Here’s your link for tonight’s movie! It’s on the YouTube, and doesn’t seem to be full of commercials. Click your clicks at 7:30! (Or click them a little bit ahead and skip the obligatory opening ad for emu insurance or whatever.)
Comedian Billy Crystal was a lifelong Yankees fan, who had actually known Mickey Mantle and became friends with him. While he was rising as a comedian, he met Mantle for the first time on singer/actress Dinah Shore’s TV show, Dinah!. You can see a short clip from that 1977
episode right here, where Crystal seems totally star-struck:
(That’s a clip from this hour-long featurette about the making of the HBO movie.)
After Mantle died in 1995, Crystal wanted to make a movie about him and Roger Maris. HBO had a script, and Crystal wanted to add some of the things Mantle had told him about his friendship with Maris. So HBO hired young TV writer Hank Steinberg to do a new script including Mantle’s stories he’d told Crystal.
Or… that’s what Billy Crystal says. Hank Steinberg’s Wiki page (which one presumes he or his agent has seen) says that Steinberg wrote the script on his own, inspired by a walk through Yankee Stadium’s Monument Park. And that Crystal came on board a year later.
Welcome to the who-did-what aspect of trying to figure out the background for any movie! This is REALLY common! Sometimes it’s ego posturing, sometimes it’s just decades later and people have different memories of the timeframe. (Five different people claimed to have worked on the script for All the President’s Men.)
I always split the difference and assume everybody contributed about equally to the thing.
In any case, Crystal decided to direct, and was a total stickler for absolute historical accuracy, according to this SABR article by technical consultant Andy Strasberg. (Crystal even joked that members of the cast/crew shouldn’t talk about other sports during break times, only baseball.)
With the help of a small research army and set designer Rusty Smith, they strove to make everything exactly as it was in 1961. (They repainted part of Detroit’s Tiger Stadium, which the Tigers left after the 1999 season, to “play” Yankee Stadium, using CGI graphics for the parts they couldn’t fix with paint, and to turn a few thousand extras into a packed house.)
Now, do I care about this level of historical accuracy? NO. Neither does this Elias Sports Bureau historian, who argues that while commissioner Ford Frick shouldn’t have added an asterisk to Maris’s record, he should also be remembered for greater things like integrating the sport (or re-integrating it after bigots kicked out Black players in the 19th century).
Nor do I care when big-budget theatrical movies do “historical prop accuracy” to an even more obsessive degree. Half the time, when a movie brags about how every detail is 100% accurate, it’s because the actual story is dull as crap.
But this story isn’t dull, and has engaging performances by Barry Pepper as Maris and Thomas Jane as Mantle. Mantle’s adult kids thought it was pretty accurate.
By the way, the following year (1962) saw this hunk o’ junk released in theaters:
It’s a cheapie churned out as fast as possible to capitalize on the publicity surrounding the historic season. Per Wiki: “The film concerns a Florida boy who lies to his Little League teammates, telling them that he knows Mantle and Maris and will bring them to their team banquet. His attempts to meet his heroes during spring training by sneaking into the stadium and the players’ hotel room result in chaos.”
“Hutch stays in the stadium overnight where he fantasizes about playing there, accidentally sets off a cannon and sprinkler, and is reunited with the stray cat.”
No, we’re not gonna watch that one! We’ll watch this instead. Here’s the link! Click your clicks at 7:30!
And here’s the upcoming schedule:
November 20: Ninotchka (1939). I’d wanted to do Roxanne, but the site it was on doesn’t work anymore. (It actually does with a workaround, but that involves a few steps I’m not gonna ask anybody to do.)
So, instead… only one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen (you won’t be surprised that Billy Wilder was one of the writers). Greta Garbo is a Soviet agent sent to undermine decadent American capitalism (during the New Deal!) It doesn’t work! Oh, and Bela Lugosi’s in this for about 60 seconds, too.
November 27: Forbidden Planet (1956). It’s an adaptation of The Tempest — except IN SPACE! With Leslie Nielsen as the (dead serious) commander, the first appearance of Robby the Robot, and who can forget Shakespeare’s classic line: “Captain, stand by to reverse polarity.” The sound effects are friggin’ COOL.
December 4: The Ref (1998). Now, we all know that Kevin Spacey is a BAD person. Unquestionably bad. But is Judy Davis? NO! Nor Christine Baranski, nor the magnificent Glynis Johns. Denis Leary? Eh. And this movie has some hilarious Holiday Family Fighting kick to it.
Here’s your link again for tonight’s movie! Click your clicks at 7:30!
