From the "People" Archives:

by Anthony Kaufman

Sure, you've heard of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but what about Hank Greenberg? His fans range from Walter Matthau to Alan Dershowitz to Detroit Tigers fans to just about any Jew living in America during the 30's and 40's. Only two home runs away from matching Babe Ruth's then single-season record in 1938, the Detroit Tigers legend and Hall of Famer was a two time American League Most Valuable Player, four time RBI leader, and three time Major League home run champ, with a career total of 331 homers Ð and one of the first great Jewish athletes. While at first enduring anti-Semitic slurs, "Hammerin' Hank" became one of the most beloved ball players around, helping to break the ethnic barrier and paving the way for the likes of Jackie Robinson. He even left baseball to join the U.S. Army during World War II to fight against Hitler -- and returned. You don't get real-life subjects more heroic than him.

So it's a long time coming for Aviva Kempner's affectionate tribute to the great slugger, "The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg," her second documentary feature film ("Partisans of Vilna" was her first). That's not to say she hasn't tried; it took Kempner 13 years to finish the project, funding the film solely through her own means and the auspices of the Ciesla Foundation, a non-profit organization established by Kempner to make films that counter Jewish stereotypes. Now, after winning Audience Awards at the 1998 Hamptons International Film Festival, the 1999 Washington Jewish festival, and screening at South by Southwest, DoubleTake, the USA Film Festival, and Jewish festivals across the globe, Aviva Kempner's efforts can finally be seen in theaters with the help of distributor Cowboy Booking, whose co-president John Vanco told her: "I love your film, it makes me so proud to be Jewish -- and I'm not even Jewish."

"The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg" opens today at New York's Film Forum and will expand to other venues throughout the year. While working the long, final hours of 35 mm post-production, Kempner spoke to indieWIRE's Anthony Kaufman about funding woes, archival rights up the wazoo, the allure of 35 mm, and our ethnic experience.

indieWIRE: So you were able to finance the film as a non-profit?

Aviva Kempner: It's taken me over 13 years, but yes. The first time around, the majority of the funding was the National Endowment of the Humanities. The second time around it was regional humanities, from 6 states, but not the national. The money was already given on a baseball topic. There's a line in the Tennessee Williams play, "A Streetcar Named Desire," where Blanche says, "I depend on the kindness of strangers." Well, that's how I made this film. However, I recently re-saw the movie and Blanche says that when she's going off to the loony bin in the end. I hope I don't have the same ending. My line is: do crazy people go into independent filmmaking or does independent filmmaking make you crazy? And I think it's a combination of both.

I'm the producer and the director of the film. And I was first the director. So I decided to have [clips from] "Gentlemen's Agreement" with Gregory Peck, and Katherine Hepburn in "Woman of the Year," and to have these wonderful scenes from the Marx Brothers, etc, and I grew up on those movies. That was the director talking. Well, this last year, to get all the footage, to translate it to 16, now to blow-up, to pay for the rights, to track them down Ð and mostly the rights Ð it's a quarter million dollars. I love that "The Blair Witch Project" cost $30,000. But I don't think people realize that documentary films cost a lot more money. You can't ask archival houses to defer payment; they just won't do it. It was the same with the choice of music. I'm doing a 30's, 40's film, so of course, you're going to go for Benny Goodman, and Cole Porter, and the Andrews Sisters. And people warned me it's going to be really expensive. But I wanted those sounds. I wanted the drums of Benny Goodman. Well, you know what I got stuck with: tens of thousands of dollars of music rights that I'm still paying for. But I never, never regretted any of my directorial decisions. Because I think I directed the best film I could. Now I have to pay for it as a producer. And who am I going to yell at?

iW: What makes the movie special is all the archival material you use.

