Okay, I have not seen this particular sequel yet, nor have I seen the workprint which has been floating around the internet for years. But seriously, I came across not just one but two trailers for “Grizzly II: Revenge,” and neither of them try to hide how god awful this film must be. It’s bad enough the title reminds me of another excruciatingly awful sequel involving a killer animal, “Jaws: The Revenge,” but this one is so shameless in inviting audiences to check it out regardless of its subpar filmmaking on display (and that’s being generous).
Truth be told, “Grizzly II’s” backstory is bound to be far more interesting than the film itself. A sequel to the 1976 “Jaws” knock-off “Grizzly,” it was made back in 1983, but its production quickly got derailed due to a lack of funding, constant feuding behind the scenes, and technical issues with its 16-foot mechanical bear. 37 years later, after a ton of legal wrangling, it is now being shown in its final cut. But unlike other long-lost films such as “Gone with The Pope” or long in the making sequels like “I Spit on Your Grave: Déjà vu,” this one is unlikely to be worth the wait.
The first thing we in these trailers is the appearance of a couple of Oscar winners, George Clooney and Laura Dern, and Charlie Sheen before he did “Platoon.” Their names headline this movie, but as we can see, they are not in it for very long. We see their screaming faces up close, and it is clear the bear will treat this trio as dinner since hibernation is out of the question. This is not the first time recognizable names have been exploited to garner attention for a movie, and it won’t be the last either.
From there, we are introduced to actors who are forced to spout ridiculous dialogue a film like this always has to offer. A female scientist tells a group that the bear they are hunting is “huge.” No! Really??!! I mean, heaven forbid the bear they are dealing with is a small one! Can you imagine a little cub going psycho on so many stupid and unsuspecting humans?
There is also a brief moment with Louise Fletcher of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” fame telling someone to kill the bear as soon as possible because there is a big concert coming up. And then we have John Rhys-Davies playing what I guess is a mountain man of sorts, and he has one of those dramatic moments where he pauses before saying something intended to be hair-raising (“It’s very bad… you got the devil bear!”).
Speaking of the concert, we are shown some of it as well. But while the crowd looks huge, the onstage performers look like they are re-enacting scenes from the so bad it’s good rock musical “The Apple.”
But perhaps the biggest problem with these trailers is the lack of the bear itself. We hear it grunting throughout and see its point of view from time to time, but we never see its face until the last few seconds. Before this, we see Davies preparing to attack it, and it looks like the actor is about to attack a big pile of wool designed to look like a bear’s legs. Clearly there is no real bear there as it would have gobbled up Davies before he had a chance to draw a weapon.
In the end, these trailers for “Grizzly II: Revenge” represent filmmaking and marketing at its most cynical. The producers are simply looking for a quick buck here as they are exploiting big names and this film’s troubled production history for all it is worth. This sequel may have been 37 years in the making, but that was never intended to be the case. Its production was simply a case of very bad luck, and now this sequel exists as a mere oddity.
All of this just makes me miss Bart The Bear, a real-life grizzly who upstaged Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin in “The Edge.” Now if Bart were in this, it just might have been worth watching.
WRITER’S NOTE: This article was originally written in 2012 when this screening took place.
Among the guests at a recent reunion screening of “Major League” at the Aero Theatre was actor Tom Berenger who played veteran baseball catcher Jake Taylor. It is still one of Berenger’s best known roles as we watch his character go through another baseball season which may very well be his last while trying to win back his ex-girlfriend Lynn Wells (Renee Russo in her film debut). And like his fellow co-stars, Berenger proved to the filmmakers he could play baseball.
Berenger did have some experience playing little league when he was growing up, and he played some more ball after that but never professionally. “Major League’s” writer and director, David S. Ward, also said “you could watch Tom swing a bat and you could tell he could play baseball.” Berenger said he played on third base and left field, but “Major League” had him taking the catcher position for the first time ever. What made the difference in preparing for this role was who he had to work with.
Tom Berenger: I had a great teacher which was (Steve) Yeager who had been a catcher for the Dodgers. Besides being a great player, he was also a great teacher which is important, and he worked with Charlie (Sheen) and I and we started probably six weeks before the other guys came in.
