Unless you’re a fictional character boldly leaping from skyscraper to skyscraper in a stretch leotard, origin stories are fickle, slippery narratives, particularly when it comes to artistic endeavors. Maybe the idea came while you were taking a bath, but why’d you get into that bath? What were you thinking just before the eureka moment? How’d you get to those thoughts?
So, when I asked San Francisco Bay Area filmmaker Eugene Corr why he took nine youth baseball players from an impoverished section of West Oakland to Cuba back in 2010, I knew I’d get a distilled version of reality. In Corr’s documentary about the trip, Ghost Town to Havana, he mentions his own fractured relationship with his father, a former youth baseball instructor, so I figured that’d fit in somewhere. Along with the magic of the bat-and-ball sport that binds together the capitalist and socialist countries that have 103 miles of sea between them.
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But what I didn’t expect was that the whole trip happened because Corr got mad at George W. Bush.
“I still think the Iraq War was a historic mistake,” Corr says, over coffee near his Berkeley home. “So much that’s gone wrong with the world seems to stem from that. I was so angry about that, I did three things. I bought a headstone for my grandmother’s grave in a cemetery in Richmond, I started a screenwriting program at San Quentin, and I went to Cuba.”
While roaming the streets of Havana on the technically illegal trip, Corr heard the familiar cracks of the bat and snaps in the mitt, and followed those sounds to a small field. He found a group of Cuban youngsters taking baseball instructions from a man in his 60s “with the body of a 17-year-old,” says Corr, fit from daily bike rides and Cuba’s rationed diet of eggs, rice, and beans. The man was Nicolas Reyes, and despite Corr’s broken Spanish, they hit it off.
“It reminded me so much of Richmond in the ’50s. The same kind of joy, family, community participation,” Corr says. Reyes reminded Corr of his own father, a longtime youth coach who mentored the area’s neglected kids, sometimes to the detriment of his own son. “I know I’m an older guy and romanticize those years, but they were pretty amazing. If you want to know what Richmond and Oakland were like in the 1950s, you have to go to Cuba now.”
The similarities between life in Havana and that of his own upbringing in 1950s Richmond—a town north of Berkeley that initially boomed from its shipyards during World War II and is now home to the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historic Park—were strong enough for Corr that a new project began to germinate. A documentary filmmaker and screenwriter by trade—he co-wrote the script for Prefontaine, the 1997 biopic of the long distance runner starring Jared Leto, and has directed episodes of Miami Vice and Arli$$—Corr instantly knew he wanted to make a film about two youth baseball coaches from low-income areas, showing their struggles and passions to highlight the similarities and differences between communities. He also knew that if he was going to pull it off, he’d have to raise funds independently.
“This is not a pitchable idea,” he says. “You’re going to follow around two coaches, and shit’s going to happen.” He went on to receive more than 100 donations from foundations and individuals, primarily from the Bay Area.
Back home from his trip, his next task was casting a counterpoint to Nicolas, a search he believed would lead to Richmond. But when he tried to find a youth baseball coach in the area, he couldn’t. Corr has some theories why. “I worked in [Richmond] factories from the time I was 17 to 26,” he says. “That was during a time when you could buy a house on a working man’s wages. But the disappearance of the union jobs compromised the stability of the community. And in order to volunteer [to coach youth baseball], you need a little stability.”
What he didn’t expect was for his search to lead him to an even more economically decimated area of the Bay.
