Filmbook: "Eight Men Out" (1988)

Aiee... Hollywood. It could have been much worse for EIGHT MEN OUT than John Sayles' adaptation, which is remarkably faithful to the book until the last half-hour when it does some truly impressive acrobatics and basically invents its own ending. Maybe it was too faithful up to that point, which would explain why it was so flat.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to see some of the characteristics I disliked in Asinof's book exaggerated for the film audience. Buck Weaver isn't just "the All-American boy," he makes impassioned speeches at the drop of a hat! (Including robbing David Strathairn as Eddie Cicotte of a chance to do his own speechifying, and that should be illegal.) Michael Mantell's Abe Attell isn't just a shady character, he needs to narrow his eyes all the time and speak in a creepy Spot-Conlon-from-Brooklyn* monotone. And the whole thing is scored in phony Jazz Age music, just in case we forget that it's The Past. I don't even want to know the direction given to D.B. Sweeney as Shoeless Joe, who plays Jackson as not so much illiterate as prone to prolonged blank stares -- "head injury patient," I guess.

There are some neat moments in this film; I appreciated John Mahoney as Kid Gleason, the Sox manager who can't explain why his team is falling to pieces around him, and Kevin Tighe is precisely slippery as "Sport" Sullivan, one of the gamblers involved in the fix. There's a great (albeit brief) scene with John Anderson as Kenesaw Mountain Landis that I didn't remember from the book. But this movie just doesn't execute the way it should. Sayles' reliance on devices like the "montage of newspaper headlines" and the "little kids with no connection to the plot, but useful receptacles for speechifying" got old. Casting himself as Ring Lardner did little to convince me of his earnestness towards the plot.

Tomorrow: Putting out the fire with gasoline and Jonathan Mahler's LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE BRONX IS BURNING.

*"Well I say... that what you say... is what I say." Anyone?

Baseball Week 2: Say It Ain't So, Eddie

If Eliot Asinof couldn't do it, I doubt anyone could. The author's account of the 1919 "Black Sox" scandal is so meticulous, it sometimes seems as if Asinof had been pressed up against the players' hotel room doors with a glass in his hand, eavesdropping on their conversations -- untrue in any sense, since EIGHT MEN OUT was published over 40 years after the series in question. He sifts through contemporary news stories and columns and court transcripts galore, but he can't tell us why eight members of the Chicago White Sox would decide to throw the World Series, believe they could get away with it, and (to a certain extent) go on with their lives.

There are a lot of unbelievable facets to the Black Sox scandal, and I don't really want to spoil them for anyone who, like me, may be going into this book with only a vague outline of the scandal. But here is your vague outline: Eight players on the White Sox, gathered by first baseman Chick Gandil (whose Wikipedia picture could not be less flattering), made an agreement with a gambler, a former boxer and a gangster -- with their innumerable intermediaries, anyway -- to throw the Series against the Cincinnati Reds for $100,000. The gamblers bet against the Sox (favored to win) and make oodles of money. Everybody wins until American League president Ban Johnson seizes an opportunity to humiliate the White Sox owner and promote himself as anti-gambling and decides to investigate the rumors that had swirled around the previous year's series.

Johnson didn' really get what he wanted from the revelation of the scandal, nor did gambling in baseball end. The fans didn't really get justice, even though the players involved were famously banned from baseball for the rest of their lives. (Perhaps an over-punishment for Buck Weaver? Hold that thought for a minute.) As reprehensible as what the players did was, justice wasn't served.

Getting back to the why: Gandil was the fixer, but Cicotte -- the only player smart enough to insist on being paid up front -- seemed like the linchpin. In some ways, he's the most tragic figure of the book, or at least that's how Asinof chose to see it. Cicotte's testimony is heartbreaking and disingenuous at the same time. I wanted to believe him, but given how he and his teammates were treated it's hard to know how much he really revealed under oath. (Being told they're signing a document protecting their immunity, when it actually waives their immunity?) If I had a problem with Asinof's account it was in his characterization of some of the players, about which I had similar reservations as with Cicotte's own words: Shoeless Joe is altogether too stupid to know what's going on, depending on his wife to read his contracts, and Buck Weaver is too "All-American" to cheat (but not too much to be in on the fix?) and bewildered when he's forced to share the fate of his fellows. Maybe those didn't seem too general so much as undersourced.

Of course I realized only too late that EIGHT MEN OUT is not the right book with which to kick off a whole week of books about baseball, in that it shows the dark side of the sport. A theme that will carry on throughout the week? Perhaps!

Tomorrow: You may be part of the conspiracy too with Philip Roth's THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL.

Reading on the Road: Don't Bring Me Down Edition

I'm going home to the Midwest for the weekend -- a short trip, but a relatively long to-do list. I have four goals: see my family, locate my copy of CLOUD ATLAS, enact vengeance and get a few good nights' sleep. (Kicking ass and chewing bubblegum will have to wait till next trip.) By the time you read this, I'll probably be working on one of those objectives; time is precious.

I'm taking Allegra Goodman's THE COOKBOOK COLLECTOR, EIGHT MEN OUT and David Foster Wallace's EVERYTHING AND MORE. That's 2/3 library books, which probably shouldn't happen but I'm not taking much with me so I still have room. The Wallace book would probably rank in the top five hardest books I've read since college, so why am I enjoying it so much?

Have a great weekend, whether it's your Independence Day or just the 4th.