MOVIES

Richard Linklater's 'Inning by Inning' follows coach Augie Garrido

By John DeFore
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Monday, June 02, 2008

By now, it won't come as a shock to Richard Linklater's fans that — after making everything from avant-garde narratives to studio comedies, animation to agit-prop — the Austin filmmaker has blazed yet another cinematic path by directing a feature-length documentary.

Still, they might be surprised to see that his debut doc is not an exploration of obscure philosophies or a Chris Marker-style rumination, but a straight-ahead, sports-nut portrait of Augie Garrido, the University of Texas baseball guru who's the winningest coach in NCAA Division I history.

A TV doc for ESPN, no less: "Inning By Inning: A Portrait of a Coach," which pitches a special red-carpet screening 7 p.m. tonight at the Paramount before its June 15 television debut.

Fans shouldn't wonder. Would Linklater have signed on to remake "The Bad News Bears," after all, in 2005 if he didn't have a soft spot for the sport — one signaled early on with a nostalgia-fueled baseball sequence in "Dazed and Confused"?

Unlike a lot of film buffs — stereotypically a pasty, underdeveloped breed — the director was quite the athlete in school. He played baseball into college, in fact, when he learned he had a heart condition that prevented him from running.

"One day you're the starting left-fielder," he recalls, "and the next day you can't play any more."

The turn of events wasn't as traumatic as it might have been for another budding ballplayer.

"It hit me at the right moment," he admits. "I was taking a playwriting class; I was kind of an English major — starting to stand in the outfield and spending all that time (thinking) I'd rather be reading Dostoyevsky. So mentally, I was starting to drift anyway. Once I discovered filmmaking, I never read a sports page for 15-plus years, I think. Sports were out of my life for a long time."

But youthful obsessions die hard, and Linklater's perspective colored the way he approached "Dazed" characters who might have been dumb jocks in a more conventional film. "I always hated the depiction of athletes in movies," he complains. "They're always these total jugheads, you know, crew-cutted crypto-fascist military-type guys — where every team I was on, we were pretty cool guys, you know? We certainly thought we were."

Cut to a decade or so later. Linklater's discovering that, after doing his time as a four-movies-in-a-row cinephile, he enjoys being outdoors: "I found out I could run again. I had a little land, and I realized I always liked hitting a baseball, liked athletic stuff. I found myself shooting more hoop and taking batting practice." And, paying more attention to local baseball and football, he discovered Garrido, whose unconventional approach struck a chord.

"Well, Augie's a different guy," Linklater explains. "You hear a usual interview after a game with a coach, and then you hear an Augie interview, and he really talks differently. He talks philosophically; he has a different vibe about him. Having played, it sort of resonated with me, like, 'Wow, that's a cool coach.' He really speaks of it in this sort of holistic, thinking, Zen-type way that I totally appreciate as an ex-player. You kind of wish — I mean, I had all different kind of coaches. But just hearing Augie speak about the game and the process and all that, I could totally appreciate that."

Linklater got to know Garrido as a fan, then a friend, and decided making a documentary about him might be fun. He recruited friend Brian Franklin to take charge of following the Longhorns through a season, filming all the games and recording conversations in dugouts and locker rooms, "just to see what the next season would be." Linklater himself conducted interviews with Garrido's peers, players and childhood friends. Together, they wound up with enough footage that it took the director and longtime editor Sandra Adair 18 months to turn it into a movie.

Does making a documentary still sound like fun?

"Not really," the director laughs. "Put it like this: I just filmed a whole movie (the upcoming "Me and Orson Welles"), and three weeks after shooting, I kind of have a cut of the movie and am almost done. On a documentary, 18 months of editing later ... I kind of don't really have the patience."

"It was pretty fascinating getting into somebody's life — not a big political figure, not a huge artist, but a coach. I thought for people who didn't even know or care about baseball, that potentially they would see what for them would be almost an anthropological study. That, 'Wow, they practice, there's something to it, not just goons trying to hit a ball with a bat.' You know, there's more to it. Baseball really is intricate. And Augie is kind of the master of that, of acknowledging that. There's going to be a winner and a loser over every pitch, over every inning; his approach is so specifically pitch-by-pitch, inning-by-inning."

Garrido's emphasis on process resonated with Linklater's approach to filmmaking, as well. When the coach, for instance, counsels his batter not to look at the number of strikes and balls on the scoreboard, but rather to take each pitch as it comes, Linklater says it's "like being an actor — you don't play the results of a scene, you exist in time, and try to communicate and be real."

Not that sports and acting are completely analogous.

"It's different in that you're not in a specific competition; in baseball, there's a zero-sum quality to it, where, you know, if I hit a home run, the pitcher sort of failed," he says. "You don't have that in filmmaking. We're just all trying to do our best. The arts are very forgiving, in that way — you know, it's not a moment-to-moment check. It is all about process. I was the kind of baseball player who just loved hitting a ball, and running, and playing, and I was OK with the noncompetitive element. While there's an element in me that's competitive, I would have been content just to practice, and not play games. I mean, it's fun when you do well, but I sort of like the purity of baseball."

He looks at his career the same way.

"I feel that way about film, too: If I could just make movies and they never had to open, that would be OK. (Laughs) Just the gift of actually being able to make the movie, that's the good thing."