Film & Book Review: White Elephant: The Rise and Fall of Miami Baseball Stadium, 2008 & 2013

White Elephant: What is There to Save? (2008). [DVD] Miami, FL: Joe Cardona, producer, director; Rolando Llanes, director; Cantilever Productions, Kids in Exile Films.

Llanes, R. (2013). White Elephant: The Rise and Fall of Miami Baseball Stadium. 1st ed. San Francisco: Blurb.


This is an odd film.  I came to it through an interest in baseball and my own childhood experience of attending Baltimore Orioles spring training games in the 60s and 70s.

But the film is not really about baseball, nor it seems much about the stadium itself.  It is more a collection of historical vignettes loosely connected to the stadium, which opened in 1949 and was demolished in 2001. The absence of an overarching narrative is confounded by nonlinear sequencing, intermittent poetry reading, and an assumption that the viewer is familiar with the mid-20th century history of Miami, Cuba, and Central America.

Some of the stories appear interesting, but as presented here in abbreviated form and mixed in with seemingly unrelated bits and bobs are robbed of much of their power. To get a better handle on their details and how they intersect, viewers might be better served by Rolando Llanes’ 2013 self-published book, White Elephant: The Rise and Fall of Miami Baseball Stadium.  The author is a professor of architecture who spent many hours researching the stadium and participating in the drafting of plans to transform the structure into a viable community facility in the years preceding its demolition.  Llanes research underlies the film, on which he consulted and in which he appears.

DVD cover

What Llanes’ story calls out for is a writer like Elmore Leonard, whose work is probably most widely know from films created from his novels, such as Get Shorty and Jackie Brown.  Many of Leonard’s films were set in Miami and featured drifters, grifters, mafioso, drug dealers, weapons runners, crooked politicians, and other assorted scoundrels involved in elaborate and often deadly schemes to extract or extort cash, often from each other.

Llanes’ story of Miami Stadium includes an impressive cast of characters and events for such a writer to draw on:  the thieving Cuban minister of education who as part of his south Florida real estate empire builds a stadium to be operated by his 17-year-old son;  a Nashville architecture firm specializing in art-deco design whose work on Miami Stadium is so impressive it is copied for the Dominican Republic’s national stadium (still operational as Quisqueya Stadium);  a Cuban crime lord with foreknowledge of the Kennedy assassination; an idealistic young stadium owner who channels his fortune into the Cuban revolution and uses his stadium for weapons storage and field training for revolutionaries; the Cuban-political-refugee-turned-Miami-mayor who transforms the stadium into temporary housing for Nicaraguan political refugees;  the season opener for Bill Veeck’s AAA Miami Marlins featuring 50-year-old starting pitcher Satchel Paige arriving to the field by helicopter; and an exceptional assortment of baseball talent from the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Yankees, and long-time tenant Baltimore Orioles.

Until such a storyteller comes along, enjoy the e-book from Blurb for only $4.99, or check out the film, currently available at Vimeo free of charge.

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