Say It Ain’t So, Joe! John Sayles’ “Eight Men Out”

Baseball is America’s game. That’s its reputation, anyway—as a wholesome family entertainment in which athletes face off against one another at a sporting event that’s easy to watch and enjoy.

 The fact that the players’ faces aren’t covered is one reason that baseball seems to be the favorite team sport of moviemakers. So’s the basic set-up of the game. There’s no scrum of heavily padded guys smashing into another clump of players, similarly outfitted, with the spectator desperately trying to locate the pigskin and figure out who is who. Instead, in baseball, one solitary soul on the pitcher’s mound rhythmically faces down one batsman at a time. A man with a ball versus a man with a bat: what could simpler or more dramatic? 

 That’s got to be at least part of the reason why there are so many baseball movies. Some are lively and pure fun, like 1949’s Take Me Out to the Ballgame and 1958’s Damn Yankees, both of them star-studded musicals. Some are heartwarming biopics about baseball greats, like The Pride of the Yankees (1942, about Lou Gehrig) and several films focusing on major league baseball’s first Black player, Jackie Robinson. (See 1950’s The Jackie Robinson Story, in which Robinson played himself, and 2013’s 42, starring Chadwick Boseman.) Baseball takes on an almost mythic significance in The Natural (1984), Bull Durham (1988), and Field of Dreams (1985). In the last of these, a young farmer in search of a father figure builds his own ballfield and greets the ghostly Shoeless Joe Jackson, along with the other disgraced members of the Chicago White Sox, who were banished from the sport forever for their part in fixing the 1919 World Series.

 Writer/director John Sayles has never much gone in for simple projects. Though his films over the years can be sorted into many genres, he seems to particularly appreciate American history, as seen on a broad canvas. In 1987, he won wide critical acclaim for Matewan, the often-brutal story of West Virginia coal miners overcoming obstacles to form a union. One year later, he directed an ensemble of major Hollywood actors (including John Cusack, Michael Lerner, John Mahoney, and Charlie Sheen) in the story of what is often called the Black Sox Scandal. Eight Men Out details how, in an era when betting on baseball games was rampant, members of the pennant-winning Chicago White Sox were approached by mobster types to throw the series, in exchange for promises of hefty payments. What made Sayles’ screenwriting complicated is that, no one, including baseball historians, has the whole story. We don’t exactly know who-all was in on the fix, nor who agreed, and then eventually changed his mind. What we DO know is that there were many bad guys around, including mobsters, greedy players, and a team owner (Charles Comiskey) so cheap that some players apparently agreed to throw World Series games as a way of getting back at a boss-man who promised them bonuses but never paid up.  And we know that eight players were eventually prosecuted, including at least one (Buck Weaver, played by Cusack) who deplored the idea of playing to lose, but never squealed on his teammates.

 Sayles takes it all on: the players, the crooks, the management, the sportswriters who smelled a rat. (He himself appears as journalist Damon Runyon, and the great Studs Terkel plays another sportswriter of the day.) Sayles has also got the little urchin who looks up at his former hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and cries out, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” Very mythic; very moving. 

 

How to Turn Brilliant into Boring (even with Chadwick Boseman in the Lead Role)

 The following was written before Oscar night. See below for my thoughts on why Boseman, despite all predictions, did not posthumously receive the Best Actor Oscar. 

  (1) Get the best talent money can buy. Get On Up not only has Boseman but also Viola Davis, in the small but key role of the mother who abandons young James but then, years later, sidles into his dressing room at Harlem’s Apollo Theater (Both Boseman and Davis came close to winning  Oscars for their very different roles in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.)

   (2) Stage terrific musical numbers. Boseman only did some of his character’s singing, with Brown’s own voice also featured. But he dances up a storm, and has perfected Brown’s trademark leaping splits, while other musicians in the film are also first-class.

  (3) Hire top-drawer craft personnel, especially those with expertise in hair and makeup. Brown’s black-black locks change their shape and trajectory in almost every scene. This helps the viewer keep track of the passage of time, which is extremely vital because the film’s chronology is so scrambled. (See #4.)

 (4) Decide that cause-and-effect is not nearly so important as an arty bouncing between various widely separated eras. The viewer doesn’t dare blink, for fear of finding herself ricocheting from the piney Georgia woods of Brown’s early days to a crowded recording studio to a Paris concert hall to a country church. .

  (5) Throw in some surreal touches for good measure. Why does young James encounter an unexplained lynched body in the woods? Yes, this might be true to the period, but how does it relate to this particular story? And why do we lurch from the funeral of James’ longtime manager (Dan Ackroyd) to a vision of Ackroyd lying dead on a golf course?

  (6) Fail to decide what the story’s really about. This is a big one, as I emphasize to my screenwriting students. It’s not sufficient to take a subject from cradle to grave, cramming in every detail of a long, complicated life. The key is to focus on a particular area of concern, like Freddie Mercury’s homosexuality or Billie Holiday’s battle with the FBI.  Get On Up wants to cover everything about Brown: his lost childhood, his introduction of a new musical style, his mixed feelings about women, his love/hate relationship with the country of his birth. This ambitious goal inevitably makes for a scattershot approach.

(7) Have plenty of loose threads: intriguing plot elements that surface, but then remain unexplored. Like that first wife: she’s lovingly introduced, along with their baby son, but then she disappears . . . and years later I gather it’s this particular son (Brown fathered at least 9 children) who’s fleetingly mentioned as having died off-camera in a car crash. It’s not good storytelling when you hear about an offscreen death and think, “Who?” 

 Follow these steps, and I guarantee that your audience will be on its way to slumberland.

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And now some thoughts about what happened on Oscar night, when Boseman—to the surprise of all, including the evening’s organizers—lost the Oscar to 83-year-old Anthony Hopkins for his stunning work as a delusional old man in The Father.

 (1)  Academy voters assumed that Boseman (the sentimental favorite because of his early death) would surely win, which left them free to exercise their independence by exploring other options.

 (2)  Some voters strongly disliked Ma Rainey, considering this screen version of an August Wilson drama basically a filmed play, filled with performances more theatrical than cinematic. Their vote was a rejection of the lengthy theatre-style monologues that made Boseman’s work in the film so incendiary.

 (3)  Political correctness can be its own form of oppression. So much ink was spilled about the strong possibility of people of color taking all four acting prizes-- to make up for past Academy wrongs -- that some voters doubtless deliberately chose to look beyond skin tones in making their choices. So the Oscar went to a Black man, a Korean woman, and two white actors. Diversity, right? 

 But what do I know?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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