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PBS's Roberto Clemente Doc & The Ken Burns Controversy
April 25, 2008
In 1972 the legendary Puerto Rican baseball player Roberto Clemente died in a plane crash while taking supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. He was only 38-years-old and his body was never found in the Atlantic Ocean where his plane crashed. If you missed out on the premiere of the PBS documentary “Roberto Clemente,” an “American Experience” this week, which has a handy Spanish-language version as well, you can now view it by visiting the PBS American Experience site. They’ve also got a page dedicated to books about Latinos in baseball.
There’s a lot to learn and admire about Clemente though I’m not a fan of baseball in the least. But Clemente was quite a trailblazing humanitarian for his time. During the height of segregration, a Spanish-speaking Afro-Latino athlete in 1950’didn’t have it so easy. The documentary shows how he was often isolated by his team members and quoted phonetically in his awkward English by the press: "Now I heet ball," or "no play too moch."
Bernardo Ruiz, the Brooklyn based writer, producer and director of "Roberto Clemente" who hails from Mexico, also wanted to make sure a thorough documentary was available on this American icon. He recently wrote a letter to the members of NALIP (The National Association of Latino Independent Producers) letting them know about the film and reminding them about the controversy surrounding Ken Burns’ documentaries and its lack of Latino representation, beginning with Burns’ celebrated “Baseball” in ’94.
Here’s a segment of Ruiz’s letter which summarizes the Latino community’s response to recent PBS documentaries:
“I am not writing in my capacity as filmmaker, but in the capacity of advocate. The fact is there are too few programs by and or about Latinos on PBS at the national level and NALIP (National Association of Latino Independent Producers could and should be doing more to pressure PBS for greater inclusion. I don’t have to trot out examples of Ken Burns’ “The War” to illustrate this problem. This has been happening for quite some time...Back in 1994, Ken Burns did the same thing with “Baseball.” Daily News columnist and author Juan Gonzalez (who is interviewed in our film) explained “perhaps the greatest Burns revision of history occurred with his 1994 film Baseball. In 18 hours of gripping drama, guess how much time Burns devoted to Latino ballplayers? Six minutes: four to Roberto Clemente, and two to all the other Latinos.” That was a spectacular omission, given that modern-day rosters are more than a third Latino. I am glad that our film does some of the work of correcting these mistakes, but lets be honest, there needs to be a greater chunk of the public media pie devoted to Latino producers --and not just small amounts of set aside money—so that these kinds of mistakes do not habitually re-occur. As a NALIP Board member I want to see our organization put intelligent pressure PBS to hire Latino leadership at the programming and executive levels so that PBS producer rosters — like Major League Baseball’s rosters in the early 1970s — begin to reflect something closer to reality. At this moment many Latino producers have to both make films and be their own advocates within the system...There will always be some of this, but we’re at a moment, when we should be able to see better results with a little bit of pressure. I’d like to make this part of our local and national dialogues. In the meantime, if you have the time, I hope you can support our project: About the film: Roberto Clemente features interviews with Pulitzer Prize-winning authors David Maraniss (Clemente) and George F. Will (Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball) as well as journalist and author Juan Gonzalez (Harvest of Empire), Vera Clemente, Baseball Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda, and former teammates. Golden Globe Award-winning actor Jimmy Smits (The West Wing, NYPD Blue) narrates."
Posted by Adriana V. Lopez on April 25, 2008 | Comments (0)
