SKULL VALLEY - Alice Hirai was a little girl during World War II when the United States government forced her and her Japanese-born parents from their San Francisco home to a "relocation center" in Utah's barren west desert.

She and her family joined more than 8,000 other Japanese Americans at the Topaz camp, where they lived for more than three years in flimsy barracks ringed by barbed wire. So when the Ogden woman, now in her 60s, set foot last month on a remote movie set built to replicate Topaz, the memories and the tears came flooding back.

"I started to cry," Hirai said during an interview on the set, some 50 miles west of Salt Lake City, where she served as an extra. "It looks the same. I saw the faded tar paper and the signs and the stairs all rickety. And I remember that," she added. "I felt my [late] parents here with me. It was a spiritual experience."

The occasion was location shooting for "The American Pastime," an independent feature its makers hope will stir equally strong emotions in moviegoers. Currently filming in and around the Salt Lake Valley, the $4 million movie is an inspirational drama about two families, one white and one Japanese, whose destinies collide at Topaz in the 1940s.

Produced by Barry Rosenbush, executive producer of the Disney Channel smash hit "High School Musical," the movie also is about baseball. The patriarch of the Burrell family is an aging catcher on a Utah minor-league team; one of the Nomura sons is a star pitcher on an all-Japanese internee squad. The two teams face off in the movie's climactic scene, with more than bragging rights at stake.

Rosenbush got the idea for the film in 2002 while sitting in traffic on a Los Angeles freeway and listening to a radio news program about the major role of baseball in the Japanese internment camps. The show's guest, Japanese-baseball expert Kerry Yo Nakagawa, described an extra-inning game between an Arizona internee squad and a state-championship high-school team from Tucson, won by the Japanese in a historic upset.

"I'm a huge baseball fan. But here was a piece of baseball history I knew nothing about. It just floored me," said Rosenbush, who was struck by the irony of internees finding comfort in a classically American sport at the same time their adopted country was treating them like untrustworthy aliens.

Rosenbush tracked down Nakagawa and acquired the movie rights to his book, Through a Diamond: 100 Years of Japanese American Baseball. Nakagawa, a Fresno, Calif., amateur historian whose uncles competed against Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, became an associate producer of the movie.

Rosenbush then recruited filmmaker Desmond Nakano to write the script and direct. Best known for directing the 1995 John Travolta drama "White Man's Burden," Nakano has parents who were in the Manzanar, Calif., internment camp and has heard countless stories about their experiences. Instead of adapting Nakagawa's book, he wrote a fictional story that drew on snippets of history and family lore.

"For the people who were in the camps, we owe them the respect of honoring their history. I want that part of it to be very authentic," said Nakano last month in his trailer during a break in filming. He chuckled. "I can't mess it up, or I'll never hear the end of it."

Camp in the desert: The little-known history of internment-camp baseball began after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, propelling the United States into World War II. Fearful that Japanese Americans might somehow compromise the war effort, the federal government herded almost 120,000 of them, mostly from the West Coast, onto remote inland camps. The Topaz camp opened in September 1942 in the desert, 15 miles northwest of Delta, and housed internees until several months after the war ended in 1945.

To pass the time and restore some sense of normalcy to their lives, internees at all the camps organized baseball leagues. Conditions were primitive: Diamonds were patches of dirt, and uniforms were sewn from potato sacks and mattress ticking. But the players were skilled, the games were spirited, and big crowds turned out to watch.

After scouting locations while filming "High School Musical" at East High School, Rosenbush settled on Skull Valley because of its proximity to Salt Lake City, allowing cast and crew to commute from downtown hotels. Using government blueprints of Topaz, the producers built a handful of barracks, guard towers and other structures. Special-effects wizards will add dozens more buildings digitally in post-production, swelling the on-screen camp to its actual size.

"Based on the photos I've seen, it looks very authentic," said Rick Okabe, secretary of the Topaz Museum board, a group seeking to preserve the Topaz site as a historic landmark. Okabe visited the set last month and came away impressed. "They've done their homework."

Filming began June 15 with a cast of mostly little-known Asian and American actors and several hundred extras from Utah's Japanese community. The elder Nomuras are played by Masatoshi Nakamura and Judy Ongg, big stars in Japan who are making their American film debuts. The two can't walk down a street in Tokyo without being mobbed and have the enjoyed the anonymity of filming in Utah - although they caused a stir last month among sushi chefs at a downtown Salt Lake City restaurant.

"Not many in Japan know about these [internment] camps," said Ongg in her trailer during a break in filming. "It's a great story, how the Nikkei people endured. Everything was taken away from them, and they were put in the desert, and yet they didn't complain."

The most familiar face in the cast may be that of veteran actor Gary Cole ("The West Wing," "The Brady Bunch Movie"), who plays embittered minor-leaguer Billy Burrell. Cole's character is a sergeant whose son is killed in the Navy while fighting in the Pacific. Burrell resents "babysitting" the Japanese internees and is upset when his daughter begins a romance with a saxophone-playing Nomura boy.

"He's not one of the progressives in this story," said Cole, sitting under a makeshift tent to escape the desert sun. "It was just plain ignorance and paranoia - a sign of the times. When you think about it, we were also at war with Germany, but you didn't see any German-American camps."

Cast and crew are filming scenes this month in Magna and at a baseball field in Copperton, where the movie's final game takes place. Filmmakers were aided by Bingham High School baseball coach Joey Sato, who supplied players for the game scenes, and the Salt Lake Bees, who helped recruit extras. Shooting is scheduled to wrap July 24.

The filmmaking experience has been a magical one so far for Nakagawa, the author who has devoted the past decade to studying and promoting Japanese-American baseball.

"To be here in Utah and see these characters come alive in the flesh has been an absolute dream come true for me," said the wiry former athlete, whose godfather, actor Pat ("The Karate Kid") Morita, was interned at a camp in Arizona. "We only had to suffer the inconvenience of mosquito bites and the desert heat for eight days. We had bottled water and food anytime we wanted. I can't imagine what it was like for the internees, who were here for three years. That's something I'll never forget."

Timely history: The makers of "The American Pastime" believe their movie tells a story of xenophobia that is timely in a post-Sept. 11 nation that often views Arab-Americans with suspicion. But they insist it's not a sobering, concentration-camp drama.

"It's not about, 'Look at how much these people suffered.' There's a lot of joy in this," said Korean-born actor Aaron Yoo, who plays hotshot pitcher Lyle Nomura. "What's beautiful about the movie is that something as simple as a game can bring people together."

The film is part underdog sports story, part family drama, part coming-of-age saga and part fable about tolerance. But its makers realize that in Hollywood, a drama about a shameful chapter of American history is not an easy sell. Only a few smaller movies have been made about Japanese-American internment camps, and none were box-office hits.

Rosenbush has yet to find a distributor for the film. He would love to premiere "The American Pastime" at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, which has long championed movies about marginalized subjects and characters. Rosenbush believes his movie's themes of human struggle, redemption and triumph will resonate with audiences.

"It's a way to tell a story about injustice through a sport that's as American as apple pie," he said. "Because everybody understands baseball. And there's no mistaking the elegant truth of baseball. Inside those lines, there are no boundaries of skin color. Once you walked on the diamond, you were treated as an equal."

---

Contact Brandon Griggs at griggs@sltrib.com or 801-257-8689. Send comments about this story to livingeditor@sltrib.com.