Up For Grabs
Directed by Mike Wranovics

Back in November 2001 San Francisco Giant slugger Barry Bonds was burning up the record books and on the last game of the season hit his 73rd home run into the stands of Pac Bell Stadium. It ought to have ended there as Patrick Hayashi emerged from the melee holding the milestone baseball. However another fan, Alex Popov, claimed to have caught the ball and news footage and eyewitness reports appeared to support him.

What happened?

The answer and a court battle that would ensue over two years form the basis of Up for Grabs, the first feature by one-time marketing exec Mike Wranovics.

"I'm a lifelong baseball fan and the day after it happened I saw this article in the paper with the headline: Fan Loses Fortune at Bottom of Pile," recalls Wranovics. "I thought this would make an interest movie."

The wrinkle in this yarn was that he had never made a film. He'd never evened picked up a movie camera though he'd taken one film history course as an elective when he attended Stanford University. But earlier that year he'd been a victim of the dot.com bust and when he considered a new career decided he'd like to write and direct movies.

"I'd been working on a script for six months when I read the story," says Wranovics. "I just thought maybe this story was better than anything I could write and just started to phone people up who'd been there and were quoted in the news reports. As things progressed I contacted the lawyers and went on-line to find out about digital cameras."

In retrospect he says he did a lot of things wrong, but the one thing he got right was telling people he was making a movie rather than just thinking about it. He simply had an innate sense that he could figure out what had to be done and things somehow coalesced when he locked in on a title for the project. He smiles at the memory of old marketing instincts kicking in to prod the production along.

Wranovics says he simply became obsessive about the story. Nonetheless he fretted that the media coverage the trial and personalities had received might make Up for Grabs redundant for audiences. It wasn't until he premiered the film at the South x Southwest festival that he came to realize just how compelling his characters were and that people had short and fragmented memories.

"I didn't really distinguish it from a fictional film. I could see it was full of ironies and had comedy, suspense and human drama. It was simply a movie and we've seen a lot of documentaries recently that work theatrically. Truth, after all, is stranger than fiction."

Wranovics wound up shooting about 250 hours of film as he covered the trial and its aftermath. He learned about film clearances, was threatened early on with a law suit by Popov and is now finally starting to receive inquiries about theatrical distribution. He's also begun a new film focusing on the Stanford Men's Basketball team and considering a couple of other non-fiction projects.

And what's become of the script he started three years ago?

"I took it out of the drawer recently," he says. "I still like the idea but I just feel more attune to documentary subject matter. My guess is that I'll eventually get around to finishing it and maybe after five or six documentaries I'll do a narrative film as a change of pace. But I'll always make non-fiction films. That's what my passion is and where my instincts take me."

- by Leonard Klady