An 'Ivy'-covered look at Wrigley Field

Chicago Sun Times, October 2, 2001

BY DAVE HOEKSTRA

What connects colorful Cubs subjects such as Moe the Ballhawk, Les the Janitor and Steve Wolf, a local artist who built an obsessively detailed model of Wrigley Field?

Chicago hope.

Appropriately then, the video ''Wrigley Field: Beyond the Ivy" is as much about Chicago as it is about the characters like Moe, Les and Steve, who feed on the park's forlorn karma.

It will be shown at 8 p.m. Friday at the Piano Man, 3801 N. Clark, followed with a premiere Nov. 10 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. At the Piano Man screening, the film's composer, Bradley Williams, a onetime pianist and arranger for Woody Herman's Thundering Herd, will provide live entertainment.

Narrated by actor William Petersen, "Wrigley Field: Beyond the Ivy" has been four years in the making. The 100-minute video was directed and produced by David Levenson, who was assisted by editor-producer Jim Hausfeld, writer-producer Bob Chicoine and producer Jimmy Mack. They financed the video's $28,000 cost themselves.

Everyone in the crew except Hausfeld is a beer vendor at Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park. They are helping hands in the community of baseball.

''Even if you don't know each other, you recognize each other," Levenson said in a conversation at Murphy's Bleachers, across the street from Wrigley Field. ''We wanted to focus on what it means to be part of something while being an eccentric and your own self. Like Moe, Steve, Ronnie Woo [Wickers], the guys who sit in specific spots or the people who want to watch the game in [the] standing-room [section]. They all have their niche and places where they feel at home--but it's part of a bigger home."

Technically, "Wrigley Field: Beyond the Ivy" isn't a true documentary because it blends fact with fiction. At the beginning of the video, Petersen confesses: ''In the end, does it really matter where the truth tails off and the tall tales begin?"

A White Sox fan, Hausfeld grew up around 31st and Pulaski. ''We're probably walking a fine line," he said. "This really isn't about Cubs or baseball. Its really about people. And some of the stories could not be told in a straight documentary fashion. If the way to tell the story was taking a true situation and having it portrayed by an actor, then that's the way it had to be."

Levenson, a 43-year-old Detroit native who has lived in Chicago since 1980, concurs. ''Some of our characters are fictionalized and composites of people and situations," he said. "Most of it is straight documentary with real people. For instance, we use a composite of a scalper. We wanted to present that part of Wrigley Field, but scalpers wouldn't let us follow them around. So we wrote a script and improvised and had an actor [Michael T. Byrne] do the scalper part. But we want people to feel it's the real thing."

Les the Janitor (portrayed by local actor Andrew Schlessinger) serves as the story's other major fictionalized character. Les lives alone in a second-floor apartment building behind the left-field foul line.

''You look across the street, and most people are hanging out their windows, cheering for the Cubs," Levenson said. ''But there are a lot of windows where nothing's happening. It's dark. There's an aspect of Wrigley where people accept their surroundings and just live there. We wanted to put a voice to that."

But the real-life vignettes work best. Unofficial Cubs cheerleader Ronnie "Woo" Wickers certainly has become an overpublicized figure (and is the subject of another documentary being made around the ballpark). But ''Wrigley Field: Beyond the Ivy" treats Wickers with dignity and keen insight. Chicoine's script says of Wickers, ''He's the resident hobo with the abracadabra, the master of one small thing. ...Will we let him grow old? Does the eagle in its twilight disappoint us when it rests on the lower branch of the tree?"

However, artist Wolf clearly provides the emotional thread that links the characters of "Wrigley Field: Beyond the Ivy."

When it came time to move Wolf's 7-foot-by-7-foot Wrigley Field model from his Buffalo Grove condo to the annual Cubs Convention in downtown Chicago, he discovered that the stadium was too big to get out of his house. Even though he had meticulously built the model from aluminum, balsa, hickory wood and acrylic glass, he had to remove all the window brackets from his condo so he could get it out.

''The model was great," Hausfeld said. "But this guy? I got sucked into this [project] through the sheer force of his personality."

''As Steve went through his travails--not being able to move the thing, getting upset, not being able to sell it--he became a surrogate for us," Levenson said. "We were doing exactly the same thing he was doing--building his vision of Wrigley Field. And going through what every artist does, such as obsessing on it, spending too much money, wondering, 'Are people going to like it?' He truly became the outline for the project."

(FYI, Wolf finally sold the model to Murphy's Bleachers, across the street from Wrigley Field, where it remains on display.)

When they began shooting "Wrigley Field: Beyond the Ivy" in 1997, the filmmakers never figured on rapid change in the neighborhood. But since then, the Wrigleyville Tap, a popular watering hole for ballpark personnel, beer vendors and occasional Cubs, has closed. The legendary Yum-Yum Donuts, 3639 N. Clark, has become a hot dog stand.

Though the neighborhood is in constant flux, the ballpark is timeless.

''The video really is capturing the waning part of an era," Levenson said. ''A different era started around '83, '84. That's why everybody in the film is around the same age. Some of the bleacher people are a little older. We had a section on kids in the ballpark, but it didn't fit the time period.

"Ballhawking? If [the Tribune Co.] puts the [proposed] extension on the bleachers, that may become extinct. Moe Mullins [the Babe Ruth of Ballhawks, who has caught nearly 3,000 baseballs flying out of Wrigley Field] tried to get his son to ballhawk. He wasn't interested.

"The rooftops are going to change. Wrigley Field will be very different in the very near future."

''Wrigley Field: Beyond the Ivy" is available for $23, plus $4.50 for postage and handling, by writing to Bougainville Productions, P.O. Box 578-358, Chicago 60657-8358