A Winning Record

When making a documentary, the shoots can feel like a sprint, but the overall process is a marathon. That was certainly the case for producer Jonathan Miller '01 and the rest of the filmmakers behind The Last Out. Their fly-on-the-wall documentary about Cuban baseball players scored an Emmy eight years after they started working on it.

Miller was brought to the project by Sami Khan, his colleague from the New York City film world, and they partnered on it. Miller was a natural choice, as he’d filmed in Cuba before, and was a big sports fan. “I was working on a lot of TV docs between narrative film projects at that time, and I figured why not work on a doc project I actually cared about and had a real say in,” he recalls.

Initially, the idea was that the film would focus on Yasiel Puig and other well-known Cuban players who’d made it in Major League Baseball. “It changed a lot as we shot exploratory interviews and stumbled onto the guys that would be in the film,” Miller says. Their new subjects — Victor Baró, Carlos O. González, and Happy Oliveros — were young and naïve, but also talented and ready to defect for a chance at making the big time.

The journey was at times difficult and dangerous, and the players were often stuck in limbo as they waited long stretches between tryouts in front of MLB scouts. All three were crammed into a small house in San José, Costa Rica, where they slept, cooked, and worked out.

“We rode that roller coaster with them, from multi-million dollar expectations to much later, just wanting them to accept a deal that would give them a decent shot,” Miller recalls. In all, the crew made 16 trips to Costa Rica, returning home to work other jobs and search for funding to keep the project going.

Once shooting wrapped in 2018, the film entered a limbo period of its own, with the lengthy editing process — they’d shot around 400 hours of film — and the COVID-19 pandemic keeping The Last Out from audiences until 2022. A deal with the POV series on PBS finally landed the documentary on TVs (and in theaters and on airplanes) later that year, and led directly to that surprise Emmy win in 2023.

“I sort of didn’t realize how big it was, winning an Emmy, until it happened,” says Miller. “And I think it helps with future projects.”

Miller, who majored in comparative literature and Italian at Haverford, has a diverse CV. He’s worked on SXSW Grand Jury Prize Winner Gimme The Loot, comedies like Desus and Mero for Showtime, the second Borat film, science and climate change documentaries for National Geographic and HBO, as well as an upcoming documentary on the artist KAWS and a basketball series for Netflix. But shooting a passion project like The Last Out offered interesting opportunities for him as a cinematographer.

“Smaller crews are more flexible and more nimble,” he says. “It’s a more intimate experience, and I think we are always trying to re-create that in various ways with bigger productions to get better, more vulnerable performances.”

— Patrick Rapa