DAYTONA BEACH -- City Island Park, palm trees and Daytona Beach's 1940s-era downtown figure prominently in the new movie “42.”
While the backdrop for the Daytona Beach scenes might bring back memories to some, what moviegoers actually see is downtown Macon, Ga., that city's Luther Williams Field and state-of-the-art computer imaging.
“That looked like Daytona,” said Daytona Beach's Doc Graham, who played for several Negro Leagues teams in Jacksonville in the 1940s and competed against Jackie Robinson.
Graham, 83, who became friends with Robinson and represented the Jackie Robinson Foundation locally, and local historian Bill Schumann saw “42” Wednesday in a private screening at Paragon Ocean Walk 10, where a general-public premiere is scheduled for 10 p.m. Thursday.
The based-on-a-true-story movie tells of Robinson's battle to break the major-league color barrier in 1947. It also recalls spring training in Daytona Beach a year earlier when the baseball legend wore No. 9 for the Triple-A Montreal Royals.
The movie stars Chadwick Boseman as Robinson and Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers' general manager, who put “a black man in white baseball.”
Robinson and his wife, Rachel, arrive in Daytona Beach on a Greyhound bus. They get off downtown in front of numerous stores, including a prominent J.C. Penney Co. storefront.
A significant portion of the movie's beginning deals with Robinson's time in Daytona Beach, where the newlyweds stayed at the home of local black businessman Joe Harris and his wife, Duff. Robinson is shown playing for the Royals in an exhibition contest against the Brooklyn Dodgers in what is depicted as City Island Park, although the movie doesn't draw attention to the March 17, 1946, encounter being the first racially integrated game on record.
Other scenes depict DeLand and Sanford, detailing open discrimination against Robinson in both locations.
“It was good they showed the spring training in Daytona Beach because this is such a big part of the story,” said Schumann, who was especially pleased to see a scene in which a young boy in the stands at City Island prays for Robinson.
That character was a young Ed Charles, a Daytona Beach native who, because of Robinson's inspiration, grew up to be a major league infielder and won a World Series with the 1969 New York Mets.
Despite “Daytona Beach” getting prominent screen time, not one scene in the film was shot here.
“When we first started talking to the movie's producers and scouts, they wanted to come to Macon because of Luther Williams Field, which is one of the older ballfields in the country,” Elliott Dunwody, chairman of the Macon Film Commission, said in a phone interview this week. “Once we got them here, we showed them the rest of the city, and it went from a couple of days of shooting to shooting other scenes around town for about 17 days.”
Luther Williams Field, a stadium built in 1929 that still retains its old-time charm, was converted to what the movie calls City Island Park complete with putting that name on a stadium entrance.
City Island Ballpark, which the movie refers to as City Island Park, was built in 1914 and renamed Jackie Robinson Ballpark in 1989. The site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Jackie Robinson Ballpark in its current form, with cement grandstands along third base that were built in the 1970s, would not have made for a believable 1940s venue, according to Brady Ballard, general manager of the Daytona Cubs. The Cubs operate the city-owned ballpark.
Ballard said he wasn't aware of anyone from the movie looking to film at the City Island field.
“I think because of the asymmetry and, obviously, the ballpark has changed a lot since Jackie played here,” Ballard said, speculating on reasons why the ballpark wasn't a candidate to be used. “Some of the modernization we've had to do to stay relevant to current professional baseball standards could have been a factor. All of the ballparks used in the movie are no longer used in affiliated (pro) baseball.”
The other fields already have that old-time look and symmetric covered seating making set design and filming that much easier.
Two other fields used in the movie – Birmingham's Rickwood Field, originally built in 1910, and Chattanooga's Engel Stadium, which opened in 1930 – are former homes to minor league baseball, as is Luther Williams Field.
Richard Hoover, the production designer for “42,” recently told the New York Daily News that the stadium, speaking about the movie's Ebbets Field, is like a character.
Engel Stadium was recreated through filming and computer imaging to replicate Ebbets Field, where the Brooklyn Dodgers played until moving west to Los Angeles in 1958. Ebbets Field was demolished in 1960, but Hoover and company heavily researched the old Brooklyn ballpark, and through computer imaging even get the field's dimensions right.
While we'll have to wait and see if the movie convinces area residents that it looks like Daytona Beach, at least one person who was on the set said it felt that way to him.
“We had palm trees in Macon to make it look like Florida,” said Jasha Balcom, Boseman's stunt double as Jackie Robinson and a former pro baseball player with the Chicago Cubs' organization.
“They made the downtown look like Daytona, and it had a spring training feel to it.”
