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Jewish World Review April 12, 2005 / 3 Nisan, 5765 Drew, Babaloo, Barf and Boston By Joel Stein
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The Red Sox World Series victory last October shook my deeply held beliefs about fate and justice and the lameness of Boston. Boston's continued arrogance in the face of a century of failure was being rewarded, and I had to watch the snobby, insular New Englanders celebrate. For a city that's been in steady decline since 1773, those people can be pretty snooty. It's a city that is down to two relevant institutions, Harvard and "Car Talk," and only one of them is welcoming to women.
Even the Democratic Party, after this last election, has given up on them. I needed someone to commiserate with, someone whose suffering was more acute and quantifiable than my own. And there was no way I was talking to George Steinbrenner. Nobody is that big of a Yankee fan.
That's when I noticed that among the Red Sox hugging on the field of Busch Stadium were Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore. At first this upset me greatly, partly because it phonied up a historic moment, kind of like if Tom Hanks really stood there waving, like Forrest Gump, as Kennedy was shot. Worse yet, it reinforced the truism that the only way to get Barrymore to pretend to be your girlfriend is to be a former "Saturday Night Live" star. Kevin Nealon has a better chance with her than me.
But then I realized that the "Fever Pitch" writers were actually suffering far more than me. Though they had gotten Fallon and Barrymore on the field, their movie, which opens this weekend, had now lost its entire premise. It was supposed be to be about a guy who placed his lifelong, never-gratified love for the Sox above his girlfriend, Barrymore. Now that the Sox had won the championship for the first time since 1918, none of that would work. I may have been severely bummed about the Sox winning, but Fox was about to throw away tens of millions of dollars. I was feeling better already.
I called the screenwriters, "Babaloo" Mandel and Lowell Ganz, to see how they were taking the loss. To my great glee, they told me they were being forced to turn around a last-minute rewrite for free. I started rubbing that in their faces, until the guys — who wrote "Splash," "Parenthood," "City Slickers," "A League of Their Own" and "Robots" — said, "Frankly, we get paid enough."
Worse, though they both grew up in New York, neither shared in my Yankee suffering. Ganz was a Mets fan, and Mandel didn't have warm feelings toward the team either because of an unfortunate childhood incident in which he had to help his father clean his cab after a Yankee barfed in it. I thought that giving up love for the Bombers because of a little barf was pretty shallow. I worried for Mandel's children.
When the Sox won, the studio figured the whole point of the movie was lost. The hero was no longer a loser who became a winner by having his unrequited childhood love of the Red Sox usurped by real human love, or at least the love of a woman who was once married to Tom Green. Now the guy was just literally a winner.
But Mandel and Ganz assured the execs that a rewrite would be simple — though I'm guessing that, no matter how impressive their resume, promises from guys named Lowell and Babaloo aren't all that comforting. It's like Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, telling you the insurgents are tiring.
After talking to Mandel and Ganz, I just felt worse. This may have partly been because of the fact that they make so much more than I do for writing penis jokes. But it was also because I was still sad about the Red Sox. And I wasn't sure why. It wasn't just that my Yankees lost. To paraphrase Ganz: Frankly, we've won enough. It's that I don't like losing constants. It reminds me of my mortality. Boston always loses, the Earth spins on its axis, and I don't get cancer.
Sure, being around when history gets made makes me feel important, but only when it fits into some greater static truth: the fall of communism turned Russia back into Russia, the 2000 election showed the strength of the three-branch system of government, and the pope's death just means another cardinal gets to pick a cool stage name. I'm so hoping for Fabian II.
"Fever Pitch," in the end, fits my view of the world. The Red Sox's victory may have changed the film's whole raison d'etre, but the script was barely tweaked. "We chose the Red Sox because the fact that they never won gave it a richness and romance and mythical quality," Ganz said. But in romantic comedy, he pointed out, depth doesn't count for much. "It was headed toward a romantic Hollywood ending," he said. "We like this version."
Ganz calls it a feel-good movie. But it's still an ending that makes me feel awful.
I can't imagine how much worse I'll feel when the Red Sox catch up to the Yankees by winning 20 more World Series.
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Joel Stein is a Los Angeles Times columnist. Comment by clicking here.
04/05/05 I regret finally learning ‘how to get to Sesame Street’ © 2005 Los Angeles Times Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate |
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