EXCLUSIVE: Growing up in the 60s, director Sam Pollard lived in a household that loved baseball, specifically the St. Louis Cardinals. Pollard was drawn to the 1961 team because it featured a number of African-American players. This was a rare roster in the MLB at that time. This team would mark the beginning of Pollard’s love affair with baseball, and the history of the sport.
“I became enamored with baseball and I eventually started doing research on the Negro leagues learning about players like Cool Papa bell, Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige,” Pollard stated. “What really sparked my interest was this idea that these players were playing in this league because of segregation and were not allowed to play in the Major League because of it.”
Fast forward 50 years later and Pollard is set to direct The League, which will tell the tumultuous journey of Negro Baseball League as it thrives and falters in a country plagued by racism as told through never-before-seen interviews and previously unearthed archival footage. RadicalMedia’s Jon Kamen, Dave Sirulnick, and Jen Isaacson will produce with Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson’s Two One Five Entertainment exec producing the doc following the success of Thompson’s directorial debut Summer of Soul. Two One Five Entertainment’s executive producers will be Thompson, Shawn Gee (and Zarah Zohlman).
2929 Productions/Magnolia Pictures is coming aboard to finance and distribute The League and Magnolia Pictures will have domestic distribution.
Throughthepersonal experience of notable NegroLeague umpire Bob Motley, the documentary will tell the story of a league where some of the world’s best athletes played. An economic and social pillar of black communities, and the eventual and unintended consequences of MLB integration. Pollard said the reason Motley is at the center of the film started with his son, Byron Motley (who will exec produce along with his partners Josh Green, and Nina Dobrev for Yabba Biri Productions) reaching out to Pollard early on in his research and would soon introduce him to Bob Motley’s book Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants & Stars: Umpiring in the Negro League and Beyond, which got Pollard even more excited about how compelling this story could be.
“The umpire sees everything, he sees the whole field, the strategy going on, he sees everything,” Pollard stated. “Back then, they had the opportunity to travel with some of these players and these teams and interact with them and see the stuff they had to deal with like not being able to eat in certain restaurants. He could also see the fellowship that they had as teammates. On top of that, Motley also happens to also be a fantastic storyteller. The idea of building the doc around his stories was something we utilized almost immediately in this process.”
As for how the Summer of Soulproducers reunited on this project, sources say Thompson and Zara Zohlman brought it to Radical while they were all in themiddle of Summer of Soul production and Radical was quick to join Thompson as a producer on the project. Insiders add both production companies are always looking for stories on collective history that most people don’t know about, especially those that had been erased and felt The Leaguefell in line with stories likeSummer of Soulthat they wanted to tell.
While it will be awhile before audiences get a chance to see Pollard’s final product with production only just beginning, Pollard says he is hopeful once they do see it, they get to understand how not only these players had an impact on American history but the communities that supported them as well.
“There are so many American stories about the African American experience that people don’t know about and the challenge is to tell the story but to tell it in the context of American history that will make the story even more compelling,” Pollard stated.
“If we do our job right, I hope people will come away appreciating the scope and impact of all these Negro league players and doing it within communities that appreciated what they did. These were communities that were thriving economically even as American segregation was going on all around them.”