Baseball Trilogy Trilogy, Vol. 1

I've Got Good News and I've got Bad News

This is the first post of a new series, The Baseball Trilogy Trilogy, where we’ll revisit three classic baseball movie trilogies:

The Bad News Bears (1976, 1977, 1978, 1979-80 TV series, 2005)

Major League (1989, 1994, 1998)

The Sandlot (1993, 2005, 2007)

By REVISIT, I mean that I’ll watch every minute of every iteration of these franchises. Why? Because I’m insane, currently un(der)employed, and… so you don’t have to.

Also I love a re-mix, a mash-up, a re-invention. It’s human nature. We see something we like and our brain says, “Gimme more of that!” But we also crave variety. It’s how we learn, hearing familiar yarns with just enough new flavor to keep our attention. “The same. But different” has been the recipe for human story consumption (and Hollywood studios) for millennia. Eventually the message behind the stories seeps into our cave-dweller brains, “Ahhh, I should only stress about the things I can actually control..” or “Taking a chance on love IS worth it…” or what have you.

Someone out there is screaming, “WHAT ABOUT THE TWELVE (!!) AIR BUD FILMS, HUH?” These don’t make the cut since only Air Bud 4: Seventh Inning Fetch (2002) is a baseball movie. Someone else is screaming about the Angels in the Outfield franchise (1951, 1994, 1997, 2000), but that misses the cut as the first sequel, Angels in the Endzone (1997), is a high school football movie. Absolutely no one is screaming for The Benchwarmers (2006)/ Benchwarmers 2: Breaking Balls (2018) since there is no third film. Ball’s in you court, Rob Schneider.

And then there’s this quote, which I might get tattooed on my neck.

“Football is war and basketball is a dance, but baseball, in which a single moment can seemingly stretch toward the infinite, is cinema.”

- Noah Gittel, from his book Baseball: The Movie

With that, we dive into our first baseball cinematic universe!

Japanese press kit for original Bad News Bears

The Bad News Bears (1976) was absolutely revolutionary in the annals of Baseball moviedom. I have a pretty liberal definition of “baseball movie”, but we’ll narrow this survey down to normal people standards. The 1950s was the say-hey-day, with over twenty baseball films produced. But for the next seventeen years (1960-1976), there were only six baseball films of any note in the US. And comedy was completely ruled out as a pairing. Just look at the titles and plot descriptions of the top three films.

Experiment in Terror (1962) - A sadistic killer terrorizes a bank teller. An FBI agent tracks him down at Candlestick park during a Giants game, where he is shot and killed on the pitcher’s mound.

Bang The Drum Slowly (1973)- A terminally-ill catcher with a learning disability (Robert De Niro) plays his final season, then dies.

It’s Good to Be Alive (1974, TV movie) - A biopic about Roy Campanella integrating baseball, then becoming paralyzed in an auto accident, ending his career. Then his wife leaves him.

Jesus fuck, kill me now. We all know how depressing the 1970s were. Watergate. Vietnam. An entirely brown and mustard-yellow wardrobe. Counter culture youth were certainly not embracing traditional American institutions like baseball. By the mid-seventies, the world was desperate for a laugh and baseball was ripe for a comeback.

In 1976, 36-year-old producer Stanley R. Jaffe had already landed and left the job of Paramount Pictures President. His first independent production would be The Bad News Bears. Later he would shepherd Oscar bait Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and Fatal Attraction (1987) into the world.

The screenplay, written on spec, was by Bill Lancaster (just 26 at the time). It was based on his own Little League experiences in suburban Los Angeles, growing up with a larger-than-life father (and sometimes baseball coach), Burt Lancaster. The elder Lancaster has his own baseball movie connection years later, playing Moonlight Graham in Field of Dreams (1989).

Director Michael Ritchie was coming off a series of features that took on American institutions: Olympic athletics in Downhill Racer (1969); politics in The Candidate (1972), an Oscar winner for Best Original Screenplay; and the beauty pageant industry in Smile (1975). “The critics are beginning to say that I’m making the same film over and over. They never said that about John Ford,” said Ritchie in a 1976 American Film magazine article.

Ritchie would continue his sports-movie oeuvre over the years with Semi-Tough (1977), Wildcats (1986), and The Scout (1994), plus comedies Fletch (1985) and Fletch Lives (1989).

Michael Ritchie from various magazine articles and international press kits.

The production team for The Bad News Bears was one A-Lister after another. Cinematographer John A. Alonzo was coming off an Oscar nomination for Chinatown (1975). Production Designer Polly Platt had worked on The Last Picture Show (1971) and Paper Moon (1973). She moved into producing, helming Broadcast News (1987), Say Anything (1989), and Bottle Rocket (1996). In that American Film article, Platt says, “Michael is obsessed with humiliation and exhilaration. [He] is a very nice man who, underneath, is an absolute tyrant.”

Editor Richard A. Harris is also worth highlighting; he went on to edit Last Action Hero (1993), True Lies (1994), and Titanic (1997).

The cast is chock-full of household names with Oscar credentials: Walter Matthau (three nominations, including one for his other 1976 film, Sunshine Boys); Tatum O’Neal, two years removed from her win for Paper Moon at age 10; and Jackie Earle Haley, coming off a string of TV appearances including the Planet of the Apes TV series, and the Oscar nominated Day of the Locust (1975). Haley would have to wait until his late-career renaissance for his own nomination for Little Children (2007). There is no mentioning Jackie Earl Haley without also highlighting his spot-on performance in Breaking Away (1979), another absolutely perfect ‘70s sports movie.

