Just days before the Cubs season opener in 2005, amateur filmmaker Paul Hoffman premiered his documentary about Chicago Cubs superfan Ronnie “Woo Woo” Wickers at a gala benefit at the Chicago Historical Society.
Hoffman’s former college roommate at Indiana University, Lou Stanczak, had befriended Wickers and would take him to Notre Dame football games, typically returning with anecdotes about Chicago baseball’s zaniest superfan. At a Fourth of July barbecue in 2000, Stanczak told Hoffman Woo Woo’s backstory: how he recalled being raised by an abusive mother on the south side; how he’d fallen in love with baseball on trips to Wrigley Field with his grandmother to see Jackie Robinson play for the Brooklyn Dodgers; how years later he’d ended up cheering for the Cubs during the afternoon, working as a janitor at Northwestern University in the evenings, and retiring late at night to his cardboard box downtown.
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Now that he’d established contact with Cubs management, Hoffman proffered a location release so he could shoot inside Wrigley Field. He assumed getting it signed would be a formality. But a few days later, he says, McDonough left him a voice mail: there was no way he was signing anything. (McDonough, now the president of the Chicago Blackhawks, declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Eventually Hoffman moved to San Francisco, where he took more film classes, tapping his professors for help on the Woo Woo project. By the spring of 2005 he had spent $150,000 and countless hours on the film, and finally he had something he was ready to show. Things seemed to come together quickly then. The Chicago Coalition for the Homeless helped him arrange the benefit screening at the Chicago Historical Society. Hoffman needed a licensing agreement from Major League Baseball that covered film festivals and academic screenings, and since all of the proceeds from the event would be going to charity, MLB was amenable.
Ponsetto steered Hoffman to Northwestern University’s Bluhm Legal Clinic, where law professor Sam Tenenbaum set three of his students to work negotiating pro bono with Major League Baseball. (The students, per NU policy, are restricted from speaking with the press.) “My prayers were answered,” Hoffman says.
Not long ago Hoffman was in contact with a vice president for acquisitions at another film company, renewing hope that a third-party distributor could still come in and take on the fight, but then the company backed down, fearing costly legal problems. Hoffman’s also had preliminary discussions with the publishers of StreetWise about a distribution deal. As he envisions it, the newspaper’s homeless vendors would offer the DVD outside Wrigley Field in exchange for a small donation, which would go directly to charity. His legal advisers are waiting to hear whether MLB would waive all its fees under these circumstances.
