In time for the start of the baseball season, we talk about the numerous baseball movies that were made for movie and television screens during the 1980s.
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Movies discussed during this episode include:
Amazing Grace and Chuck (1987, Mike Newell)
Blue Skies Again (1983, Richard Michaels)
Brewster's Millions (1985, Walter Hill)
Bull Durham (1988, Ron Shelton)
The Comeback Kid (1980, Peter Levin)
Don't Look Back: The Story of Leroy 'Satchel' Paige (1981, Richard A. Colla)
Eight Men Out (1988, John Sayles)
Field of Dreams (1989, Phil Alden Robinson)
Long Gone (1987, Martin Davidson)
Major League (1989, David S. Ward)
The Natural (1984, Barry Levinson)
Night Game (1989, Peter Masterson)
Only the Ball Was White (1981, Ken Solarz)
The Slugger's Wife (1985, Hal Ashby)
Stealing Home (1988, Steven Kampmann and William Porter [as Will Aldis])
Tiger Town (1983, Alan Shapiro)
Trading Hearts (1988, Neil Leifer)
A Winner Never Quits (1986, Mel Damski)
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On this episode, we will be talking baseball. I had a much different opening for this episode, but the Friday before I was set to record and release the episode, the owners and players finally came to an agreement to get back to playing, so all that is gone, and I’m happy that the timing with this episode worked out.
Now, movies about baseball weren’t new to the decade. We had The Babe Ruth Story and Take Me Out to the Ballgame in the 1940s, Damn Yankees and Fear Strikes Out in the 1950s, and three of the best movies about baseball come out in the 1970s: 1973’s Bang the Drum Slowly, the movie Robert De Niro made before he starred as the younger Vito Correlone in The Godfather Part II, 1976’s The Bad News Bears, and The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, also from 1976. And like I did in our episode about Blue Thunder and WarGames from last year, I am once again going to recommend you seek out Bingo Long, which is just a wonderful film with Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones, Stan Shaw, Ted Ross, Mabel King, Ken Foree from the original Night of the Living Dead, and my favorite acting performance from the late, great, Richard Pryor. It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s a bit serious at times, and it’s just a movie that needs to be rediscovered by everyone.
There were biopics about baseball players. Some, like 1920’s Headin’ Home or 1950s The Jackie Robinson Story, featuring the subjects of the movies playing themselves. Headin’ Home featured Babe Ruth, if you’re asking. Others, like 1942’s The Pride of the Yankees or 1953’s The Winning Team, featured Hollywood stars playing real-life ballplayers. The Winning Team, in case you missed it, starred Ronald Reagan as Hall of Fame pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander.
But after nearly four dozen baseball-themed movies made between 1898’s The Ball Game and 1958’s Damn Yankees, there’d be only one baseball movie made over the course of the next fifteen years, a little piece of fluff from 1962, Safe at Home, which featured Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris playing themselves in a comedy made just after Maris had his record-breaking 61 home run season.
But thanks to the success of The Bad News Bears and its sequels, 1977’s The Bad News in Breaking Training, and 1978’s The Bad News Bears Go to Japan, baseball was back on the big screen. On the small screen, too. Five of the eleven baseball movies made and released during the 1970s were made-for-TV movies. And in the 80s, that trend would continue. Now, for this episode, we will be glossing over most of the made-for-TV baseball movies, unless we get to talk about John Ritter like we will with our first baseball movie of the decade.
The Comeback Kid was an ABC-TV movie that was made during one of Ritter’s breaks from filming his hit ABC-TV sitcom Three’s Company. I don’t want to say it was more dramatic role for Ritter than viewers were used to, either on Three’s Company or Hero at Large, the superhero romantic comedy featuring Ritter and Anne Archer, which had been a minor success when it had been released into theatres two months before this aired in early April 1980. The film was a romantic comedy sports film, where Ritter plays a lifetime minor leaguer who quits the game and becomes a coach for a group of underprivileged kids.