Berenger even talked about how he got Yeager and some of the cast to come back to his hometown in South Carolina so they could practice there. His thought was that practicing at Pepperdine University near Malibu with the “dry air” and “breeze coming off of the ocean” was “a little deceiving” as real ballplayers deal with more humid conditions.
TB: We raised a little team so we could do infield practice and drills and things like that, and it was all these guys who were on softball leagues that had once played baseball. They loved it. It was great. I had a friend that was head of maintenance for the public schools, and he got us a field at one of the high schools that was totally blocked off. It was just screened by Palmetto trees, Live Oaks and stuff. He gave us the key to the gate to get in and he brought all his equipment out there and he recut the field, he redid the mound, he gave us a pitching machine so I could practice pop-ups and we could do batting practice.
Berenger said this worked out great for everyone there because they all were forced to deal with humidity, and it was this same humidity which the cast and crew faced in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where “Major League” was filmed. The movie was shot in 1988 during the hottest summer in Wisconsin since 1938, and he remembered it being brutal to work during the day as a result. While the training done in South Carolina certainly prepared many for day shooting, Berenger looked more forward to working nights when it was cooler.
Watching the movie again had Berenger getting nostalgic for the old Cleveland as it appears in the movie’s opening credits, and it is one of the few parts of the movie which was actually shot there.
TB: I’m looking at it and I’m going wow, look at that industrial town. That’s what we used to be. And that makes me a little sad, you know? Chicago and Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Bethlehem and Allentown; all those towns were like that and they’re not there anymore, and I find that really sad because I think they were the backbone of this country.
“Major League” still holds a place in all our hearts thanks to its humor and deeply felt moments which have stayed with us long after the end credits are done. Even Berenger admitted the movie still has a profound effect on him more than 20 years after its release.
TB: I have to say that I just love this film. I cry at the end every time I watch it. It’s a comedy but it’s got so much heart and great writing and direction.
In 1988, John Carpenter made “They Live,” a science fiction horror film about a drifter who discovers the ruling class are actually aliens who have managed to conceal their existence and manipulate the human race into spending money and to “obey” them through subliminal messages in mass media. Years later, when Carpenter was attending a screening at the Egyptian Theatre, he described “They Live” as being his response to his horror at the Ronald Reagan years and his distaste at the increased commercialization of politics and popular culture in the 1980’s. When I was at a screening of “Big Trouble in Little China,” and I got to ask Carpenter the following question:
“You have said ‘They Live’ was your response to your horror at the Reagan years. With George W. Bush currently wreaking havoc around the globe, don’t you think this is the perfect time for a sequel?”
Carpenter’s response stays with me to this day:
“The 80’s never left us.”
Looking back, he was absolutely right. While I am a child of the 80’s and have a great love for that decade, it marked the start of America becoming an infinitely greedy nation as we strove to become very rich, deficits began to explode, and politicians began selling us on trickle down economics which promised that tax cuts on the rich would benefit the middle and lower classes. This proved to be a big lie, and yet politicians still try to sell Americans on it.
All of this went through my head as I watched Lauren Greenfield’s “Generation Wealth.” This documentary comes to us in 2018, and it proves once again how the 80’s still live on as we watch individuals try to become wealthy or at least gain the appearance of being rich. What results is a look at how the American Dream has been corrupted, the cost of greed, and the chance for redemption.
Greenfield is an acclaimed photographer and filmmaker, and “Generation Wealth” starts off with her narrating how through her 25 years of work, she discovers her work has pointed to one uniting phenomenon: wealth culture. From there, she investigates the various pathologies which created the richest society in the world, and she interviews several people who look to increase their bank accounts or change the way they look to where society will view them as sexy.
We meet Florian Homm, a former hedge-fund manager who at one time had a net worth of $800 million and ended up fleeing the United States to avoid getting arrested by the FBI. Watching him sit back on a couch while smoking a cigar with glee makes him look the modern-day version of Tony Montana from “Scarface.” Homm is never shy about just how much he loves money, and he laughingly admits how Harvard Business School didn’t train him to be an ethical businessman but instead to be “fine-tuned to rule the world.”
