Oscar Contender ‘It Ain’t Over’ Documents Underappreciated Greatness Of Yogi Berra — “Criminally Overlooked His Whole Life”
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“You can observe a lot by watching.”
Although attributed to the late Major League Baseball Hall of Famer/wit/pitchman Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra, one could imagine Albert Maysles, Frederick Wiseman or other legends of the observational/vérité strand of documentary positing this as a driving theme of a keynote address. Such is the understated prowess of this often misunderstood cultural icon, whose considerable achievements both on and off the field warrant a worthy documentary profile.
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Enter filmmaker Sean Mullin, whose canon has consisted primarily of fiction features. Back in 2018, his producer, Peter Soboloff, was impressed with RBG, about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, about television icon Fred Rogers, and he suggested that Mullin consider Yogi Berra as a protagonist. Soboloff then introduced Mullin to the Berra family.
“I’d done my research by the time I met with them,” says Mullin, “and my pitch was essentially that this guy was criminally overlooked his whole life, at every stage, from childhood onwards. He was never taken seriously, but he was someone to be taken seriously.”
Despite three MVP Awards and 10 World Series rings to underscore his Hall-of-Fame bona fides, pundits would hone in on Berra’s goofy mien and squatty stature as counts against their preconceived image of what a ballplayer ought to be. And this continued well past retirement: The 2015 All Star Game included a tribute to the greatest living players of all time–and Berra was not included. Lindsay Berra, Yogi’s oldest grandchild, was watching the game with her grandfather, and that snub crystallized her mission to maintain the family flame and promulgate Yogi’s story–which in turn earned her the honor of narrating the film. (She is also executive producer.)
“My initial goal was not to have Lindsay narrate the film,” Mullin admits. But then he saw the value of her impassioned advocacy. “I turned to my producers and said, ‘Lindsay is our narrator. This is our way in. She’s the perfect torchbearer for this legacy and the perfect person to shine a light on this discrepancy between perception and reality.’”
It Ain’t Over opens with that All-Star Game slight of Yogi and Lindsay voicing her disappointment. That de facto prologue sets the tone for the purpose of the film–to amplify and celebrate Yogi Berra’s legacy in a full-bodied way, as an athlete, as a sage, as a man. And it established the collaborative dynamic between Lindsay and Mullin.
“The collaboration was great for me from a craft standpoint,” says Mullin. “I come from the narrative feature world, so I write an awful lot. In working with Lindsay, I didn’t necessarily want to put words in her mouth. I wanted to make sure everything that was said was something that she really said. We already had two or three interviews with her, so we were already able to pick out some of our interview bits to pepper the rest of the narrative.”
With Mullin and Berra on opposite coasts during the pandemic, they collaborated on the narration via FaceTime and podcast mics. “I’d never done voiceover work before,” Berra admits. “To do it under such bizarre circumstances, it was difficult. I thank Sean for his patience. If I didn’t like something, he was like, ‘Okay, cool. How would you say it?’ It was a really good experience.”
Mullin came to the project not only from feature filmmaking–It Ain’t’ Over is actually his second documentary–but also from stand-up comedy, and before that, the military, as a West Point grad.
“The leadership qualities I got at West Point actually really helped,” Mullin explains. “With documentary, the crews are smaller; you have to be nimble. Things are going to go wrong, there’s a lot of travel, you have to keep people motivated and keep the morale high. The similarities between the military and filmmaking are much more than most people think.
“With stand-up comedy,” he continues, “people have a hard time being both funny and good. You’re either the joker or you’re the king. But Yogi was both. People are very uncomfortable with allowing people to be funny and good. Being the funny guy at West Point was definitely a strange contradiction to a lot of people. So I think you’ll have a tough time labeling people that have such disparate qualities to their character.”
Lindsay came to the project as a veteran print and online journalist of two decades, having written for MLB.com and ESPN magazine, among other outlets. Even though she was new to documentary, “I consider it a major life objective to keep my grandfather’s legacy alive. I thought that making a movie was a great way to do it. When I first started talking to Sean, after my grandfather passed away in 2015, I had written a ton. And I just started collecting all of the things I had written and all the Google Documents I had made of stats and started throwing them at Sean.
“My journalism brain just went into, Who are these interviews? How do we get them? How do we set them up? And how do we do it as soon as possible? I just tried to be logistically helpful and then stay out of Sean’s way. But I also think that as a magazine writer, I’m a storyteller too, and I had things that I wanted to get across. I’d spent years thinking about my grandpa in certain settings, and crafting stories in other settings. So I had arcs that I wanted to push that thankfully Sean was open to.”
One little-known chapter in Yogi Berra’s narrative that Mullin and Lindsay bring to life in the film is his service in the Navy in World War II, and particularly his participation in the D-Day invasion at Utah Beach in Normandy. Mullin — who as a captain in the National Guard oversaw a contingent of Army first responders at Ground Zero after the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center — felt a visceral connection to Yogi’s tour of duty. “That was very important to me,” he explains. “I’m not trying to compare my experience to Normandy, by any means. I did have a lot of personal ties to the story that I think really helped, and obviously Lindsay’s personal attachment to the story elevated the ultimate product.”
“I keep getting messages from folks, especially since the documentary is on Netflix, who say they’ve been lifelong Yankee fans, but had no idea that my grandfather was in the service,” Lindsay shares. “And when you know that about Yogi Berra, it puts his career into a much different perspective. They talk about him as one of the best clutch hitters in the history of the game, but he would tell you that the bases loaded/two outs/bottom of the ninth is nothing but opportunity. That’s not pressure to guide him through a real life-or-death situation. That really just lends another depth to my grandfather that folks clearly didn’t know about.”
As a child of Italian immigrants and as one whose career paralleled the civil rights movement, Yogi Berra epitomized empathy and grace, befriending Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby and Monte Irvin both before and after their playing days, and advocating for LGBTQ+ equality in his twilight years. “It wasn’t something that he talked about,” Lindsay admits. “He always did the right thing without really having to think about it. It’s a real gift, but it also goes back to World War II. He didn’t go overseas to literally risk his life for the freedoms of a bunch of French people and then come home and watch those same freedoms and liberties denied to his fellow Americans. So I just think that he treated people the way he would want to be treated.”
It Ain’t Over, distributed theatrically by Sony Pictures Classics, is currently streaming on Netlfix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play and YouTube.
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