OK, enough IMDB regurgitation. The collected talent on this film was unbelievable. This was not the little indie that could. This was a STUDIO PRODUCTION that miraculously survived STUDIO PRODUCTION. It’s the rare comedy-drama that’s actually (LOL) funny and actually (tears welling in the eyes) dramatic.

Going back to Baseball: The Movie. In the introduction, Director John Sayles describes The Bad News Bears as his favorite film and “a terrific movie that probably could only have gotten made by a Hollywood Studio within a five- or six-year period, a kind of glasnost moment where an honest look at ourselves was permitted and sometimes even financed.”

German Lobby Cards for “The Bears Are Loose!”

The central philosophical conflict in The Bad News Bears is between the virtues of childhood and adulthood. I heard some screenwriter years ago talk about what makes an emotionally satisfying screenplay. They said the good ones take a central question (“What is the meaning of life?” “Is conscious consumerism really possible?” “Can women and men really be friends?”) and the subtext of each scene and conversation in the film is a debate on that one topic. Every character, great or small, has an opinion that falls on one side of the other. The Bad News Bears excels in the light of this particular film analysis. Every kid in this film acts like an adult. Every adult has childish outbursts. None of the characters know how to live or how to experience joy until they learn from the other side of the equation.

This is demonstrated from the first seconds of the film to that last. In the opening scene, we’re introduced (spectacularly) to Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau), as he sits in his shitty Cadillac, mixing a makeshift Boilermaker. As he lips his equally shitty Swisher Sweets cigar, a lighter flicks into frame. We cut to a 14-year-old Kelly Leak (Jackie Earl Haley), straddling a Harley Davidson dirt bike, Marlboro dangling from his lips. After Leak lights the cigar, there’s a throwaway line of dialog that is absolutely priceless (and on-theme), Buttermaker mumbles a cordial “Thanks, Mister.”

From this first line of dialog, the film is treating this pimply kid like a man and asking the audience: Is this right? Is this what kids have become?

All the Bears (played by actors between age 6 and 14) demonstrate their adoption of adult mores: Tanner’s cussing, fighting, and casual racism; Engleberg’s mostly Budweiser branded wardrobe; Ogilvie’s nerdy professionalism; Lupus’ mixing of the perfect martini for Buttermaker; Amanda’s job, selling maps to the stars to pay for her braces; and Leak’s flirting with middle-age women in Amanda’s ballet class (“So… You live around here?”).

The adults never consider the children in their lives. The dad who hires Buttermaker to coach his son’s team has political motivations. Buttermaker himself doesn’t care, until he does, then he cares too much. He’s living out his own failed minor-league baseball aspirations. Then there’s the antagonist Yankee coach, played with impeccable asshole vibes by Vic Morrow. He’s so hell-bent on winning, he would rather walk Kelly Leak with the bases loaded, like he’s steroid-era Barry Bonds, then let his son pitch to him. When the son balks (emotionally, not literally) at his father’s tactics, dad gets physical. The parents are sending one message, again and again, to these kids:

ADULTHOOD = WINNING AT ANY COST (fuck fair play, sportsmanship, honesty, and Amanda’s sore elbow).

And they’re sending the implied inverse message:

PLAY for the sake of joy is utterly CHILDISH and unworthy.

The shooting script has montages of the Bears interacting with their parents at home. Director Ritchie smartly excised these from the final film. We don’t need backstory; we know how these kids live from their actions on the field and in the dugout.

The final emotional turn in the movie is when Buttermaker sees the folly of his adult ways. He inserts all the substitute players against their own protests into the championship game and tells them, “Just do the best you can.”

With all that the world witnessed in the real life 1970s and all the lessons the adults provide in The Bad News Bears, it’s no wonder that tears well up when Buttermaker just… lets the kids… PLAY. As much as anyone, these misfits, nerds, and booger-eaters deserve a childhood of playing while they still can.

The Bears don’t win the championship game, they achieved a higher moral victory: playing the game the way kids are meant to. Adulthood, with all its lying, injustice, and cruelty, is just another failed American institution. The audience is entirely on Tanner’s side when he yells at the rival team (and every adult in earshot), “Hey Yankees... you can take your apology and your trophy and shove 'em straight up your ass!”

In one last burst of clinging to his precious childhood, snot-nosed Lupus throws the pitiful 2nd place trophy and shouts, “Just wait ’til next year!” The Bears then pour cheap beer on each other like every World Series Champion since the dawn of time to sweeping music from the opera Carmen (the 2nd greatest use of Bizet’s music after that one Gilligan’s Island episode in 1966). A victory for honesty and the love of the game. The reward: another year of childhood, friendship, and baseball.

The story of the underdog who fails to win, but achieves a moral/ ethical/ personal victory became a trope of 1970s films.

“Rocky came out the same year as The Bad News Bears. Slap Shot was released a year later. These are irreverent movies that reject the conventional sports narrative of a talented athlete who suffers a bad break, but overcomes it through grit and resilience, and becomes a champion. In these films, the heroes are regular people, and regular people lose.”

-Noah Gittel, from Baseball: The Movie

Rocky (released in December, 1976) gets all the credit, but The Bad News Bears (released in April, 1976) did it first.

The world, or at least Hollywood, was a different place after 1976. A baseball cinema renaissance was on the horizon, both in quantity and quality. The Natural (1984), Bull Durham (1988), and Field of Dreams (1989) would all be nominated for Academy Awards in the next decade. There’s no cinematic “crack of the bat” or “green of the grass” (or studio greenlights), without Bill Lancaster, Michael Ritchie, Walter Matthau, and these Bears.

Next newsletter: The sequels, the TV series, and the remake!