We also get introduced to Cathy, a bus driver from Virginia who travels to Brazil to get extensive plastic surgery which she charges to a credit card, the successful porn star Kacey who gained notoriety after Charlie Sheen paid her $30,000 for a days long party and drug binge, a young beauty queen who looks like a combination of Honey Boo Boo and JonBenet Ramsey, and former rapper Cliff (G-Mo) who we first celebrating the hip-hop version of the American Dream. They all want the best-looking bodies as well as all the money in the world, but as Greenfield says at one point, those who have everything never feel like they have enough.
I found myself getting sickened by the subjects Greenfield photographed and interviewed as it felt they were doing more damage to themselves than good to where they appeared, if not soulless, very empty on the inside. It proved to be a relief when someone like Chris Hedges shows up to put some much-needed perspective on what we are seeing as he compares America’s obsession with wealth to the end of Rome. At one point he even says, “Societies accrue the most wealth as they face death.” Can America be close to suffering the same fate? It certainly feels like it.
Greenfield doesn’t break new ground with “Generation Wealth” as Michael Moore already compared Rome’s fall with America in “Capitalism: A Love Story,” and “The Big Short” was an entertaining and sobering look at the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Do we need to go through how greed has wrecked America in yet another movie? Oh yes, we do! This country threatens to make the same mistakes yet again as politicians still insist on selling its citizens on trickle-down economics.
One key character from the 1980’s whom Greenfield highlights is Gordon Gekko, the fictional and unscrupulous corporate raider Michael Douglas played in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street.” But while Stone intended for “Wall Street” to be a cautionary tale about the downside of unchecked greed, Gekko proved to be such a charismatic character to where he became a huge inspiration for those desperate to make it big on Wall Street. It didn’t matter how Gekko set a terrible example for them, these wannabes still looked up to him, and there is a good deal of him in many of the people Greenfield interviews here.
Greenfield to her credit she never judges any of the people featured here. She presents their stories objectively and never tries to manipulate us into thinking about them in one way or another. Whether you are intrigued or repulsed by the things they do, there is a sense of empathy I had for them as they become more and more human as the documentary reaches its final act.
When it comes to “Generation Wealth’s” final act, we see the results and repercussions of the actions everyone has made as they reach a plateau in their quest for money. Greenfield aligns their journey with the catastrophic financial crash of 2008 which left much damage in its wake. Seeing these people on the other side of it has them finding something absolutely priceless while others find tragedy and financial ruin. This proves to be both inspiring and devastating all at the same time.
“Generation Wealth” does lose some of its focus as Greenfield awkwardly inserts herself into her documentary. Is she also interested in being rich and wealthy? Is she well off thanks to her photography? It’s hard to say what she is saying about herself, but it does lead to some very amusing moments as one of her sons admits he knows the name of each Kardashian but not those of his neighbors, and her other little boy ends up inserting a sign in front of her camera as she films everything and anything. I don’t want to spoil the moment for you as it had me laughing endlessly.
Watching “Generation Wealth” kind of reminded of when I first saw “Doc Hollywood” which starred Michael J. Fox as a doctor intent on making tons of money as a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, and who later finds a more meaningful life for himself in Grady, South Carolina. But that was a fictional movie, and this one deals with real life, and I came out of it with more hope for the human race than when I went in. This documentary also shows how life is about the journey rather than the final destination. While I wanted to sit some of these characters down and force them to pay close attention to the lyrics of Digital Underground’s “No Nose Job,” it is worth watching their journey as, like them, we come to see what matters most in life.
With that, I leave you with the words Harold Perrineau uttered as Augustus Hill on the HBO series “Oz:”
“We think we know what we need. We spend our time figuring out how to get what we want, who can help us, who’s in the way. We make our moves and sometimes we get lucky. We get exactly what we want. And life gets worse. Simple truth #22, be careful what you wish for, brother. Be very, very careful.”
I think its use of “Adagio for Strings” by Samuel Barber is one of the reasons I stayed away from watching “Platoon” for the longest time. It still is one of the saddest pieces of music I have ever heard, although it would later be eclipsed by the even more emotionally devastating “Symphony No. 3” (subtitled “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”) by Henryk Górecki which Peter Weir used to powerful effect in “Fearless.” Plus, the way the violence in “Platoon” was described to me by friends at school, like when a soldier gets his arms blown off by a bomb, filled my mind with horrible images which had no business infecting my mind at such a young age.
