Here’s your link for the movie! It’s from a Strange Site, but most internet security experts consider it pretty safe (for streaming; I wouldn’t try downloading). It has no commercials, so no sync issues! Sync issues are a pain on Movie Nights! Start the show at 7:30!
The idea of doing a newer, franker movie version of Jackie Robinson’s story began with Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s widow. She’d wanted there to be a new version since the early 80’s.
In the early 90s, sportswriter Mike Downey and his friend,
journalist Don Pepper, wrote a well-regarded screenplay about iconic boxer Joe Louis. It didn’t get made, but Rachel Robinson got ahold of the script and liked it. Downey/Pepper were hired by Lorimar Pictures to write a new Jackie Robinson movie. But there were “creative differences”; Rachel Robinson wanted the script to have more of Jackie’s post-MLB life, the producers didn’t. The project collapsed.
Such is Hollywood.
Next up, veteran director Spike Lee got involved, with Rachel Robinson’s blessing. He wrote his own script — and made it public during COVID for baseball/movie fans to enjoy. It’s not public anymore, the links to the script are dead now. But I read it, and I thought it was quite good. It did cover more of Robinson’s life beyond baseball, like his testimony before the McCarthyite House Un-American Activities Committee about singer Paul Robeson. (Robinson was mildly critical of Robeson, and later wished he’d stood up for Robeson more.)
Yet Lee wanted Denzel Washington, Washington thought he was too old, there were problems getting financing, and the project collapsed.
Such is Hollywood.
There was a early-2000s attempt by Robert Redford to get a project together, with Redford to play Branch Rickey. That fell through.
And so finally, the movie got made in 2013, with Rachel Robinson’s permission again, but leaving out the stuff after baseball that she had wanted. With Brian Hegeland writing/directing. Hegeland wrote the script for L.A. Confidential, which is a pretty overrated movie, and the script for The Postman, which wasn’t overrated at all; everyone knew it stunk. That guy got to make the new Jackie Robinson movie.
Such is Hollywood.
I remember this being… alright. Not great, but alright. With a terrific performance by the late Chadwick Boseman as Robinson. Boseman was also excellent in 2017’s Marshall, about a case Thurgood Marshall defended in the early 1940s. And incredibly powerful in a Netflix version of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. A beautifully gifted actor; gone far too soon, at only age 43.
At the mothership, Rob Neyer mentioned some of the small details which this movie got wrong about Robinson’s life/career. At ESPN, Howard Bryant wrote about the movie from a Black writer/historian’s perspective; he thought “the film’s conventions were predictable and unnecessary, intellectually lazy, and showed little regard for baseball’s African-American history.” (Bryant recently published a book, Kings and Pawns, on the Robinson/Robeson connection; I just requested it from the library. I wrote a little about Robeson when we had the original The Jackie Robinson Story for our first Movie Night.)
What I found interesting about the making of this one is how Hegeland was inspired by seeing Robinson’s picture on a billboard reading “Character: Pass it On.” Hegeland had been waffling about making the movie, but that billboard made up his mind.
Remember when those “Pass it On” billboards were everywhere? Encouraging everyone to be nice, and be inspired by the great accomplishments of brave souls? I remember them. And I remember being suspicious that the people behind them had some “be nice but never tax the rich” agenda. (The people funding the billboards, not the people featured in the pictures, many of whom were terrific.)
Guess what? The people behind them had a total “be nice but never tax the rich” agenda.” And “global warming is fake,” and “public schools are rotten,” and a whole lot worse. Which makes me feel bad for many of the great individuals in those billboards. They are cool people. The money behind the billboards ain’t. And THAT’S what inspired (not usually very good) writer Brian Hegeland to make this movie?
Such is Hollywood.
With Chadwick Boseman, Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey, Nicole Beharie as Rachel Robinson, André Holland as Pittsburgh Courier writer Wendell Smith, Alan Tudyk as the odious Ben Chapman, plus a host of good actors in smaller roles; Hamish Linklater, James Pickens Jr., and Benched’s John C. McGinley, among many others.
(Oh, and incidentally, Ford on his baseball background: “I played about one and a half games of Little League. The whole atmosphere of anxious parents and more anxious children was too much for me. We, as a family, never went back.” That was in the 1950s! It’s much worse now!)
Here’s your link again for the movie! Start the show at 7:30!
And, next week, our final Movie Night of the spring: Field of Dreams (1989)
I might be outta town next week, but I can trust all y’all to behave nicely to each other during that feelgood classic, right? You’re all nice people. Most of ya. Free on the Strange Site.
No more time for suggestions this year… but, who knows, maybe we’ll give it a go next year, too? In any case, show starts at 7:30!