His character finds love with Susan Day, six years out from having played Laurie Partridge and six years away from finding a new level of success on L.A. Law. But then, one of the kids on the team gets hit by a car and dies, which isn’t really that funny. But it does bring the coach and his remaining players closer together. Gen X’ers like myself will recognize a number of the people in the movie. Doug McKeon, who would go directly from making this into shooting On Golden Pond. James Gregory, the curmudgeonly Inspector Luger on Barney Miller. Jeremy Licht, from The Hogan Family. Michael Lembeck, who would play Julie’s husband Max, on One Day at a Time. Kim Fields from The Facts of Life. And you wouldn’t know him at the time, but this would feature Patrick Swayze in one of his biggest roles to date. It’s exactly the treacly pabulum one would expect from a television network trying to shoot a cheap, socially conscious quickie with one of their biggest stars while he has a small hole in his schedule, but if you loved John Ritter, and seriously, who didn’t love John Ritter, it’s worth a watch.
1981 would see two baseball movies. One, Only the Ball Was White, was a short documentary made by the Chicago PBS station WTTW about the players of the Negro League who for many years were denied the ability to play in the Major Leagues. Narrated by Paul Winfield, the documentary featured interviews with several of the Negro League’s greatest players, including Roy Campanella, Buck Leonard, Don Newcombe, Ted Page and Satchel Paige.
Speaking of Satchel Paige, he would be the subject of 1981’s other baseball movie, the ABC-TV movie Don’t Look Back, featuring Louis Gossett, Jr. as the future Hall of Fame pitcher, Clifton Davis and Ernie Barnes as his 1932 Homestead Greys teammates Cool Papa Bell and Josh Gibson, Blazing Saddles star Cleavon Little as a fellow player simply called Rabbit, and Ossie Davis as a old-time star of the Negro Leagues who has been reduced to being a rooming house dishwasher in his post-playing life. It’s a bit heavy-handed, and its cast is far better than the movie their given to perform in, but if you knew nothing about Satchel Paige before it, at least you’d know who he was after watching it.
1982 was bereft of any baseball movies, but 1983 would have two mostly forgettable entries, one each from movie theatres and from television.
The feature film Blue Skies Again, from Warner Brothers, was the kind of trash that could ruin a young star’s career. Harry Hamlin stars as the owner of a minor-league baseball team in Denver who is convinced to give a female softball player a chance to try out for the team, because the owner has the hots for the softball player’s personal manager.
Again, if you’re of a certain age, you’ll recognize a number of the stars of the film, including Mimi Rogers, who would be making her film debut here but would be better known in a few years as the first Mrs. Tom Cruise, Kenneth McMillan, a veteran character actor in such movies as Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, and Dana Eclar, from the 1974 Best Picture winner The Sting. And you wouldn’t know it at the time, but this would also be the biggest role to date for a young actor named Andy Garcia. But for Robyn Barto, who plays the softball player looking to become the first professional female baseball player, she would never be seen in anything ever again. The film would open in seven theatres in Miami, near where it was shot, and on ten screens in Denver, where the fictional Devils team was based, on April 29th, 1983, but it would be gone from all seventeen screens after two weeks and less than $60k in tickets sold. Warners would give it a second chance with a ten screen release in New York City on July 29th, but the movie would get pummeled by the press, and it would gross barely $10k in three days from fifteen screens. At one theatre, the 34th Street East, its $900 weekend gross was 1/10th what the Twilight Zone had made in its sixth week at the theatre the previous weekend. Warners would quickly pull the film and get their next release, Risky Business, a few extra screens.
The other 1983 baseball movie, the TV movie Tiger Town, is mostly notable today as being the very first made for The Disney Channel movie, featuring Roy Scheider as an aging ballplayer who is having a bad season, and Kramer vs. Kramer star Justin Henry as the player’s biggest fan, who may or may not be connected to the player’s resurgence just after the boy’s father dies. It’s not a great movie, but kids should enjoy it, and you might enjoy it too. Disney had so much success with the film, they would air it on their flagship ABC Sunday Night Movie series a few months later, and release it into Detroit-area theatres the following summer, which, coincidentally, ended up being the best year in the Tigers’ storied franchise history.
