Sports make for great theatre and often even better documentaries, especially when the event features two storied franchises in America’s most historic sport. When executive producer Sara Bernstein and director R.J. Cutler got their opportunity to take audiences behind the scenes of last year’s baseball championship showdown between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees, they didn’t hesitate.
Apple TV+’s Fight For Glory: 2024 World Series will debut on March 28. The three-part docuseries is an inside look at the Fall Classic won by the Dodgers in five games. This documentary was created in collaboration with MLB Studios, Apple TV+, and Ron Howard’s and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Documentaries. Imagine and Apple TV+ teamed up for last year’s The Dynasty: New England Patriots. Fight For Glory includes the story of a possible emerging dynasty: the Dodgers.
“Who wouldn’t want to tackle the World Series?” Bernstein said in an interview with Awful Announcing last week. “We at Imagine have an incredible relationship with Major League Baseball and signed a first-look deal with them in 2023. And in thinking about what probably could be one of the most iconic, eventized projects that we could think about developing collectively, we started thinking about the World Series.”
Bernstein and Cutler were fortunate that the World Series was Dodgers vs. Yankees. The matchup not only featured two of the most popular, highest-spending teams with the biggest stars, such as Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, Mookie Betts, Juan Soto, Giancarlo Stanton, and Freddie Freeman. It also harkened back to their previous 11 meetings, including the memorable 1981 World Series.
MLB used to make films with World Series highlights for the soldiers fighting in World War II starting in 1943. The concept of producing films for worldwide distribution to armed forces installations was brought to Commissioner Kenesaw Landis by Lew Fonseca. Cutler, an avid baseball fan, was eager to create something that also had deep traditional roots.
“Here was an opportunity, as Sarah said to me when we first talked about it, to make it a real film,” he said. “To be as cinematic and character-driven, as emotional, as dramatic as possible. We always love those opportunities. But particularly, we love them when the game of baseball is the landscape because that’s an opportunity to tell real, powerful, metaphorical stories about life itself, and that’s what you see in the series.”
In any documentary, there is the challenge of gaining the trust of the participants. That’s not always easy even for the most accomplished of filmmakers. One thing that helped was bringing in Hall of Famer Derek Jeter early in the project as an executive producer. Another was the cooperation of Freeman and his family. It was a storybook 2024 for Freeman, who overcame injury to win World Series MVP. He had the most dramatic moment of the championship with a game-winning grand slam in the 10th inning of Game 1.
Cutler said the Freemans involvement opened the door for other opportunities.
“We had access to the Freemans, who were so generous with their time and with allowing us to film with them at such a critical moment,” he said. “And not just Freddie and Chelsea, but their kids and Freddie’s dad and the extended family. Because they were involved, that was a real encouragement to Brianna Betts and Mookie’s mom to also be part of it. It can be a rippling effect. The more people who are involved, the more opportunities you have. S,o you can get on the bus with the family, and you can do all sorts of things.”
Fight For Glory: 2024 World Series will be available for streaming on March 28.
