Major League

Losers get their day in modern day faerie tale for sports fans

Tom Berenger, Charlie Sheen and Wesley Snipes in “Major League”

MAJOR LEAGUE (1989) is to sports comedy what Aaron Sorkin did with political comedy in his screenplay for The American President (1995). Though not magnificently written or particularly well-directed, it is fun throughout, and qualifies a modern day faerie tale, imagining a world operating just the way it should, in the dreams of its author.

David S. Ward grew up in South Euclid, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. He won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay with The Sting (1973) and cashed in his chips from a lucrative screenwriting career to (loosely) adapt and direct a film version of John Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row (1982), starring Nick Nolte and Debra Winger. His directorial debut a critical and commercial failure, Ward understood he had, at best, one more shot at directing, whatever his next project might be. Chris Chesser, head of production for Filmways until it was acquired by Orion Pictures in 1982, was a fan of Ward’s script for Cannery Row and met with him, interested in what Ward wanted to do next. Ward’s hometown major league baseball club, the Cleveland Indians, were mired in what would be a forty-one year drought between World Series appearances. Their last trip to the championship series was in 1954, after the Indians notched a then-historic American League record of 111-43 before going 0-4 against the New York Giants and being swept from the postseason. Figuring his only way to see Cleveland win would be if he used Hollywood to fabricate it, Ward proposed a comedy about a team of rejects coming together to win the Indians a division title, against the hated New York Yankees.

Tom Berenger, Wesley Snipes, Dennis Haysbert, Corbin Bernsen, Charlie Sheen in “Major League”

As fate would have it, Chesser grew up in Tucson, Arizona, where the Indians held spring training, and he’d attended exhibition games as a boy. A Yankees fan, Chesser was delighted by the prospect of seeing his favorite team cast as the heels in a movie. In 1983, he pitched the idea to Martin Shafer, president of Embassy Pictures. Shafer successfully lobbied his boss, CEO Alan Horn, to commission a script from Ward. With Chesser along for the ride, Ward made research trips to Hi Corbett Field in Tucson, and the filmmakers were granted access to the Los Angeles Dodgers and California Angels dugouts, where they soaked up material. Though Ward wanted to base his characters on a composite of players, his hook was based on efforts by Calvin Griffith, infamous owner of the Minnesota Twins, to relocate the team to Florida using an escape clause in his contract with the city. This gave him permission to move the Twins elsewhere if annual attendance fell below a certain mark, and Griffith did what he could to help by fielding the cheapest teams possible. Griffith would sell the Twins in 1986, its new owners keeping them in Minneapolis, but his sleazy M.O. provided Ward the catalyst for a script.

Margaret Whtton and Charles Cyphers in “Major League”

Ward completed Major League in the spring of 1984, as the baseball season was getting underway. Executives at Embassy thought the script was funny, but not knowing Calvin Griffith from Calvin & Hobbes, thought it lacked credibility. Despite or perhaps due to the relative success of The Natural (1984), Embassy pointed out that cable television now allowed baseball fans to tune in to a game whenever they wanted, making baseball movies irrelevant. Ward argued that this was a comedy that would show the game differently than TV, but Embassy put the project in turnaround. Some time later, Ward and Chesser had a meeting with director Sydney Pollack at the offices of Mirage Enterprises, the production company Pollack co-founded with Mark Rosenberg in 1985. Pollack wanted Ward to adapt an idea Bill Murray had pitched him about an American slob who becomes heir to the throne of England. Ward would write and direct what became King Ralph (1991) starring John Goodman, but at the meeting, pitched his script Major League. Pollack read it, loved it and reimbursing Embassy their development costs, bought it for Ward to direct.

Wesley Snipes in “Major League”

Sydney Pollack’s involvement got the attention of producer Joe Roth, who’d co-founded a film production and finance company with an auto import businessman in Baltimore named James G. Robinson. A fan of director Preston Sturges, Roth named their company Morgan Creek, after the comedy The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944). Unlike Mirage, Morgan Creek had a guaranteed line of credit–from a bank in Baltimore– allowing them to both develop and finance their own slate of reasonably budgeted pictures, without a major studio. In 1987, Roth was developing what would be Morgan Creek’s first film: Young Guns (1988). Roth knew that one of the stars of that film, Charlie Sheen, was a huge baseball fan, having pitched and played shortstop in high school. Sheen was so enamored of baseball, he’d had to drop out of the role of Johnny Utah in what became Point Break (1991) when he injured his shoulder working out with the Dodgers in preparation for a role in Eight Men Out (1988). Roth proposed reuniting Sheen with Tom Berenger, who’d played dark mentor to Sheen’s character in Platoon (1986), a relationship they could revisit as a young pitcher and veteran catcher in Major League. Only funny.