Now, there was only one baseball movie in 1984, but darn it if it isn’t one of the greatest movies about baseball ever made.
The Natural.
Barry Levinson’s follow-up to his 1982 debut, Diner, was a movie that should never have worked as well as it did. The novel from which it was based on had been published in 1952, and scores of producers had spent thirty years trying to make it. Levinson was best known for being a comedy writer, having helped to write two of Mel Brooks’ better movies of the 1970s, Silent Movie, and High Anxiety, or as a writer of comedic dramas, like Norman Jewison’s 1979 courtroom dramedy And Justice For All.
The star of the movie, 48-year-old Robert Redford, would be playing both a nineteen-year-old and a thirty-five-year-old version of his character, Roy Hobbs. And its memorable score would be created by Randy Newman, a singer/songwriter at the time best known for his satirical song Short People who had only written two other movie scores before, one of which was partially based on adaptations of century-old piano songs.
But what did make the movie work so beautifully was the camerawork of cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. The natural lighting. The scene of Iris standing up in the stands, her white hat and dress illuminated by the sun hitting her just so from outside the stadium. Roy Hobbs jogging the bases in the near dark of the stadium, after hitting the home run that exploded one of the light towers on the roof, sparks falling to the ground behind him. The darkness of The Judge’s office, with wisps of light peeking through from behind the blinds.
That Caleb Deschanel could be the glue that kept the movie together was not a surprise to anyone who had seen his previous work on Hal Ashby’s Being There, Phillip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff, or, especially, Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion.
And it would be Deschanel’s work on the first baseball movie of 1985 that would be one of the few interesting things about it.
The Slugger’s Wife should have been a better movie, thanks to its pedigree.
Its director, Hal Ashby, had made six of the best movies of the 1970s, back to back: Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, and Being There. Between those six movies, there were 23 Academy Award nominations, including two Best Picture nominations, and six wins. But by 1985, he was on a losing streak. Two expensive projects, 1981’s Second-Hand Hearts and 1982’s Looking to Get Out, would be virtually dumped by their studios, and his 1983 Rolling Stones concert movie, Let’s Spend the Night Together, was an out-of-character misstep.
Its writer, Neil Simon, was one of the most famous playwrights and screenwriters to have ever worked. For most of the 1960s and 1970s, Simon would write a new play for Broadway, which would open to great acclaim and ticket sales, then adapt that show into a screenplay, which would get made into a movie that would open to great acclaim and ticket sales, writing and releasing a new play while the movie version of the previous play was being filmed. From The Odd Couple in 1968 to Chapter Two in 1979, practically every movie he wrote was a critical, box office and award favorite. The Odd Couple. Plaza Suite. The Sunshine Boys. California Suite. Chapter Two. Occasionally, this cycle would get interrupted when Simon wrote an original screenplay, which would also open to critical, box office and awards success. Murder by Death. The Goodbye Girl. The Cheap Detective. The formula worked so well that there was a pattern for years.
Ray Stark would produce, Simon would write the screenplay, and either Herbert Ross or Robert Moore would direct. Ross would direct The Sunshine Boys in 1975, then Moore would direct Murder by Death in 1976. Ross would direct The Goodbye Girl in 1977, then Moore would direct The Cheap Detective in 1978. Ross would direct California Suite in 1979, then Moore would direct Chapter Two in 1979. Ross would direct two more Simon movies in the 1980s, but as the 1970s turned into the 1980s, the scripts weren’t as good, and the movies weren’t as good.
