For the quasi-documentary Wrigley Field: Beyond The Ivy, scenes have been staged, characters have been composited and played by actors, and everyday scenes of the scalpers, bleacher bums, ballhawks, neighbors, and merchants in and around the Chicago ballpark have been edited and presented in such a way that any deception is disguised. The film's creators (director David Levenson, writer Bob Chicoine, editor Jim Hausfield, and producer Jimmy Mack, who are collectively known as Bougainville Productions) even wrap up Beyond The Ivy with a tag that indicates what later happened to their fictional people. The Bougainville quartet has only acknowledged the extent of their reality-massaging when speaking to the press. There's nothing inherently wrong with combining imagined events with actual ones, but Beyond The Ivy's methodology does feel a little tawdry. Some of the film's vignettes—like the first-person narrative about finding a parking space in Wrigleyville—are blatantly staged, and have the goofy video look, tone, and sound effects of a local TV commercial. But a segment about a scalper and one about a sad-sack Wrigleyville resident both have the same naturalistic slice-of-life feel as the pieces about the men who stand on the street and wait for home-run balls, even though the first two are faked and the latter segments are real. Eventually, the shifts in veracity begin to cast suspicion on the parts of the film that should be unassailable: Whenever there's a man-on-the-street voice on the soundtrack but no video of the actual man on the street, the audience has to wonder if the comments were added in post-production. Beyond The Ivy is slickly produced, for a video documentary, and it has moments that are captivating, or at least entertaining. There's humor and drama, especially in the ongoing saga of a man who builds a scale model of Wrigley Field in his living room, then can't get it out the door to put it up for sale. (Although anyone familiar with the structure of collage-style documentaries should be able to predict how his story will turn out.) Had Beyond The Ivy been conceived by a journalistic purist like Frederic Wiseman, the premise of capturing the habitat that develops around a public gathering place might have yielded something consistently vivid and enlightening. As it is, most of the film is too stacked, and the manipulations yield unsurprising insights. For example, when old fans complain about the yuppies that have infiltrated the bleachers, it's disappointing that Bougainville doesn't turn the camera on the yuppies and let them speak for themselves. Of course, if they did, there'd be about a 50/50 chance that they'd be speaking to performers who were paid to say and do what the filmmakers wanted.