I am not a huge baseball fan, that is as far as watching it on television goes. If you tell me we are going to watch the Mariners at Safeco I will be the first one in the car, that place rocks! However, boring or not, baseball films seem to be (for the most part) the only sport that really work well in films. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that a baseball game can be told far more dramatically thanks to the slow pace of the game. Football and basketball depend so much more on individual skill and moves whereas baseball’s skill is hand-to-eye coordination and the real drama is in how the play turns out. However, a film about Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball hardly needs on field plays to be interesting. This is a story built for the big screen, and it is about time it was told.
The as-yet-untitled flick is set to be directed by Thomas Carter (Coach Carter) with Robert Redford and the boys at ESPN producing. Redford has been trying to get the film made since 2005 and it seems the ESPN partnership may be the catalyst to get it off the ground.
Redford will star in the pic as Branch Rickey, the team’s general manager whose vision it was to make the statement and whose teamwork with Robinson off the field made it successful.
The plot as described worries me a little bit only in that I hope they don’t paint Rickey as the ultimate hero and play it out evenly. As much as Rickey took heat for signing Robinson, I can only imagine the heat Robinson took for being the first black man in an exclusively white sport until that time was about ten times as bad. Basically I just hope it doesn’t turn out to be another “white man saves the black man” movie, but considering Redford’s involvement along with ESPN I have faith this will be a film worth seeing. The support of Rachel Robinson, Jackie Robinson’s widow, as well as Branch Rickey Jr. and the MLB also give me hope.
