One day, David Van Sleet of Estero walked into John Biffar’s office. Van Sleet had a story he thought might interest the Dreamtime Entertainment filmmaker.
He began to tell Biffar about this baseball team he’d started. They’re called the Louisville Slugger Warriors. A minute in, Biffar stopped him.
“I said, ‘I’m in,’” Biffar recounted. “There was no budget. There was no anything. But I was enthralled by this story. You don’t run across stories like that. At least I don’t. And I was all in right away.”
Biffar knew right from the start that his documentary would focus on the team’s individual coaches, trainers and players — all amputees.
“Some of these guys were injured in war and lost limbs,” Biffar said. “Some of them were congenital birth defects. Some of them had tragic accidents in everyday life. But what was so amazing to me was that they considered themselves to be lucky.”
The project took Biffar all over the country during the two years the project consumed.
“Filmed a couple of games here in Southwest Florida at JetBlue and at FGCU. And then up north. I went out and interviewed Jim Abbott in Los Angeles and then when the team got honored by the Mets, we went to City Field in the middle of the playoffs.”
Biffar’s accomplishments include the 1994 feature film “Captiva Island,” starring Ernest Borgnine and Arte Johnson; the History Channel documentaries “The Nazi Plan to Bomb New York” and “John Paul II, A Saint for Our Times”; “Queen of Swing,” about Norma Miller’s influence in the globalization of American jazz culture; and “Cuba Reframed.” So when the nine-time Emmy winner says that “Curveballs” may be his best doc ever, that’s saying a lot.
"I knew this was going to be a special film, and it’s exceeded my hopes for it,” said Biffar. “And that’s mainly because of the guys’ stories. The reason that I think this movie is so powerful is the life these guys led and the attitudes that they chose to have about life."
“Curveballs … Lessons in the Game of Life” premiered Wednesday night at the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center during the 15th Annual Fort Myers Film Festival's opening night festivities. It plays four more times in four different venues today through Saturday. A number of the players and coaches will be in attendance and available for questions and photo opportunities.
MORE INFORMATION:
The Louisville Slugger Warriors are a nationally sponsored and extremely competitive amputee baseball team that consists of U.S. military veterans, active-duty personnel, wounded warriors and current and former amputee college baseball players. All of the players have either suffered a loss of limb, partial limb, digits, eye or serious limb deformities. Others have prostheses due to congenital, disease, or trauma-related reasons.
The team plays in national and regional baseball tournaments around the country and in special baseball game events against able-bodied teams. These versatile amputee ballplayers not only compete on the baseball field but also have been known to occasionally display their ability on the softball diamond as well.
Louisville Slugger Team Advisor states, “At Louisville Slugger, we are proud of our commitment to our LS Warriors National Amputee Baseball Team. These men have far exceeded rehabilitation expectations and challenges and deserve an opportunity to test their ability to play against the whole, athletic, and otherwise normal baseball players.”
The team was founded by Estero resident David Van Sleet, a prosthetics expert who has dedicated his career to supporting disabled veterans.
“His background is really interesting,” said Biffar. “He worked for the V.A. making prosthetics. He was about to retire, and they told him he had to take this course that would help make the VA better. The course was given by a third-party consultant, who told David to come up with an idea on how to improve the VA. David’s idea was to form an amputee baseball team. The consultant looked at the proposal and said, ‘No, no, no, no, no. Come back and give me something that we can really do. Tomorrow, I want to see a new idea.’ David returns the next day with the same proposal and the consultant tells him, ‘I told you yesterday you’re not going to pass this class with that.’ And David says ‘I don’t care if I pass this class, I’m retiring. I’m leaving, you know. This is what I want to do.’ So he did it on his own, and now that same consulting firm uses his baseball team as an example of out-of-the-box thinking and what you can accomplish. So it’s a pretty funny story.’
Van Sleet and Biffar worked together as producers on the documentary.
“David is the kind of guy who, if he gets it in his mind to do something, he makes it happen,” Biffar said. “So David also played a critical role in helping me make this film because of his connection with all the players. He was fabulous to work with.”
“The route we took with this film,” said Biffar, “was to profile the individual players, each of whom had these unbelievable stories of overcoming tragic injuries and accidents.”
Among the players that Biffar profiled are Luke Brittain, who lost a hand in a lawnmower accident, and Derek Holcomb, accidentally shot by a hunter.
The Warriors are coached by former Major League athletes, including head coach Curtis Pride, who is deaf and played 11 seasons in the MLB. He recently released his memoir, “I Felt the Cheers.” He played in Major League Baseball from 1993 to 2006 for the Montreal Expos, Boston Red Sox, Detroit Tigers, Atlanta Braves, New York Yankees, and Anaheim Angels/Los Angeles Angels. In 2015, Pride was named MLB's Ambassador for Inclusion. Since 2009, Pride has been the head baseball coach at Gallaudet University. He was deaf at birth from rubella.
