A year shy of Media Process Group’s 25th anniversary, founder Bob Hercules credits his 1989 indie documentary “America’s Classic Ballparks” with knocking the MPG success story out of the park.
“We were a loose filmmaking collective that gradually coalesced into a serious production business,” Hercules recalls. “But we needed a feature-length program to really get us to the next level.”
In 1988, as Hercules and his MPG co-founders were batting around ideas for an indie doc on America’s first baseball parks, they focused on four parks built during baseball’s golden era: Chicago’s Wrigley Field (1914-) and Comiskey Park (1910-90), Detroit’s Tiger Stadium (1912-99), and Boston’s Fenway Park (1912-).
Wrigley and Fenway have been modified and modernized, and Comiskey and Tiger Stadium are just memories, but all four live on in the collector’s Edition of “America’s Classic Ballparks,” and showcased in bonus featurettes that detail their fate since the 1989 original filming.
One featurette is “Ted Williams?Up Close & Personal,” unseen footage from Hercules’ cherished interview with Red Sox legend Ted Williams, who seldom gave interviews in his twilight years.
