Eric Cochran was looking for an inspirational story eight years ago when he visited a softball team camp for limb-deficient kids in Mission Viejo, Calif., put on by the Wounded Warrior Project.
Cochran, a veteran cinematographer, planted himself in the bleachers. He was there for all of about 90 seconds when he fixed his eyes on an 8-year-old who was working with Matias Ferreira, a former Marine who lost both legs below his knees while serving in Afghanistan in 2011.
“Picture this little, kind of roly poly kid on prosthetic legs and he’s got the bat tucked against his body,” Cochran said. “And he’s just rifling shot after shot and talking smack. I’m like, ‘Who the hell is this kid?’”
Cochran sat and observed Landis Sims for a day, then worked up the courage to ask his mother, Amanda Sims, to talk to him the following day. Cochran was wearing a Boston Red Sox cap. Landis, a New York Yankees fan, immediately let him have it.
“He started giving me crap,” Cochran said. “That’s just kind of how the relationship started.”
Cochran pitched the idea to Amanda of visiting the Sims family at their home in Elizabeth, a rural community near the Ohio River in Harrison County in southern Indiana. “I had no idea the journey it would turn into,” Cochran said.
The result, after eight years, is the inspiring true story of Landis Sims, now 16 years old. The 95-minute documentary — “Landis: Just Watch Me” — chronicles Sims, who was born without hands and feet, as he overcomes obstacles on his journey as he strives to make his high school baseball team at South Central High School.
