If you're the type of person who thinks sports don't mean anything, direct your attention to Steve Bartman. On the morning of Oct. 14, 2003, Bartman was an anonymous 26-year-old Chicago Cubs fan; hours later, he would get blamed for costing his beloved team a chance to go to the World Series. Over the weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival, Oscar winner Alex Gibney debuted Catching Hell, his in-depth look at all things Bartman, save one thing: Steve Bartman.
For those who don't know the story of the 2003 Chicago Cubs, here are the CliffsNotes: Following an 88-win regular season and a National League Central title, the Cubs were leading the Florida Marlins 3-2 in the best-of-seven National League Championship Series with a World Series berth on the line. That might not seem like a big deal until you consider that the last time the Cubs went to the World Series, it was 1945... and the last time they won, it was 1908.
Enter Steve Bartman. With the Cubs up by a score of 3-0 with one out in the 8th inning of Game 6, Marlins second baseman Luis Castillo hit a foul pop up along the left field line; Cubs left fielder Moises Alou drifted over to the stands and jumped to make the catch, but met Bartman's hands instead. Castillo received a second life and walked. What happened after could only be described as a meltdown: Following that play, the Marlins would score 8 runs in the inning and go on to win Game 6. And then Game 7. The National League title was theirs.
Bartman, meanwhile, was pelted with beer, cussed out, and basically treated like Josef K. in The Trial -- all for doing the one thing most people would do when a ball is hit in their direction: attempt to make a catch.
Catching Hell, the latest work from Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side), opens with the Bartman play -- narrating the film, the director begins by asking rhetorically and ominously, "What are the odds of catching a foul ball?" -- and proceeds to dissect it using interviews with a wide swath of participants from that fateful night. Everyone from Alou (who doesn't show much remorse for throwing a tantrum after the play, which led to much of the vitriol inside the stadium), to the fans surrounding Bartman in the stands at the moment of impact, to the Fox Sports producer who kept showing the replay to millions of viewers, gets his or her say.
Who doesn't get a say is Bartman. The center of the documentary -- and a former Public Enemy of Chicago so reviled that then-governor Rod Blagojevich even joked that he would like to throw him in jail for costing the Cubs the game -- has become something of a myth since Oct. 14, 2003. With the exception of a written statement apologizing for the play in the aftermath of Game 6, and a brief encounter with an ESPN reporter in 2005, Bartman is -- as a local Chicago television reporter called him in the film -- "the J.D. Salinger of Cubs fans." He simply doesn't talk, turning down hundreds of thousands of dollars for appearances and interviews on a regular basis.
Does the absence of Bartman's insight hurt Catching Hell? Surprisingly, not really. Not that Gibney didn't try his hardest to get the mystery fan to make an appearance on camera. Following a screening of Catching Hell on Sunday night, Gibney and ESPN reporter Chris Connelly discussed the film's reclusive centerpiece, sports scapegoating and fans in general. Here are a few highlights:
Alex Gibney wasn't even sure he wanted to make a movie about Steve Bartman in the first place.
"I was constantly confronted with my own reservations about should I be doing this film. The guy doesn't want to be outed, he doesn't want people to talk about him anymore, so why should I do it?" Gibney said. "I answered that question by saying I thought the story was important enough -- and the idea of understanding this process was important enough -- that it was worth doing that story."
Once he did, though, Gibney really wanted to get Steve Bartman to cooperate.
"I was very forthright," he said. "I knew that people had been trying to talk to him for a long, long time. I wrote a letter to him -- I know it got to him. I started having conversations with his lawyer. I came up with all sorts of good reasons why I thought he should cooperate. Why I thought this would move beyond -- it would be, in a way, his opportunity to move beyond -- and also, I tried to pitch him on the idea that it might do a whole lot of other people some good. But my argument was not successful." Later, Gibney revealed that he even showed an early cut of Catching Hell to Bartman (through his lawyers), just to prove that he wasn't going to have "fun at his expense." Still, no dice.
Fortunately, not getting his cooperation was a good thing.
Gibney told Connelly that not having Bartman led to a creative breakthrough, of sorts. "There's a character here saying no, saying that he wants to be anonymous. That, ultimately, has to be part of the movie. So I became OK with it, and in a peculiar way, I think that the fact that he's not in the film -- at least not in the film as an interview subject -- works in a funny way. [...] Sometimes, when people don't talk, it pushes you to discover other things that you might not have discovered."
If Bartman happens to be reading this, though, Gibney has some questions.
"The first question I would have asked him, is to take me through what happened. Because I want to know what he felt, and whether he felt the animus -- whether he understood right away what was happening -- and why," Gibney said about what he would have asked Bartman if he ever did get an interview. "The next question I would have asked him is, 'Why did you decide it was so important for you not to come forward?' If you play it out in your head, I think there is a pretty good argument to say that if you had gone and taken a bow -- say in front of a lot of people -- or if you had come forward and hadn't made yourself so anonymous, then a lot of this might have gone away. I'm not saying it would have, I'm just saying there's an argument to be made for that."
Alex Gibney was probably a big fan of Lost.
"I'm actually a big fan of flashbacks. They're considered to be sort of a no-no, but I love them," Gibney said about his decision to bookend the film with footage of former Boston Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner (who, like Bartman, is an infamous postseason scapegoat). "One of my favorite fiction films is an old black and white film noir called Out of the Past; it's all about flashbacks. Because I think if you have a narrative momentum going forward, just at that moment when you want to know, 'What's going to happen next?' sometimes you can flashback, and there's a whole other story to be told. So when you come back to that moment, it's like, 'Oh, I get it now.'"
Directing a movie about sports is not as far outside Gibney's wheelhouse as you might assume if you only know him from Taxi to the Dark Side, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.
"Scapegoats, really. I've dealt with scapegoats in other films," Gibney said, when asked how Catching Hell fits into his oeuvre. While he hasn't done any sports films before, the story of Bartman spoke to him on the basic level of assessing blame to the wrong person. "In Taxi to the Dark Side, that was the famous phrase about the folks in Abu Gharib. 'A few bad apples.' A lot of the lower down soldiers, I think were definitely scapegoated -- I'm not saying they weren't responsible for doing some very bad stuff. I think even peculiarly enough, Jack Abramhoff in Casino Jack and the United States of Money. He did wrong, but there's no doubt that he wasn't the only bad apple in Washington."
Not that he hasn't been bitten by the sports bug.
Gibney revealed that he's completed a documentary about Lance Armstrong that would be coming out soon via Sony. "I think it's pretty interesting."
Don't cry for Steve Bartman (even though you might if you see Catching Hell).
"Steve Bartman may be living exactly the life he wants," Gibney allowed when confronted with the idea that perhaps Bartman isn't necessarily a martyr. "Which is to say, working at a job he likes with some people he enjoys. We don't know enough about it, to really know. I don't necessarily think that his life has been destroyed."