It took buying the 25th anniversary edition of “Platoon” on Blu-ray for me to finally sit down and watch it. I hadn’t even seen the movie yet, and here I am buying it at Costco for $11.99 By then, I had seen many Oliver Stone movies like “Born On the Fourth of July,” “JFK,” and “Natural Born Killers,” so I was long overdue to give this Best Picture winner a look.
Before “Platoon,” I had seen “Apocalypse Now,” “The Deer Hunter,” and “Full Metal Jacket” which viewed the Vietnam War from different perspectives. The one thing they had in common was they were directed by filmmakers who had never served in Vietnam. Stone, however, had served there, so “Platoon” is largely autobiographical for him. As a result, this is probably the first truly realistic depiction of the Vietnam War anyone could have ever hoped to see in a movie.
Charlie Sheen stars as Chris Taylor, and it’s interesting watching him here as this was long before his days on “Two and a Half Men.” Taylor serves as the narrator and most relatable character as, like him, we are coming into this war fresh-faced, naïve and innocent. The first scene where Taylor comes off a plane with a bunch of newbies is an omen of what is to come. Seeing body bags filled with fallen soldiers and crossing paths with those men who have seen the war up close quickly gives you a good idea of what Taylor will probably end up looking like at the movie’s end.
Sheen is perfectly cast as he makes Taylor go from being a newbie to an experienced combat veteran in little time. It’s a shame Sheen has since pissed away a good portion of his talent to where he’s pretty much playing a version of himself as some drunken womanizer, be it on a television show or a movie. His work here is a strong reminder of how good he can be as he is utterly believable in a role no one would cast him in today.
Seeing Taylor struggle on through the Vietnamese jungle after the opening scene is a quick indication of how unprepared he is for combat. Like many wars Americans have fought, it was on the soil of another country they were completely unfamiliar with. We see how this puts them at an immediate disadvantage as they look completely exhausted and depleted even at the start of the day.
When it comes to Vietnam, Taylor makes it clear he is a unique case as he tells everyone he dropped out of college to volunteer and serve in the war. This makes him seem like part of a generation raised to believe fighting in a war is both noble and infinitely patriotic, something to be proud of. Taylor also feels that not only poor kids should be sent to fight instead of the rich, but he soon learns the truths about war, one of which is given to him by King (Keith David) who tells him something which resonates strongly even today: “You got to be rich in the first place to think like that. Everybody know, the poor are always being fucked over by the rich. Always have, always will.”
The other two performances worth noting are given by Willem Dafoe as Sergeant Elias and Tom Berenger as Sergeant Barnes. Both figure prominently in Taylor’s tour of duty, and even he says these two were fighting for his soul. Dafoe is mesmerizing as the idealistic soldier who sees America’s involvement in Vietnam ending badly. The Christ-like pose he gets in, whether its holding a machine gun over his shoulders or as he runs from the Vietnamese soldiers, is no mistake. Elias ends up dying for the sins of his fellow soldiers while doing his best to protect them.
Berenger’s performance as Barnes ranks among his best ever. He succeeds in getting inside the head of someone who has been shot at so many times to where they are forever psychologically altered. Having seen death up close, Barnes acts as if he has surpassed it. In some ways, Berenger doesn’t need those makeup scars to show you how many firefights his character has been in as watching him walk through the jungle, completely unaffected by explosions going off around him as if he were Colonel Kilgore in “Apocalypse Now,” is more than enough proof of this.
Stone makes you feel the blood, sweat, tears and exhaustion these soldiers experience, and it’s all so vivid to where we come out of “Platoon” feeling like war veterans ourselves. It leaves all those other movies which make war seem like fun to utter shame. Coming from a filmmaker who has seen this particular war up close, we cannot deny the authenticity he puts on display.
“Platoon” also captures how quickly people can lose their moral bearings in the face of war. The scene in the village is by far the movie’s most unnerving moment as we watch Taylor and the other soldiers get overcome by their boiling anger and hatred. What’s so horrifying is that while you would like to believe you would have acted differently than they did, there’s no way you can be sure if you haven’t been in combat. The line between soldier and killer gets seriously blurred here, and it’s not hard to understand why.
