Bill Bradley is Ready to Tell His Own Story | Interviews

You have an unusual combination of producers, including Hollywood directors Spike Lee and Frank Oz. How did that come about and how were they involved?

I gave my political papers to Princeton. They did an oral history interview with about 50 people. I invited all 50 to a reception and 40 showed up. And I stood up and told stories about each of the 40. And one of them, a guy named Manny Azenberg, who produced 72 plays on Broadway, a friend for 50 years, came up to me afterwards and said, “You sound a little bit like Hal Holbrook doing Mark Twain. You ought to work something up.”  And so I did, over the next year I wrote the script and took it to 20 cities around the country to workshop it. I performed it in small theaters, at law firms, and at the commissary on the Warner Brothers lot. There were about 50-60 people there. I was just reading it. And a guy came up and said, “I’m Mike Tollin, and I did ‘The Last Dance’ about Michael Jordan. I think this could be a film.” And so Mike Tollin was on board.

And then I ran into my old friend, Spike Lee, in Walt Frazier's restaurant one night. By this time, I had memorized it, right, by walking around Central Park and muttering to myself, so I said, “I've done this thing.” And he said, “Come do it for me.” So, I did it one-on-one for him, an hour and 50 minutes at that point. And at the end, I noticed he's got tears in his eyes. And so I think, “Maybe I've got something here.”

After I memorized it, I then had to do it every day. Like shooting baskets, you've got to do it every day. Every day at 3.30pm in the rec room of our apartment building, I would do the show. I started out doing it for nobody and then it got around. People would come listen, sometimes two people, eight people, four people, three people, 14 was the highest number.

One day, two people come in, one of whom was Frank Oz, who heard about it from somebody who had been to an earlier one of those sessions. And afterwards, he said, “I'm going to do it.” And so, he got involved, gave a lot of editing notes when we got to the film, and gave me some very helpful suggestions, as did Spike.

So these are all angels, right? Mike, Frank, Spike. And then the last angel came two years later, two weeks before Tribeca. I wanted to use a song by Van Morrison called “And the Healing Has Begun.” That was my hope for the film, that it might have a healing effect. And then Van Morrison's agent called and said, “Van does not give you permission to use the song.” So, I called my friend Stevie Van Zandt. And he said, “Bruce wrote a song in the early 80s called ‘Summer at Signal Hill.’” But Bruce Springsteen and Stevie sold the rights to their songs. So, I had to go to Sony. But they were very, very helpful. Two days before Tribeca began, I got permission to use “Summer at Signal Hill.”