The Strange Journey of Dock Ellis
http://www.ifc.com/news/2010/06/dock-ellis.php
By Michael Hoinski
06/24/2010
The mythical story of Dock Ellis and the no-hitter he pitched in 1970
while on LSD is one giant matryoshka doll. There's layer upon
exquisite layer to be uncovered: The black power movement, the war on
drugs, Major League Baseball's free-agency era. And that's just the
first couple of layers.
In the last year, the story of Ellis, who died in 2008, has been
resurrected in song -- it's the sixth time -- with folkie Todd
Snider's "America's Favorite Pastime." That was followed by artist
James Blagden's psychedelic animated short, "Dock Ellis & the LSD
No-No." Now there's a movie, "No No: A Dockumentary," in production.
Austin filmmakers Jeffrey Radice and Mike Blizzard, "No No"'s
writer/director and producer, respectively, took the occasion of June
12th, the 40th anniversary of Ellis' no-hitter with the Pittsburgh
Pirates, to debut a seven-minute trailer of their forthcoming
documentary. The location was The Highball, the new lounge/bowling
alley operated by Austin's homegrown movie theater chain, Alamo Drafthouse.
The trailer opens with a frame of text: "I pitched every game in the
major leagues under the influence of drugs." Whether or not Ellis
pitched his no-hitter on LSD, four years after the drug became
illegal, is beside the point (Ellis was equally infamous for beaning
hitters). LSD was just a metaphor for doing things your own way,
being your own man.
"You draw people in with the LSD," Radice says, "so you can start to
address much bigger issues. What is it to be a role model as an
athlete? What is heroic behavior? I mean, Dock was certainly flawed,
but he was human and he was honest about his flaws. And that's the
story to me: how his honesty about himself and his own flaws become
as much a part of the story as the drugs he was taking."
Through archival footage and interviews, we meet a man in Ellis who
is funny and charismatic, and who likes to tell it like it is -- part
Richard Pryor, part Eldridge Cleaver. "I would try to out-milligram
any opponent," Ellis said in the trailer. This played well with the
radical times, but it really ticked off Major League Baseball, who
didn't appreciate Ellis being so vocal about rampant amphetamine use
among its players.
We also begin to see a glimpse of the man behind the legend -- a
Zelig whose influence ranged from the at-risk males he counseled
about drugs for roughly a quarter century after baseball, to Glen E.
Friedman, the acclaimed photographer of the '80s punk rock and skate
counterculture, who as a boy got a signed baseball from Ellis that
read, "You can do anything you want," to the U.S. soldiers in
Vietnam, whom it's said Ellis got high with before bunkering down
with them in the trenches while on a USO tour.
"There's this story about Jackie Robinson writing Dock this letter,"
Blizzard says, upon qualifying Ellis' place in baseball's first
all-non-Caucasian lineup, with the '71 Pirates, "basically saying,
what you're doing is good. Keep doing it. But it's gonna be a hard
road to tell the truth."
Radice adds, "The two times I've heard him recite that letter he's
broke down crying."
Radice already has two Sundance-selected short documentaries to his
credit, as producer. The most recent, "LSD A Go Go," about MK-ULTRA,
the CIA's mid-century experiment with LSD as mind control, sparked a
lot of hallucinatory tales.
"People love to share their own personal LSD stories," Radice says.
"It kicked something loose in my brain about this piece of folklore
that I had heard about Dock Ellis."
That led Radice to "Dock Ellis: In the Country of Baseball," a
biography written by Donald Hall that was published in 1976. Hall,
who would become U.S. poet laureate in 2006, had a long history with
America's game, having played softball with Robert Frost in his youth.
"Here's this academic poet, kind of hippie-looking white guy, long
hair, but he and Dock Ellis kind of became friends over a couple of
spring trainings," Radice says. "So there's this connection through
this school of very traditionalist American poetry that ends up at
Dock Ellis, and that gave me something really to think about."
Radice and Blizzard plan to shop "No No: A Dockumentary" around to
festivals next year. In the mean time, they're working to score
interviews with, among others, David Lander, better known as Squiggy
from "Laverne & Shirley," who was at Ellis' LSD no-hitter; Ron
Howard, who directed Ellis in the movie "Gung Ho," and whose "Happy
Days" character Richie Cunningham often ran into Laverne and Shirley;
and Michael Keaton, who starred in "Gung Ho," and who is a huge
Pittsburgh Pirates fan.
"We're not just sitting around on the couch smoking a joint and
talking about this anymore," Radice says.
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