A League of Their Own – The Documentary

My mother was a professional baseball player in the All American Girl’s Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) in the 1940s.  The league was established by chewing gum magnate Philip K. Wrigley during WWII to provide sports entertainment in the small factory towns in the industrial heartland.   My mother – Helen Callaghan – was recruited from Vancouver, Canada as one of the original players in the league.   Her sister Margaret – like in the Columbia Pictures movie made from the documentary – was also signed to the league.

When I graduated from College in the early 1980s, I left with many more questions than when I arrived.  One of the most salient was why so many important events and achievements in American history were virtually unknown except to those who had participated in them.  The ten year existence of the AAGPBL was lost in time, only recognized by the veteran women players who gathered together periodically at reunions to swap stories and talk about their playing years.   I decided – along with my producing partner Kim Southerland – to chronicle the existence of the league by following my mother to a reunion of the league in Ft. Wayne, Indiana.  It was 1986. 

Prior to heading for Ft. Wayne (my mom played in the league for the Ft. Wayne Daisies) I had shown some old film clips of the league to producers at Los Angeles PBS station KCET.  They were so fascinated by the subject matter they agreed to co-produce the film, provide a substantial portion of the budget and offer the film to PBS for a national airing.  

After shooting the documentary it aired later that year in a national showing on PBS.  The morning of the airing my mom and I went on the Today Show and were interviewed by Brian Gumbel.  It was my mom’s only visit to New York in her life. 

Later the same week I received a call from Director Penny Marshall inviting Kim and I to her house.   We talked about turning the documentary into a film and I set out to write a story outline – called a “treatment” in Hollywood – about two sisters who fight and battle each other in the league but end up finding a way to move beyond the rivalry that almost tears them apart. 

Penny ultimately took the film idea to Columbia Pictures and it was shot and released in 1992 with an “all star” cast of Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, Madonna, Rosie O’Donnell and Jon Lovitz.     At the premier, Genna Davis wore a dress that was stitched up like a baseball.    The film went on to make $100 million in the domestic market and to add a new phrase to our national vocabulary.  We all now know that “There’s no crying in baseball!” 

A League of Their Own is an “evergreen” movie – never going out of style and still seen and admired by young and old.  It’s hard for me to watch today as my mom died of breast cancer in 1992, the same year the movie came out.  But I’m proud to have honored part of her life.  She was an athletic pioneer and an inspiration to young girls everywhere.

When Hope and History Rhymed

A Documentary Film on the Northern Ireland Peace Process

History says, Don’t hope
On This side of the grave
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of Justice can rise-up,
And hope and history rhyme.

Seamus Heaney – The Cure At Troy

Two summers ago I took fifteen students from California State University, Chico and traveled to Belfast, Northern Ireland to study politics and history at Queens University and to shoot a documentary film on the Northern Ireland Peace process.    The students came from a number of academic disciplines including communications, political science, international relations, psychology, and history.   Northern Ireland was a place where people were groping for a way forward after 25 years of violence.  In April 1998 the Good Friday peace agreement was signed that brought an end to the protracted violence that had taken thousands of lives.     Our journey to Northern Ireland was an attempt to understand the origins of the conflict, but more importantly to look at the practical lessons of peace making.  

By the time we were finished with our three weeks in Ireland we had interviewed Nobel Peace Prize winner John Hume, Irish Prime Minister Albert Reynolds, Senator George Mitchell (Chairman of the peace talks), Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams, and the Archbishops of the Anglican and Catholic churches.   We also interviewed community leaders, paramilitaries from both sides of the conflict and “regular” people on the street to get their impressions of the situation.     In September of last year we returned to London to interview British Prime Minister Tony Blair about his involvement in the peace negotiations and about the process of reconciling deeply divided societies.     

When Hope and History Rhymed follows these young students on a political, intellectual and personal exploration.   The students learned about a part of the world where the issues of nationalism, colonialism, religion, violence and struggles over political identity have been played out on a tiny patch of land.  

In early May, 2007, the film premiered at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles.  It was a full house attended by Senator George Mitchell and both the Irish and British Consul Generals.   Mitchell opened the film and answered questions at its conclusion.  There was broad agreement from the audience that the film should be shown in other conflict areas where divergent groups are attempting to make steps towards reconciliation and peace. 

The film will be distributed in college and university classes throughout the country.   It is designed to stimulate conversation and debate about what it takes to build a future where violence becomes less and less necessary to resolve social conflict.

Olof Palme – A Life in Politics

In college I studied modern European political History.  I was particularly interested in the attempts to find a political path between rapaciousness of unfettered industrial capitalism and the devastating legacy of Soviet Communism.   For me, the European Social Democratic tradition was where I gravitated. 

Olof Palme was an exemplary representative of that tradition.  He was, by Swedish standards, a unique politician.   He was educated in the United States at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.   He was influenced by the American union movement and dismayed by the state of race relations in the United States.  While here, he hitchhiked through the South in an attempt to understand one of our most enduring dilemmas.   In his youth he also traveled to Asia and India and saw first hand the impact of colonialism.

Upon returning to Sweden he quickly rose up the ranks of the Swedish Social Democratic Party and was elected Prime Minister for the first time in 1969.   He was a staunch critic of the American involvement in Vietnam, a position that put him at odds with the Nixon administration.   But he also protested the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the so-called “Prague Spring.”

Palme built on the well known and often derided Swedish “welfare state,” where their unique experiment in taming the more perverse aspects of he market has led to high incomes as well as significant protections for young people, the aged and workers. 

Sweden went into shock when Palme was assassinated by an unknown gunman on the streets of Stockholm in 1986.      Similar to the Kennedy assassination, the crime has never been definitively solved.  

My documentary covers the major milestones in Palme’s life.  I traveled to Stockholm and Berlin to conduct interviews with German Chancellor Willy Brandt, African National Congress President Oliver Tambo and Palme’s successor as Swedish Prime Minister, Ingvar Carlsson.   I also interviewed his one-time political opponent Henry Kissinger at his New York offices.  The film is narrated by actor Paul Newman who met Palme at Kenyon College.   The documentary has been shown on television throughout the world.  

http://www.olofpalme.org