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2 months ago
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EXCLUSIVE: Justin Baldoni spent much of the summer embroiled in a hushed battle with his It Ends with Us co-star Blake Lively. Now, he’s become entangled in another row, this time involving race and basketball.
In 2021, former NBA star Craig Hodges, who won two championships with the Chicago Bulls, struck a deal with Wayfarer, the production company run by Baldoni and billionaire Steve Sarowitz, to turn his 2017 book into a documentary.
Given the success of The Last Dance, the hit ESPN series featuring his former teammate Michael Jordan, the idea was to take a different look at the same period, using Hodges’ book Long Shot: The Triumphs and Struggles of an NBA Freedom Fighter as source material.
However, the three-point expert has spent much of the past 12 months trying to get the rights to the project back after it was shelved by Wayfarer last year.
There are financial issues at play, as happens regularly in Hollywood, but this latest skirmish also raises the question of race, and who should be allowed to tell the story of a Black man like Hodges.
In his book, Hodges claims that was blackballed from the NBA in the early 1990s for using his platform to stand up for justice and was unable to find another team after he was cut from the Bulls, in part, he says because he criticized fellow Black athletes who “failed to use their considerable wealth and influence to assist the poor and disenfranchised”. When the Chicago Bulls were invited to The White House in 1992 after their championship win, a dashiki-clad Hodges delivered a hand-written letter to President George H. W. Bush demanding that he do more to address racism and economic inequality.
Initially, Hodges began working on the documentary, which has had working titles including The Lost Dance and Whiteballed, with British-Indian producer Jivi Singh. Wayfarer – which is responsible for Will Ferrell’s trans road-trip doc Will & Harper – then came on board to finance it. After the first director involved fell through, Hodges wanted Singh to direct and produce via his IFF Content banner.
That’s when things soon started to go wrong. There were early disagreements about the creative path for the documentary. Hodges believes some of this involved making his story more “palatable” for the NBA, a claim that Wayfarer denies.
“When I met Jivi, I realized he wanted to do justice to my book [with] an accurate portrayal of the timeframe that the material covered. However, Wayfarer’s involvement [started] a creative debate about framing Craig Hodges in a palatable way that the NBA would accept, which isn’t the essence of my book,” Hodges told Deadline. “Wayfarer never seemed interested in that version of the story. Justin Baldoni was definitely interested in virtue signaling and piggy-backing off the hype of The Last Dance, but a lot less interested in the true weight of responsibility that came with accurately depicting the realities of being a Black man in America.”
Baldoni and Wayfarer’s CEO Jamey Heath, who is Black, wanted someone other than Singh to direct the documentary. The pair set their sights on Kirk Fraser, a Black director who helmed the ESPN doc Without Bias about Len Bias, the college basketball player who died two days after going in the second round of the NBA draft. Fraser, who was born in Jamaica, has also directed docs such as History’s Tuskegee Airmen: Legacy of Courage.
In a Zoom call reviewed by Deadline, which received permission to use the comments, Heath and Baldoni tried to convince Singh he wasn’t the right man for the job due to his ethnicity, nationality and experience.
“I promise you, that as much as feel you feel no one knows [Hodges’ life] better, no one knows it better than me. I’m his age, I’ve experienced it and walked through it. You might be a wonderful filmmaker, but the story is something that there might be some blind spots for you,” Heath said on the call.
Singh replied, “We’re all going to have our own subjective perspective, Jamie, but I asked you to articulate those nuances to me and you said to me, and I thought this was slightly disingenuous, rather than articulating them for me and allowing me to grow and understand, you said to me ‘Jivi, if you’d have experienced this, you wouldn’t need to ask that question’. To me, that felt like obfuscation, rather than you trying to inform and illuminate me to what it was that I was missing. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to do that.”
Baldoni then added, “Racism in America… is so unique to America that most people don’t quite understand it. So, when Jamie as a Black person tells you, as a non-Black person, if you’d experienced it, you wouldn’t have to ask that question. It’s coming from 50 years of pain and racism, of being thrown out of a swimming pool when he was seven years old and the white people had to drain the pool because a Black person touched it. It comes from a place you don’t know.”
“We, as people who are not Black, can never put the emphasis on the Black people to tell us and teach us… this is a very important thing of why it’s unique to America, why the director does need to be Black, I believe, and from America,” he added.
The conversation touches upon the question of whether someone who isn’t a Black American can accurately portray the Black experience in America? Hodges certainly believes so but others, including Heath and Baldoni, disagreed in this instance.
Ultimately, Fraser walked away from the project as he didn’t want to get in the middle of the dispute. Wayfarer says that Singh passed on Fraser.
Subsequently, Singh is understood to have shot a considerable amount of footage for the documentary and there is a rough cut of the film, which has now been caught up in the rights battle.
“The Craig Hodges story is one we at Wayfarer, and in particular myself, care a great deal about,” Heath told Deadline. “A Black man being denied the opportunity to professionally practice his craft all because he wanted to highlight what was happening to Black people in America in the 1980’s and 90’s is something we continue to see in current times, which is why we felt so passionately to pursue this project with the care and proper filmmaking team it deserved. While all stories involving Black people don’t need to be told by a Black person, some do indeed require someone that has lived the experience, which is something Justin Baldoni understood and expressed vocally to those involved. I am proud to have a team of people who recognize this very important matter of having Black voices behind the camera and it was never our intention to have to publicly defend our decision to stand tall for what we believed in from the start.”
While the dispute between Hodges and Wayfarer highlights the question of who should be able to tell certain stories, as with many other rows in Hollywood, it has now also become about money.
Wayfarer is understood to have put around $1.1M into the project, as well as having paid considerable funds to Hodges to cover living expenses, in addition to his contracted fee as a consultant during production.
The company is willing to release its rights and has asked for $50,000 upfront in addition to $125,000 if Hodges and Singh manage to sell the project to another buyer.
But Hodges and Singh maintain that under the contract they don’t have to pay Wayfarer. They claim that they have creative control as a result of a “creative tie-break” in the deal and a rights reversion. IFF issued a termination to Wayfarer, which they say they could do if the company had not fully funded the project 18 months after the start of principal photography.
“When Wayfarer offered to sell us the rights back for $50,000 plus $125,000 in add-ons they contractually, in our view, were asking us to pay for something we already own. I believe they knew that the ongoing dispute would make it effectively impossible to onboard a third party to help fund and complete the project,” Singh told Deadline.
Hodges wants to be able to finish the film. “Wayfarer needs to step aside and relinquish any and all claims to the film. Jivi has the best intentions for the production and for me personally. His film is an honest and fair representation of the events and what happened to me,” he said.