Also featured is legendary pitcher Jim Abbott, who famously threw a no-hitter for the Yankees with one hand and continues to inspire a new generation of one-handed players.
Biffar describes his approach to creating a documentary as organic.
“True docs unfold on their own,” Biffar explained. “If you have an idea of what you’re going to do ahead of time, in my mind it’s not really a doc because a doc will unfold naturally over the course of time.”
The process begins by Biffar interviewing as many people as he can. As he does, he continually asks himself how he’s going to bring the story to life visually which, in turn, dictates what he needs to shoot to tell the story and make it interesting. That often entails locating archival footage. Sometimes, Biffar finds it necessary to stage and film reenactments.
“[Editing] is like a big jigsaw puzzle,” Biffar continues.
To gain cohesion, Biffar asks each interviewee many of the same questions.
“We live in an ADD society,” Biffar explained. “I’m one of them. If you stay on one person too long, [the documentary] kind of drags. So you need to have more than one person telling the story so that in editing, they can complete each other’s sentences. It really keeps the pacing moving.”
Biffar’s other technique is to avoid narration.
“I never use narration. You know, narration is kind of editorial, right? You have the voice of God coming in and telling the story … ‘And this happened this way.’ To me, it’s fake. It doesn’t work. What’s so much better is to allow the viewer to look at the screen, watch somebody talk, and derive their own impression of who they are and what they’re about. When you have this narrator come in, to me, it takes away the film’s validity.”
Lack of narration requires the filmmaker to collect a far greater volume of material, but in Biffar’s estimation, the result justifies the added effort.
Initially, “Curveballs” was slated to premiere on Saturday at the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center. Players and coaches made airline and hotel reservations with that expectation. Then Biffar received a call from Fort Myers Film Festival Director Eric Raddatz.
“Eric said, ‘Uh, you can still have Saturday night, but would you mind if we used your film as the opening film as well?’ I’m like, ‘Sure.’ It went from there to running five times in four days on Sanibel at BIG ARTS, at the Alliance for the Arts at 3 p.m. on Friday, out at Babcock Ranch on Thursday night and twice at the Davis Art Center. We’re going to try to make it to as many of them and bring team members with us.”
“Hey, what’s better than premiering a film in your hometown?” Biffar ask rhetorically. “To me, festivals are all about the people and your friends. And that’s what I’m excited about. I get to hang out with my friends, have a good time and show a movie. What could be better?”
Over the past three decades, Biffar has served as a director, producer, screenwriter, cinematographer and on-air talent. He has directed such notable talent as Don Shula (late coach of the Miami Dolphins), Helio Castroneves (Indy Car Champion and "Dancing with the Stars" Mirror Ball winner), Ernest Borgnine (“McHale's Navy,” “From Here to Eternity,” “The Wild Bunch,” “Marty”), Arte Johnson (“Laugh In”), Norma Miller (The Queen of Swing), Bill Cobbs (“Night At The Museum,” “Northern Exposure”) Ali MacGraw (“Love Story”), news legend Walter Cronkite, Olympic skater Dorothy Hamill and Jacques Cousteau.
Biffar began his career in filmmaking at the University of South Florida.
In 1983, Biffar founded one of the first independent production companies in Fort Myers. Over the next five years, the company expanded in both sales and reputation, evolving in 1987 into Dreamtime Entertainment, Inc.
As president and CEO of Dreamtime Entertainment, Biffar has expanded the studio’s client base to encompass both national and international clients. With the company’s award-winning team of producers, directors, camera crews and editors creating superior programming, including broadcast commercials, feature films, corporate videos, web video, and long-form, original programming for national, international and home video release, Dreamtime today is a leader in film and television production.
Dreamtime’s first feature film, 1994’s “Captiva Island,” saw theatrical release and aired on HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Encore and Starz networks.
Over the next few years, Biffar went on to work on a TV series shown nationally on The Travel Channel. Then in 1999, he teamed up with Walter Cronkite and James Newton to film “Uncommon Friends of the Twentieth Century,” which examines the unique friendship that developed in the early 1900s between Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone and James Newton, who penned the book of the same name.
In 2002, The History Channel commissioned Dreamtime to shoot a documentary titled “The Nazi Plan to Bomb New York.”
In 2008, Dreamtime completed and debuted a documentary on the life of Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. Titled “John Paul II, A Saint for Our Times,” the film enjoyed a national release.
Two years later, Biffar produced “Queen of Swing,” a 72-minute documentary narrated by Bill Cobbs which took an inside look at Norma Miller’s influence in the globalization of America’s jazz culture and her and her fellow artists’ roles in racial integration.
In 2009, Biffar directed the national PBS documentary “Under the Sea” on legendary underwater cinematographer Al Giddings.
Biffar’s other accomplishments include the 90-minute History Channel documentary “Fire Boats of 9-11,” which has received acclaim for its portrayal of the heroic efforts of the New York Fire Department post 9-11 and his 2020 documentary, 'Cuba Reframed.'
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.