By 1985, the stars signing up for a Neil Simon movie weren’t as big as they had been a decade before. Gone were the days of actors like Alan Alda and Michael Caine and Peter Falk and Jane Fonda and Alec Guinness and Madeline Kahn and Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau David Niven and Richard Pryor and Peter Sellers and Maggie Smith dropping everything to be in a Neil Simon movie. But then, The Slugger’s Wife wasn’t a typical Neil Simon story. It would tell the story not about neurotic New Yorkers or cynical entertainment types, but of a young baseball player for the Atlanta Braves who falls in love with a singer, and whose professional fortunes rise and fall depending on where he is in his relationship with his new bride.
Michael O’Keefe, the young star of Caddyshack who had scored a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination in 1981 for his work as Robert Duvall’s son in The Great Santini, signed on to play the ballplayer, and Rebecca De Mornay, hot off her sizzling star-making role opposite Tom Cruise in Risky Business, would play the singer. Then there’s Randy Quaid as one of O’Keefe’s teammates, and director Martin Ritt as the manager of the team.
To call The Slugger’s Wife a bomb would be an understatement. It would open on March 29th, 1985, against The Care Bears Movie, Desperately Seeking Susan, King David, The Last Dragon, Police Academy 2 and a re-release of Return of the Jedi. On 898 screens, The Slugger’s Wife would gross $1.32m, which would put it dead last for new major openers, and fifteenth on the list of the top movies nationwide. For comparisons, Desperately Seeking Susan, with Rosanna Arquette and Madonna, opened on about one quarter of the screens, would gross $1.53m, and Amadeus, which would be in its 23rd week of release, would gross $2m from 546 screens, but also, to be fair, it had just been named the Best Picture of the Year by the Academy the previous Monday.
The Slugger’s Wife also has the distinction of being one of the few movies to have a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s how truly awful it is.
Less awful than The Slugger’s Wife but still pretty bad is the other baseball movie of 1985, Brewster’s Millions. The seventh film based on the 1902 novel of the same name, Richard Pryor stars as a minor league baseball player who stands to inherit $300m from a great-uncle he never met, if he can spend $30m in 30 days without having any assets remaining at the end of the month.
It’s hard to imagine any comedy movie starring Richard Pryor and John Candy being as completely unfunny as Brewster’s Millions, but as great as they were as comedic actors, Pryor and Candy made a lot of bad choices when it came to the movies they decided to make. For every Silver Streak he made, Pryor did three movies like Wholly Moses or The Toy or Critical Condition. For every Stripes or Uncle Buch he made, Candy made a Speed Zone or Armed and Dangerous. And maybe Walter Hill, the director of such films as The Warriors and The Long Riders, wasn’t the best choice to direct a flat-out comedy, even if he was responsible for 48 Hrs. The only reason anyone should be watching this is if they made a vow to themselves to see every Richard Pryor movie, or every John Candy movie, or every Walter Hill movie.
1986 saw only one baseball movie, an ABC- TV bio-pic about Pete Grey, the first one-armed man to ever play Major League Baseball. Keith Carradine played Grey, while Mare Winningham plays his wife.
There’s be two movies about baseball in 1987, but neither of them were worth much of a mention.
Long Gone was an HBO movie about an independent minor league baseball team in Florida that goes from last place to first during the summer of 1957. It’s interesting in that it features a number of future stars in early film roles, including William Petersen, Virginia Madsen, Dermot Mulroney and Joel Murray. But it’s also worth mentioning it features one of the best casting ideas of all time, putting together character actor Henry Gibson and Teller of Penn and Teller fame as the scheming father and son owners of the baseball team. Once you see them together, you’ll wonder why they didn’t become regular castmates in movies and on television. And, yes, Teller speaks. Quite a bit.
The second was more a “No Nukes” movie than a baseball movie. Amazing Grace and Chuck is one of British filmmaker Mike Newell’s earlier efforts, and one that maybe could have been better in the hands of an American filmmaker. In the film, a young boy from Montana named Chuck decides to make a stand about the insanity of the potential mass destruction of the world by nuclear missiles, refusing to play for his Little League team until the world is rid of the weapons of mass destruction. A player for the Boston Celtics, Amazing Grace Smith, played by then-Denver Nuggets star Alex English, hears about the young boy’s protest, and refuses to play basketball until there are no more nuchal weapons.
