2007 Film Festival
2007 Baseball Hall of Fame Film Festival
Baseball and motion pictures have had a connection since the early days of silent movies a century ago. The sport has been ripe for hundreds of screenplays over the years, which is why the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum saw fit to link these popular industries with a Baseball Film Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y.
The second annual Festival begins its three-day run Friday at the Hall's Bullpen Theater where 10 films covering a variety of baseball themes will be shown. Each film will be followed by a question-and-answer session with a representative of that production. Tickets are available free of charge, but seats are limited and must be reserved by in advance by calling the Museum's Membership Department at (607) 547-0397.
The Festival kicks off with an invitation-only Filmmaker's Social in the Library Atrium where each film's representatives have the opportunity to meet with other film makers, the Festival's judges and the Hall of Fame staff. The Festival's judges include film critic Jeffrey Lyons and actor-director-producer Paul Borghese, who played Yogi Berra in the 2001 HBO movie, "61*" which will have a special screening.
The first film of the Festival is at 7 p.m. Friday, "American Pastime," a 105-minute documentary about how baseball helped Japanese-American families cope with life in internment camps in the western United States in the early 1940s. Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japanese-Americans were uprooted from their homes and sent to these camps where baseball provided one of the few outlets for joy.
"American Pastime" will be followed at 9:30 p.m. by "Rounding Third," a 14-minute feature about a doctor who turns into a recluse after his father's death and then is befriended by a former Yankees player named Roberto, who was once a teammate of Mickey Mantle.
Saturday's schedule of five films begins at 10 a.m. with "Reel Baseball: Baseball's Golden Era, The Way America Witnessed It - In the Movie Newsreels." The 60-minute feature is a nostalgic view of how movie newsreels brought the game's star players and highlights to film-going audiences between 1933 and 1965. Before the growth of television's baseball coverage, newsreels that were shown at theaters before features were major sources of presenting the sport to fans.
"The Last Giant" at 11:30 a.m. is a 17-minute reflection by former New York Giants catcher Harry "The Horse" Danning about what the game was like in the Depression Era of the 1930s. Danning, a four-time All-Star who played on three Giants' pennant-winning teams in that decade, was 88 years old when he was interviewed in 1999 for the project in which he reminisced about the old ballparks and train rides and what it was like to be behind the plate when the likes of Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams and others were at bat.
A look at baseball overseas is featured at 1:30 p.m. in "City of Baseball," a 55-minute look at the Italian village of Nettuno, south of Rome, where American soldiers introduced the game to local citizens during the Allied invasion of Italy in 1944. Through league pioneers, current players, fans and local historians, the film tells how the town embraced the sport with a passion that continues to this day.
Red Sox fans will be delighted by the 3 p.m. presentation of "Rooters: The Birth of Red Sox Nation," a 106-minute account of Boston fans from their start as the 200 "Roxbury Rooters" of 1897 to the legion that exists today.
Attention turns to Cubs fans with the final Saturday feature at 7 p.m. "Chasing October" is filmmaker Matt Liston's humorous, 90-minute documentary about his quitting his job to make a film about the Cubs during the 2003 season so that he can single-handedly will them into the World Series.
Sunday's schedule starts at 10 a.m. with "Long Road Home," the story of John Malangone, a New York street baseball legend from East Harlem who was signed by the Yankees but despite his raw talent never made it to the majors. The 56-minute film depicts what happened to the player the Yankees once thought would be the next Yogi.
At 11:30 a.m., "The Showdown" is a sort of John McGraw meets John Wayne. The 17-minute film brings together two uniquely American forms, baseball and the western, with a confrontation between a pitcher and a batter in a pivotal game juxtaposed against a deadly duel between two gunslingers in the Old West.
The Closing Ceremony at 2 p.m. will feature awards presentations and a Q&A with Lyons and Borghese. Prior to that, John Fitzgerald, whose film "The Emerald Diamond" won the Critics Choice Award last year, will preview his upcoming project, "Playing for Peanuts," a reality show about Minor League Baseball.
Borghese can be seen as Berra in the 3 p.m. presentation of "61*," the Billy Crystal-directed TV movie about the 1961 pursuit of Yankees teammates Roger Maris (Barry Pepper) and Mickey Mantle (Thomas Jane) to break Babe Ruth's then record of 60 home runs in a season.
By Jack O'Connell / MLB.com