Before filming began, the cast was treated to an intensive military training course under the tutelage of former Marine Captain Dale Dye who also served in Vietnam. They were made to dig foxholes and subjected to forced marches and nighttime ambushes which utilized explosions. This succeeded in breaking them down, and you can see and feel the weariness in them throughout. It more than adds to the sheer realism we see here.
There’s no victory to be found in “Platoon,” only death and destruction on both sides of the conflict. The movie gets at the truth of war which Danny DeVito talked about in “The War of the Roses” when he said, “There is no winning! There’s only degrees of losing!”
The violence and death portrayed may not seem quite as visceral as it did when the movie first came out. There have been many other war movies since like “Saving Private Ryan” which featured scenes of such brutal violence that no other filmmaker could possibly match. Plus, we all know about the Vietnam War in general and big a mistake it was for America for many years now. Still, “Platoon” is nothing less than powerful as its vision of the craziness and insanity of war is impossible to shake once you have seen it.
The Vietnam War may be a thing of the past, but the lessons we learned from it still need to be taught over and over again. America keeps fighting wars which, whether necessary or not, continually overstay their welcome and leave a lot of people feeling angry and betrayed. Oliver Stone certainly understands that, and he makes “Platoon” into a movie which shows the damage of war and why we can’t just let the past be the past.
On Friday, February 19, 2010, Jason Reitman began his program of movies at New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles. The first double feature of his program was “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “Election,” great movies dealing with high school and teenagers in an intelligent way and which star Matthew Broderick. “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” was one of John Hughes classic films from the 1980’s which everyone has seen at least nine times. Reitman remembered wanting to see it with his dad when it first came out, but his father, Ivan Reitman of “Ghostbusters” fame, was busy shooting “Legal Eagles” and couldn’t get away from the set. They ended up going to the movies later, but instead they watched “Big Trouble in Little China,” John Carpenter’s ode to martial arts movies which was not as successful, but later become a beloved cult film.
Reitman said he considers “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” to be Hughes’ love letter to Chicago. Indeed, Chicago does look very beautiful as shown here. These days, it’s rare to see it without snow covering it. Richard Belzer has a brilliant quote when he played John Munch on “Homicide: Life on the Street,” “Chicago has two seasons, winter and St. Patrick’s Day.”
Reitman saw Ferris Bueller as the guy who knows everyone is dying from a terminal disease. Knowing this, he lived every day as if it were his last. He then went on to say “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” is a movie about people dying, and the last moment of joy anyone has comes at the end of the parade when Broderick is out shaking his bod to The Beatles’ version of “Twist and Shout.” The acclaimed director was serious about this and even said, “If you came out of this movie happy, THEN YOU MISSED THE ENTIRE POINT!”
Before the movie began, Reitman brought out a special guest, Jennifer Grey. She played Jeanie Bueller, Ferris’ largely unpleasant and infinitely resentful little sister. Grey would go on to become a big star when she starred in “Dirty Dancing” opposite the late Patrick Swayze. Reitman said he asked Grey to come just this morning, and she was very gracious to appear at such short notice.
Grey warned Reitman upfront she smoked a lot of pot during the movie’s making, so she doesn’t remember a lot of it. However, during her brief time with Reitman, she did remember quite a bit, so maybe all the smoking helped.
One of the big revelations was that Grey admitted was never really a big fan of Hughes before she got cast. She had just seen “Pretty in Pink” which he wrote the screenplay for but didn’t direct, and she declared she didn’t get it. As a result, Grey went into the audition not really caring if she got the part or not. She didn’t even try to hide her attitude towards Hughes when talking to him about how she didn’t really care for his films. It was this attitude which got her cast as the bitchy little sister of Broderick’s iconic character.
Another big revelation we learned was Hughes and Broderick were always at odds with one another, and the tension between them was always high. Broderick found it very hard acting to the camera, one of the signature devices of this movie. Grey also said Broderick was “very slow” in putting a performance together, and this was certainly the case when he played Ferris. It got to where Hughes was constantly waiting for Broderick to start giving him what he wanted, and there were points where Grey said Hughes leaned over to her and said, “Is he ready now? Is he warmed up? Is he gonna give us ‘Brighton Beach Memoirs?!’”