The basketball star movies to Montana and buys a barn near the boy’s house, where he and other pro athletes who have joined the protest can live while they continue their protests, William Petersen plays the boy’s father, a military jet pilot, Jamie Lee Curtis plays the agent of the pro player, and Gregory Peck shows up at the end as the President of the United States to explain to the the young boy, the pro athletes, and the audience, why we need the nukes.
The summer of 1988 brought two of the best movies ever about baseball. But before we get to those, there was another baseball movie in the early summer of 1988, released Memorial Day weekend. Trading Hearts starred Raul Julia and Beverly D’Angelo as a down on his luck baseball player and a down on her luck lounge singer who are set up by her precocious pre-teen daughter, played by indie rock goddess Jenny Lewis in her first film role. Some sources say the film opened in some theatres on May 27th, 1988. Some sources say May 29th. I can’t find any theatrical playdates for the film, or exactly when it might have come out on video, but I do remember the film. It was certainly not worthy of good actors like Raul Julia, Beverly D’Angelo or Jenny Lewis.
I talked about Bull Durham in one of our episodes about its distributor Orion Pictures, and about Eight Men Out both in that same Orion Pictures episode and, more recently, in our second episode about its writer and director, John Sayles. So I won’t get too much into the details I already covered. But I will tell you this much… depending on my mood on any given day, Bull Durham is either my favorite movie of all time, my second favorite movie of all time, or my fourth favorite movie of all time. I’ve seen it so many times, and I never get tired of it. It’s got that feeling about it, that intimacy about the inner workings of it all, that only someone who played in the minor leagues in the era could accurately capture. It’s not a flashy movie. It’s not overloaded with a bunch of technical marvels. It's a simple story, told simply, with a group of actors who are firing on all cylinders. Which can also be said for Eight Men Out. Eight Men Out is a great movie too, and in many ways a more incredible film, because of how Sayles was able to make a late 1910s period movie on a budget lower than a more modern film like Bull Durham, but I don’t love Eight Men Out as much. It’s not as fun, and it’s not meant to be as fun. Which is fine.
But sitting here in my office, in early March 2022, I am floored when I realize, in two years, we will be as far away from the release of Bull Durham and Eight Men Out as the release of those two movies were from The Pride of the Yankees. The Pride of the Yankees was ancient in 1988. Bull Durham is not ancient. Not even close. It’s just one of the weird little things that you don’t think about when you’re 20 but you constantly think of when you’re 54.
But there actually was yet another baseball-related movie released in the summer of 1988, just one week before Eight Men Out.
Stealing Home is a great metaphor for a dramatic movie about a failed baseball player who learns that his childhood sweetheart has committed suicide, and has charged him with the responsibility of discharging her ashes, as she believed he would be the only one who would know what to do with them.
The film has one hell of a cast. Mark Harmon, who never achieved the stardom he was destined to have, stars as the baseball player, and Jodie Foster as his lost love. Then there’s Harold Ramis in a rare dramatic role, Jonathan Silverman as a younger Harold Ramis, Blair Brown, Richard Jenkins, John Shea, Helen Hunt, and Beth Broderick. But, sadly, it’s yet another movie where the script and direction are no match for the stellar lineup of talent in front of the camera. In the years since its release, it has allegedly become a cult classic, but I don’t think I’ve seen or heard anyone talk about this movie since the late summer of 1988. Harmon claimed in 2006 that people talk to him about the film all the time, which I guess is or was at one time possible. I tried to watch it again for research into this episode, but it’s a really bad film, and it would be mostly forgotten within a couple of weeks of its release, thanks to the other Jodie Foster movie of 1988, her Academy Award-winning performance in The Accused, released six weeks later.
