Davis still has his name in lights
Baron Davis’ IMDb bio describes him as a “producer and actor, known for ‘The Drew: No Excuse, Just Produce’ (2015), ‘That’s My Boy’ (2012) and ‘The Night Before’ (2015)."
There is no mention of his two NBA All-Star appearances (2002, 2004), one All-NBA selection (2004) or place in Warriors lore as the leader of the 2006-07 “We Believe” team, which is just fine with Davis. Nearly six years removed from his final NBA game, Davis, 39, is intent on showcasing his talents beyond the hardwood.
“When you’re known as one thing, people want to label you as one thing,” said Davis, who, as part of Golden
State’s promotional schedule honoring its final season in Oakland, will have a bobblehead of his likeness given to the first 10,000 fans at Tuesday night’s Jazz-Warriors game. “So, now everything I’m doing with film and TV gives me the opportunity for people to see I can do other things, you know?”
Davis has moonlighted as a producer since 2005, when he formed a production company with a high school friend shortly after the New Orleans Hornets unloaded his contract to Golden State for journeymen Dale Davis and Speedy Claxton. What started as a hobby has blossomed into a wide-ranging career. In addition to boasting 18 producer credits and 15 actor credits, Davis is making a name for himself as a documentary filmmaker.
His documentary, “The Drew: No Excuse, Just Produce,” about a popular summer basketball league in the heart of South Central Los Angeles was picked up by Showtime and nominated for an LA Muse Award at the 2015 Los Angeles Film Festival.
The film held personal significance to Davis, who wrote and directed it.
As a kid, he lived seven blocks from Charles Drew Middle School in Compton, where the league was founded in 1973. Davis — the middle child of two drug-addicted parents — was raised by his maternal grandparents during the 1980s crack epidemic in South Central.
He saw movies, TV and books as an escape from the drugs and gang violence plaguing his neighborhood. In the seventh grade, Davis landed a basketball scholarship to the Crossroads School in Santa Monica, a private arts school filled with children of Hollywood’s elite.
Davis became friends with actress Kate Hudson, a classmate at Crossroads, and built a reputation as a class comedian. His English teacher, Hya Young — intent on pushing him out of his comfort zone — once made Davis pretend to be a preacher as he recited “Mary Had a Little Lamb” at a school assembly.
During an African American history class at UCLA, Davis studied Paul Robeson, a football player at Rutgers who became a famous singer, actor and political activist. Robeson’s story made Davis want to master several different fields.
In 1999, when Davis was a rookie with the Charlotte Hornets, some of his older teammates told him that it’s never too early to start planning for life after basketball. Two years later, he was a voice actor in “The Jungle Book 2.”
Davis, who often passed the doldrums of the NBA season by shooting funny videos, pitched executives at numerous companies on letting him direct commercials for them. However, it wasn’t until he founded a production company called Verso Entertainment in 2005 with his longtime buddy, Cash Warren, that his TV and film career began to flourish.
Verso’s first feature-length project was the 2008 documentary, “Crips and Bloods: Made in America,” which examined the conditions that have led to decades of gang warfare in South Los Angeles.
Since retiring from the NBA in 2012, Davis has been adamant about not being confined to a single genre, working on everything from an Adam Sandler comedy about a deadbeat dad who ruins his son’s wedding, to a film about World War II veterans finding love.
Last month, Fuse TV premiered “WTF Baron Davis,” a sitcom about Davis taking social-media personality Brandon “BDot” Armstrong under his wing in an unorthodox mentorship program. Davis also is working on documentaries on longtime San Antonio Spurs guard George Gervin and the Warriors’ 2006-07 “We Believe” team.
“I think that a lot of stories that will go untold, that no one will tell, those are the stories that I want to tell,” Davis said. “Those are the people that I want to give a voice to.”
When Davis first started dabbling in movies and TV, NBA players didn’t have a great track record in Hollywood. Davis, in his small way, has helped pave the way for the likes of LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Stephen Curry to build multimedia empires.
However, most Golden State fans still know Davis as the bearded leader of a team built around castoffs and renegades that became the first No. 8 seed in NBA history to outlast a No. 1 seed in a seven-game series.
“That’s going to be a good one,” Davis said of his “We Believe” documentary, which is set to premiere sometime next year.