Kempner: I tried very hard not to use a narrator. My editors, Marian S. Hunter and Judith Sobel, did an incredible job of working with me to integrate all the scenes. And not to use a narrator takes an extra year of editing, you know, because you really need to build visually and choose people saying things that are going to work. It was the same with "Partisans of Vilna." I think historical documentaries are very important Ð a very important way of conveying to an audience what life was like. And I don't think it should just be something that you see on the television. I really make my historical documentaries first and foremost to be seen in a movie theater. And that's why I'm spending all this time; I spent an extra year raising money for the 35 mm because I really want that format, it's the format I grew up with. And you know people used to see Ð all the footage I have in the movie, the archival footage Ð is what people saw in movie theaters. I'm trying to bring it back, that's how they were shot, they were shot on 35 mm. I really want audiences to still have that sense of drama of seeing it on the big screen. To see Hank on the big screen is worth everything.

iW: It looked as if there is a huge load of material to sift through? How much time did you spend researching?

Kempner: Oh, that's true. What you do is you do it in stages. We made an initial research at all the top archive houses, then I kept on making calls to newspapers and among people who knew him, and then all the great archival photo places, as well as Cooperstown. I overshot; I did hours of hours of the people who knew him and played with him. Again, it has to do with being an independent documentary filmmaker. I didn't have an anniversary or something that I had to be on TV with this film. In a way, it was good that I didn't have enough money, because I would start and stop so many times. But because I had to stop and start, every time I came to another stage and another person, it was another archival search. It's basically about 15 archival houses that you sweep. I think my biggest regret is Ð well, personally I could have made more films in these 13 years, instead, I fell back on writing about films and lecturing about film, and started a Jewish film festival in Washington Ð is that if it had come out a year ago, I would have loved to have tried to influence the vote in terms of Hank being on the All American Century team; that's my biggest regret.

iW: Why do you think it took 13 years?

Kempner: It cost a little over a million dollars. I didn't raise it all. I had $3,000 the first year to do research. And most of the years I didn't even pay myself. Because it took so long to have a finished, 35 mm film. Two years ago, I had an almost finished rough cut. I had to stop for 6 months; I couldn't pay for an editor, anymore, because everyone got paid by the hour but me.

iW: Did you ever worry it wasn't going to get finished?

Kempner: The reason I decided to do this movie is I grew up in Detroit and the day I heard that Hank Greenberg died Ð which was the day after I was opening my [first] film in LA, he was my Dad's hero, I had always heard about him Ð I knew he was the next film I had to make and how difficult it was for American Jews in the 30's and 40's. Because it was in my Dad's honor, and my Dad died in '76, I knew I could never give up on it.

I think I'm a part of a whole phenomenon of 2nd generation immigrant kids who are filmmakers. I have friends, Irish Americans, who are making films like "Out of Ireland"; that was one of Paul Wagner's films. A friend of mine, Patrick Mullan, made a film about Irish music. I think the kinds of films that Spike Lee decides to do are part of his culture that hasn't been addressed. Joe Tropiano co-wrote "Big Night" with his cousin Stanley Tucci Ð we all want to show that there are these wonderful, powerful stories in our past. It's not that all Jewish men are nebbishy or victims, or all Italians are gangsters, or it's not that all Irish are drunks, that's not the culture we grew up on. We'll struggle for years to say this is a part of our ethnic experience. Hank is a household figure in a lot of Jewish homes. The whole reason I started filmmaking 20 years ago was "Roots" and "Holocaust" on TV and I decided I had to go make a movie about Jewish resistance against the Nazis, being a child of a survivor. I think, though, to be able to sustain yourself all these years you have to be absolutely passionate, it's like a political mission. The one thing I hope I accomplished in "Hank Greenberg" is it's a story of one man and his fans, but it's also a universal story. There are sports figures all over the world, which is what I felt how Dominicans were following Sammy Sosa. I think it was very similar. I haven't heard any anti- or racial Latin things ever said about Sosa. But I think we also have to tell people this is where we've come from. That's not to say there aren't those kinds of things happening still in sports and society. . .

iW: Did you read those comments by John Rocker, the pitcher for the Atlanta Braves? They were horribly racist.

Kempner: I heard he said things, but I didn't know what.

iW: I happen to have it right here: "The biggest thing I don't like about New York are the foreigners. I'm not a very big fan of foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?"

Kempner: That's awful. As a matter of fact, I think it's awful how the Latins weren't -- [Roberto] Clemente wasn't on the Century team. But it won't happen on the 21st Century team. Sports is global and I'm glad that we're able to have these players.