And for some, The Naked Gun qualifies as a baseball movie, thanks to its third act setting, so we’ll mention it here because it’s a darn good movie, but it’s not really a baseball movie.
As we come to the close of the decade, 1989, there’d be two more exceptional movies about baseball, and one not so good one that’s mostly been forgotten.
The first baseball movie of 1989 was David S. Ward’s magical comedy Major League. After the owner of the Cleveland Indians dies, his one-time Vegas showgirl wife makes a series of moves to put together the worst damn team in the sport, so she can take advantage of a clause in the team’s contract that would allow her to move the team to Miami if the attendance for the entire season falls below 800k. As someone whose family is from Cleveland, who spent summers in the mid 1970s in suburban Cleveland listening to Indians game with his grandpa on the radio every night, and who returns to Cleveland with some regularity to visit family and go to Indians games, I can understand where Mrs. Phelps is coming from. My dad, who was born and raised in Cleveland, has often been quoted as saying the best part about being from Cleveland is being far from Cleveland. I can’t 100% agree with him, but I also had the luxury of not growing up in Cleveland and only being there for short bursts of time.
She brings in a rag-tag team of misfits, losers and has-beens, who predictably start off the season bad, and things just go worse from there, until the team starts to gel together. When the manager of the team discovers Mrs. Phelps’ plan, he devises a strategy to motivate the team to become champions.
I love Major League as a movie. It hits all the right spots in terms of vulgar sports comedy, but it also hits a number of unexpected sweet spots of tenderness and caring. It would, for the most part, introduce us to Wesley Snipes and Rene Russo and Dennis Haysbert, give Tom Berenger his best role since Platoon, and give Bob Uecker his best acting role ever. But one of the things that I cherish most about the movie has nothing to do with the movie whatsoever. In April 1989, when the movie was released, I was a manager-in-training in Monterey, CA for United Artists Cinemas. We ran a number of theatres in the area, including one in Carmel called The Golden Bough Cinema. The Golden Bough is where Major League has been booked to play in the area, and theatres would run their new movies after closing the night before they opened, to make sure the print was built up correctly. Since my theatre was a single-screen theatre, and we were not opening a new film that week, I was invited to come watch the movie at that theatre. The manager, knowing I was a movie nerd and a movie theatre nerd, gave me a small tour of the small theatre, until we stopped at a seat in the center of one row, about two-thirds of the way back.
“See that seat?” he said, pointing to the seat.
“Yes.”
“
This is Clint Eastwood’s favorite movie theatre in the area, and that’s his favorite place to sit when he comes to see a movie here.”
“Awesome!”
“Yeah. He’ll probably be sitting in that seat later tonight.”
"That’s pretty cool.”
“Yeah. You can sit there if you want.”
So that’s how I watched Major League for the first time. In Clint Eastwood’s favorite seat at his favorite movie theatre.
Opening the first Friday after the start of the 1989 baseball season, Major League would be a big hit, taking the top spot on the box office charts the first two weeks of release, and grossing nearly $50m by the time it left theatres near the end of the season in September.
One thing I learned during researching the movie for this episode was that the filmmakers had shot two different storylines concerning Mrs. Phelps and her ways.
The second storyline actually had her as some kind of proto-Moneyball wunderkind, having scouted all of the players except for Willie Mays Hayes herself, knowing the players would have lifted each other up with the right kind of motivation because her late husband had left the team nearly broke and she couldn’t have afforded the previous year’s players. I watched the second storyline sequence, and I’m not sure the filmmakers made the right choice by making her a Grade A witch. I am sure the film might not have been as big a success as it eventually was if that was the route they had gone.
The second baseball movie of 1989 was released only two weeks after Major League, while that film was still the second most popular movie in the country.
