09:29 AM EDT on Friday, May 21, 2004

BY MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer

"I hate the Yankees!" Paul Doyle Jr. is saying over the phone from his New York City office, by way of explaining how a native New Yorker came to make THE defining movie of what it means to be a Boston Red Sox fan.

Doyle acknowledged that when he first set out to make Still, We Believe: The Boston Red Sox Movie he was greeted with a huge dose of skepticism from Beantown fans, though eventually they came around.

"I'm a Mets fan," he protested. " '86 notwithstanding [the year the New York Mets trounced the Red Sox in the World Series, thereby dashing the dreams of Sox fans everywhere], we developed an understanding that, hey, I hate the Yankees, too.

"I think Sox fans are savvy enough to know I'm sincere."

Doyle hadn't set out to make a film celebrating the die-hard Red Sox fans who have suffered shattered dreams in up-and-down seasons and the myth of the "Curse of the Bambino" for as long as any of them can remember.

It was going to be a film about the Red Sox themselves and the new management that had come into play shortly before he approached the team late in the 2002 season. He proposed covering the team's 2003 season, beginning with spring training and following them for as long as they were still playing ball. Doyle and his small camera crew were given unprecedented access to the Red Sox offices, the team airplane, even the locker room once the players acclimated themselves to the cameras. Yet very little of this footage has made it into Still, We Believe: The Boston Red Sox Movie, even though it accounts for a large chunk of the 275 hours of footage he shot.

"By June we realized how strong an element the fans would be," he said, in explaining why the film's thrust was shifted.

He'd planned to follow the fans all along as part of his film, but he hadn't realized at first how compelling they would be. He'd chosen several of them long before the season started, with help from the staff of radio WEEI's call-in sports talk show, who offered up their most articulate and passionate listeners. "It's not like Angry Bill or Jermaine Evans Sr. [two of the fans on screen] are on the air all the time saying the Red Sox are Number One. They'll call in to say the manager mismanaged this time. They're just very articulate guys who know the game."

Hits and misses

Sometimes this approach didn't pan out, however. Doyle recalls one woman fan, suggested by several people, who seemed perfect until she asked, "Does it matter that I'm a Yankee fan?"

His crew also found several fans in line one frigid February morning, waiting outside Fenway Park to buy single-game tickets. They included Harry Mann, who recalls being able to have a full day at Fenway Park for eight quarters, including a hot dog and round-trip bus fare to get there, and the two blond women from East Boston -- Erin Nanstad and Jessamy Finet -- who turn up at many games dressed in Sox jackets and caps and once drove to Chicago in hopes of seeing the Yankees lose to the Cubs in an interleague series.

Doyle says if you count all the people who answered his questionnaire at Fenway that day, there were thousands of potential subjects for his film.

What he came away with is an extraordinary sociological study of the quintessential Red Sox fans who've never quite given up hope, even though they're always fatalistically expecting that black cloud to rain lightning bolts down on their team.

Modestly, Doyle admits that, "I'll never say I had enough foresight to understand how compelling [their story] would be."

He did count on the Red Sox, though. Based on their previous year and buoyed further by the success of the team as the season ground on toward the playoffs, Doyle said, "I thought maybe the Sox might win this. I had to consider that the Red Sox at least would be contenders." That they made it to the playoffs: "We just lucked out on that."

He didn't shoot every game. "No, we picked the games. Otherwise, you'd burn out your talent because that's a very long season -- every day starting with spring training. So we'd pick spots and anticipate what the story would be. You end up covering 50 angles, hoping one will pan out.

"During the playoffs we used four cameras, but usually we'd have two at a game. We'd try to pick significant events in the fans' lives or a significant game, such as when they played the Yankees. So we might have been at a Yankee game with the girls and also home with Harry watching it on TV. Then we'd look at the footage and decide which game was better told by which of the fans."

Still, We Believe: The Boston Red Sox Movie opened to good box office numbers in Boston, its suburbs and Cape Cod two weeks ago and is rolling out across the rest of New England today. But will it play outside New England?

"That's the hope," said Doyle. "I'd like to believe that, because I'm a big sports fan." The 42-year-old Doyle has won a pair of Emmy Awards shooting a number of sports-based documentaries, including features on the Manchester United soccer team in England and the St. Paul Saints baseball team in Minnesota.

"I can relate to these guys. I can relate much more to the fans than to any of the athletes.

"Cubs fans can watch this and say, 'Yeah, me too.' "