Tom Berenger and Charlie Sheen in “Major League”

It was only when Sheen and Berenger committed to Major League that Chesser (producing the film with Morgan Creek’s line producer Irby Smith) thought about seeking the permission of Major League Baseball to make their movie, which only worked if the Cleveland Indians with their futile history were permitted to be the ball club. Anxious that the script’s profanity would botch everything, the filmmakers were surprised when commissioner Peter Ueberroth suggested only minor changes, finding nothing in the script he thought would reflect poorly on the MLB. The Indians’ public relations office loved it, while George Steinbrenner, the pugnacious principal owner of the Yankees, didn’t care whether his ball club was beloved or beat the lowly Indians in a Hollywood movie, as long as the Yankees were being talked about. Morgan Creek paid a flat fee of $100,000 for use of the Indians’ and Yankees’ trademarked names, logos and uniforms. Corbin Bernsen–then the third most recognizable actor in the cast due to his role on NBC’s L.A. Law–joined the ensemble with Margaret Whitton as the club’s owner, an ex-showgirl who inherits the Indians from her late husband and sabotages the roster so she can relocate to Florida. James Gammon was cast as the crusty manager most likely to lose. Rene Russo and Wesley Snipes were unknowns, but received nearly as much screen time as Sheen and Berenger, playing the ex-girlfriend of Berenger’s character, and Cleveland’s undrafted center fielder, respectively.

Margaret Whitton and Corbin Bernsen in “Major League”

What amounted to a $10 million independent film commenced shooting in July 1988 in Milwaukee, with Milwaukee County Stadium standing in for Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Filming the games in Cleveland in late summer proved impractical because the Cleveland Browns–sharing a stadium with the Indians until Jacobs Field opened in 1994–were marking up the grass for pre-season football. Union regulations in Ohio also made filming there expensive. Shooting mostly in Wisconsin, a so-called “right to work” state, significantly reduced costs. The location also ended up bringing Bob Uecker to the attention of the filmmakers. Uecker, who started his major league playing career with the Milwaukee Braves, was by 1988 doing color commentary for the Milwaukee Brewers on radio, appearing in a successful ABC sitcom (Mr. Belvedere) and starring in a popular national commercial ad campaign for Miller Lite. Given the green light to add to or change the dialogue of the Indians’ play-by-play announcer, Uecker joined the ensemble. Brewers TV analyst Pete Vuckovich was cast as the Yankee hitter who menaces Sheen’s character. A former ace pitcher for the Brewers, Vuckovich couldn’t hit a ball into the infield, but looked like an intimidating slugger.

Skip Griparis and Bob Uecker in “Major League”

With Paramount Pictures providing distribution, Major League opened the first weekend of April 1989, on the eve of major league baseball’s opening day. Released wide on 1,541 screens in the U.S., it was the #1 film in the country its first two weekends. Word of mouth made the comedy a hit, holding a spot among the top ten grossing films for nine weeks. Its rewatchability on videocassette added to the film’s popularity, launching a sequel directed by Ward in 1994 that reunited all cast members except Rene Russo and Wesley Snipes, by then too expensive to consider hiring. One component to the film’s appeal is that while it does take place in a locker room and the MPAA gave it an R-rating for profanity, there’s no violence or nudity, and Ward cuts away from two sexual situations before they get too uncomfortable to watch with family in the room. As baseball movies go, Bull Durham (1988), written and directed by a former pro ballplayer, is in another league, literally and creatively, but Ward’s picture is authentic too. It’s about a real organization in a specific city with a deeply frustrated fan base. Winning the participation of Major League Baseball–which today would probably be more laborious than studio development and notes from eight different film executives, if feasible at all–was a coup.

Major League is a film by and for sports fanatics. It’s full of moments that Ward wished into existence, from an undrafted rookie making the roster, to a small market club beating the Yankees. There’s also a librarian attractive enough to have leapt from the pages of Vogue magazine (which Rene Russo had). Its best dialogue is sticky, easy to find yourself repeating (particularly Bob Uecker calling a pitch by Sheen’s character that misses the batter’s box by six feet: “Juuust a bit outside!”) The movie is so active–jumping from the locker room to the press booth to the stands (where it begs for someone as witty as Uecker to heckle the players on the field)--that Ward doesn’t slow down to include one spontaneous moment, doing his best in scenes where Berenger’s character tries to win back Russo’s. It’s a weakness in the directing that the ensemble rarely seems to be responding to each other or acting in the same movie, each actor doing their bits. Though little more than the second unit photography was shot there, what we see of Cleveland has never looked better on film. Ward also begins the movie with the pitch perfect song, “Burn On,” Randy Newman’s sardonic ode to Ohio which Major League immortalized.

Video rental category: Comedy

Special interest: Guys On a Mission