Field of Dreams was a fairly straightforward adaptation of W.P. Kinsella’s 1982 novel Shoeless Joe, which itself was an expansion of Kinsella’s 1980 short story Shoeless Joe Comes to Iowa. In the novel, a farmer in Iowa who lives with his wife and their five-year-old daughter starts to hear voices while working in his cornfields, telling him to build a baseball field in the middle of his field so his hero can have a shot at redemption. The other farmers in Ray’s small farming town think he’s gone crazy, including his brother-in-law, but his wife supports her husband’s choices, including going to Boston to find a famous, reclusive writer and bring him back to Iowa.
Along the way, Ray and the writer meet up with a former baseball player who only got one chance to play in the major leagues before becoming a doctor, and eventually, everything comes together when spirits of the past start to play on the baseball diamond that was built in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa.
We all know the story. We’ve all seen the movie. Except the movie does some creative changes from the book in its adaptation. The movie loses Ray’s identical twin brother and his hippie girlfriend, as well as the man who Ray and his wife bought the farm from, who was locally known as the oldest living former player for the Chicago Cubs. And, most importantly, the filmmakers, afraid of a lawsuit by the famous, reclusive writer J.D Salinger, would change the identity of who Ray sought out in Boston during his trip, which would give James Earl Jones one of his most beloved roles.
Field of Dreams would open in 22 theatres nationwide on April 21st, and it would gross more than $530k, its $24k per screen average easily the best in the nation. It would enter the top ten the following week, when it expanded to 110 theatres, grossing $1m. It would expand to 633 theatres in week three, and to 1028 theatres in week four, until it reached its widest point of release at 1100 theatres in week seven. And even though it would end up grossing more than $64m, and eventually be nominated for Best Picture, Field of Dreams would never be the number one movie in the nation at any time in its release. The closest it would come was in week four, when it came in second with $5.77m in ticket sales to the latest Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder comedy, See No Evil, Hear No Evil.
And I know it’s not cool to admit to liking Kevin Costner, but let’s face facts here for a moment. Between The Untouchables, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams and Tin Cup, it was easy to like Costner. Sure, he made a lot of crappy movies in between, and some fairly good ones too. I’ve never been the biggest fan of Dances With Wolves, but still a well made film. And I honestly couldn’t tell you without looking up his resume what the last new film I saw him in. Turns out, it was Hidden Figures, a great movie he was very good in, but I had completely forgotten he was in it.
The third and final baseball movie of 1989, and thus the final baseball movie of the decade, was a lower budgeted murder mystery crime thriller from the company that brought us Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
Night Game would star Roy Scheider as a former minor league baseball player Mike Seaver, who settled in Galveston, TX after his playing days were done, becoming a homicide detective. When several young women are found dead around the beaches of Galveston, it’s up to Seaver to find out who the killer is.
Eventually, Seaver, still a big fan of baseball, is able to find a connection to the murders: they were all murdered on evenings where a former Galveston player, Silvio Baretto, wins a night game for the Houston Astros at the Astrodome.
Peter Masterson, the director of The Trip to Bountiful and the father of actress Mary Stuart Masterson, directs here as well, and the film also features two of the best movie jerks of all time, Paul Gleason from The Breakfast Club and Lane Smith from My Cousin Vinny.
The film would open on 175 screens nationwide, including 82 theatres across the New York City metropolitan area, on September 15th, grossing $228k and coming in 27th place that weekend. Even Field of Dreams, in its 22nd week of release, would gross more. The distributor, Trans World Entertainment, would stop reporting grosses after that first weekend, and the film would lose all but six of those 82 New York Metro area theatres after just seven days.
Baseball would continue to explode on movie screens in the 1990s. There were eighteen movies about baseball or baseball related in all of the 1980s. There’d be eighteen baseball movies in the 1990s by the end of 1995, and that’s not including Ken Burns’ incredible nine episode, eighteen and a half hour PBS documentary about the history of the game that aired in 1994. And there’d be even more movies about baseball in the 2000s and 2010s. Even filmmakers in South Korea and Japan would start to make movies about baseball.
Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again in two weeks, when Episode 74, The 3-D Movie Craze of the Early 1980s, is released.
Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, FilmJerk.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.
The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.
Thank you again.
Good night.