Still, Grey recalled her experience of making “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” as being “heaven on earth,” and she felt very safe with Hughes as a director to where she never felt self-conscious about anything she did. She admitted she loved every single experience she had making this classic, and she even developed a big crush on Hughes, describing him as being a “Baby Huey.”
Reitman asked how Charlie Sheen got cast as the drug addict who befriends Jeanie Bueller while waiting at the police station. Grey explained she was the one who got Sheen involved as she had just done “Red Dawn” with him. There was actually a lot of improvisation during the police station scene, and Grey said the moment where Jeanie says some people call her Shawna was born out of that.
One of the questions really burning on Reitman’s mind was what it was like for Grey when she worked with “her brother.” Broderick and Grey were actually dating for a time during this movie’s making, and she replied the only time you see her character and Ferris together in the same room is at the very beginning and right near the end.
Before the movie started, Grey finished by saying Hughes did such a great job in capturing the voice of the time and of teenagers in general. She pointed out what we all came to see, that Hughes very much understood the gravitas of being a teenager and of how difficult and frustrating those years can be.
It was great to see Grey come out for this special screening of one of the best and most entertaining movies of the 1980’s. Reitman went on to say we all must be wondering what became of Ferris Bueller after he graduated from high school. There was always talk of a sequel which would show Ferris as a burned-out executive of some corporation, and a day off from this kind of job is always welcome no matter what day of the week it is. What did Reitman think? For that, he said to check out Alexander Payne’s “Election.”
Charlie Sheen is better known these days for his bad reputation than his talents as an actor. His ouster from the CBS show “Two and a Half Men” looked to be the end of him, but he soon bounced back and filmed a plethora of episodes for the FX series “Anger Management.” Still, his bad boy image is impossible for him to shake, and it makes one wonder just how much he is like his character of Ricky Vaughn in “Major League.”
The question of what it was like working with Sheen was brought up when American Cinematheque did a special screening of “Major League” and “Major League II” at the Aero Theatre. Sheen’s role as the Cleveland Indians star pitcher Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn remains one of his best and most memorable roles, and his current troubles in the press can’t take away from our pleasure in watching him. Among the guests at this screening were writer/director David S. Ward, Tom Berenger, and Corbin Bernsen, and each described their memories of working with Sheen.
Ward, who wrote and directed the first two “Major League” movies, described Sheen as being the consummate pro on set and said he showed up every day on time.
“He knows his lines, he gives everything, he very seldom goes up on a line, he’s very generous with the actors and they all love to work with him,” Ward said about Sheen. “I can’t say enough about him.”
Ward even remembered a time while making “Major League II” when Sheen had a scene with David Keith who played the overly cocky Jack Parkman. It was a scene where Sheen was pitching to Keith, and it turns out that Keith had lost his contact lenses and was seeing two baseballs instead of the one being thrown to him.
“I was trying to get a shot of him (Keith) hitting a ball that looked like it got in the air enough to get out of the stadium,” Ward said. “Well he (Keith) was seeing two baseballs coming at him, and Charlie threw him 128 pitches. And I said ‘Charlie let’s stop, we can do this tomorrow, we can do this some other day’ and he said ‘no, no, no let’s do this. I’m warmed up, let’s do this.’ 128 pitches, never complained, and it took us that many for Keith to hit one in the air! That’s the way Charlie was. He gave everything, he loves baseball, he loves to play baseball, he’s a terrific baseball player, and he’s got a great arm and throws hard.”
Berenger, who had previously worked with Sheen in Oliver Stone’s “Platoon,” recalled playing ball with him at Santa Monica High School before “Major League” began filming.
“He threw ten pitches, and out of the ten one was a little outside and nine were right on the corners of the strike zone,” Berenger said. “That’s how much control he had, and he was fast too. We went down and did batting practice with the Savannah Cardinals which was a minor league team at the time, and I warmed up one of the pitchers and he threw 94 miles an hour. And I’m guessing Charlie was about 88-89 miles an hour.”
Bernsen ended up telling this story of when Sheen was working on “Major League II.” One day Sheen found out his hotel room had been robbed, and among the items stolen were his wallet, his Walkman (remember those?) which he always had on him, and his gun.
