MILWAUKEE – Legendary sportscaster Bob Uecker celebrates his 90th birthday on Friday, January 26, 2024.
Local directors Steve Farr and Michael T. Vollmann are celebrating his career, his impact on pop culture, and his unique ability to connect with people with a new project. Farr and Vollmann are in the midst of producing a documentary titled “Ueck”.
Filming began during Spring Training in 2023, mainly with Bob Uecker and his broadcasting colleagues. The creative team also spent hours with Uecker at his home gathering stories from his days growing up in Milwaukee, playing baseball in the major – and minor – leagues, and his experiences in the entertainment world ranging from television shows, beer commercials, and professional wrestling. The personal approach they’ve taken with filming has resulted in stories that are both hilarious and touching.
In addition to in-person interviews, the team has been combing through hours of fascinating footage from over the years from a variety of different sources, including Bob Uecker’s wife, Judy. Farr recalls one visit to Uecker’s home when “she comes out with this grocery bag, brown paper bag, just full of VHS tapes. And she said, ‘Well, you know, there’s stuff in here, there’s a lot of stuff in here you might want to look at.’ And so, we did and it was a little bit of everything.”
The documentary team discovered and digitized videos from home movies, Mr. Belvedere and Tonight Show TV shows, and even Milwaukee Admirals commercials.
The next step in the production of “Ueck” is a round of interviews in Los Angeles. Farr and Vollmann are partnering with documentary production company September Club, which specializes in films ranging from feature films to docu-series. Previous projects that September Club has produced and/or edited include “American Movie”, “Napoleon Dynamite” and “A Disturbance in the Force”. The hope is for “Ueck” to be completed in 2025 with the goal of a theatrical release.
Farr and Vollmann shared the details of their production with What’s on Tap‘s Sandy Maxx on the eve of Bob Uecker’s birthday, which you can watch below.
