having any hallucinations from LSD while pitching?
That’s hard to say. There is definitely a shot of him covering first base when the ball is hit to the first baseman and he covers first base. He very gingerly hits the base and then pulls his foot back. I don’t know how much I would read into that. Dock said that when he got to the game, he took a bunch of greens and some other form of speed to put himself back into his mindset. So I don’t know how much he was hallucinating during the games at all. I think that that’s the glorified side of the story, the Robin Williams and Sarah Silverman doing standup side of the story. If anything, the side of the story that I find more interesting is what Ron Howard was telling us about how Dock felt a lot of regret. He couldn’t remember most of the game. I think that, and this is what his widow told me too, that Dock really felt sad that this was the highlight of his career and he couldn’t remember but tiny little bits and pieces of it.
After Sundance, what do you expect from SXSW?
I don’t have so many expectations. We’re going to be able to share it with all the people that have supported us here in Austin. I think it gives us an opportunity to show it to our greatest supporters locally anyway. Aside from that, sharing it with audiences has always been my goal and that’s really my only expectation.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