“Charlie had just flown in one of 15 women who had come in during the shoot. Charlie is Charlie, he’s still professional but Charlie is Charlie,” Bernsen said. “I got pretty close with him and I remember him saying, ‘Fuck! I don’t care about my wallet, I don’t care about my Walkman, they took my fucking gun! Whatever happens, I just don’t want that to get out!’”
“So he and his girlfriend and I walked from the hotel across this walkway because he’s got to find another Walkman to do tomorrow’s shoot with because he likes to have his music,” Bernsen continued. “And he’s gonna go into the appliance store to buy a Walkman and always going, ‘I don’t care about the money and I don’t care about the Walkman. Don’t mention the fucking gun!’ And we walk into this department store into the appliance section back in the old days where they had a hundred TVs on the same station. The news was on and as we entered the department, ‘Breaking news: Charlie Sheen was robbed while in town making ‘Major League.’ Among the things stolen was his gun…’ And I just saw him freeze.”
Whether this adds or takes away from all those crazy stories we’ve heard about Charlie Sheen over the years, it also shows him to be far more professional than we give him credit for in general. Sheen’s performance in the “Major League” movies was no fluke, and if Ward and company are serious about making another movie in the future with these characters, they would be incredibly foolish to not include Sheen in it.
The 1989 sports comedy “Major League” got a special screening at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, and joining moderator and American Cinematheque program director Grant Moninger for a Q&A was the movie’s writer and director David S. Ward and producer Chris Chesser. This screening brought out many excited fans who consider “Major League” to be the best baseball movie ever made.
Moninger started off by saying that after watching “Major League,” it seemed like the most fun film to make as everyone got to film and play baseball. When he asked Ward what the making of the movie was like, we were surprised by his answer.
“It was one of the most difficult movies to make that I ever had been associated with,” said Ward. “When we started we had one of the hottest summers in 75 years in Milwaukee where we shot the movie. We started out with six weeks of night shooting because we had to work around the (Milwaukee) Brewers schedule at the time, and staying up all night for six weeks just kills you. It was an independent movie at the time, and we didn’t have a lot of money and we didn’t have a lot of anything.”
Regardless of the production difficulties, however, Ward said he did have a great time making “Major League” because of the guys, and he even said that Rene Russo, who played Berenger’s ex-girlfriend Lynn Wells, was one of the guys as well. Ward described the cast as being magnificent and said everybody pulled together to make this movie work. It was just the physical difficulty of making it was hard, and it was something the cast and crew hadn’t planned on dealing with.
Ward went on to describe the “red tag” scene in the locker room in which the players discover whether or not they have been cut from the team. This scene ended up being shot in the basement of a high school which had no windows, and it was already 95 degrees when they began shooting there at four in the morning.
“We had two jerseys for each player, and I remember Tom (Berenger) doing a take and he would sweat through his jersey because it was so hot,” Ward said. “We would take his jersey and give him the other one, and we’d blow dry the one that was sweated through with a hair dryer. Well, it dried it, but it also made it hot. When he sweated through the other one, he had to put on the dry one which was hot!”
When it came to casting “Major League,” Ward said he would only cast people who could play baseball:
“I had actors come in and tell me they played Triple-A ball for the Cardinals, and Chris (Chesser) and I would take them outside and we’d play catch with them, and the Triple-A guy couldn’t throw the ball 15 feet; he never played baseball in his life! People will say anything to get the part, so we just took them outside and we tested them out.”
The cast ended up having two weeks of training before filming began with Steve Yeager who was a former Major League baseball player himself. This was about getting everybody in shape not only to play baseball but also to do basic physical conditioning.
“If you’re not used to playing baseball every day, you don’t realize how many quick starts and stops there are and you can pull muscles and hamstrings,” Ward said. “If an actor gets injured, you can’t shoot with them for a while and your schedule gets screwed up. So, everybody got in shape both physically and baseball-wise and that was a big help.”
Players from other baseball teams were also cast such as Peter Vuckovich who was an All-Star pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers and Cy Young award winner. Vuckovich played the New York Yankees’ first baseman Haywood, and Chesser remarked he was actually asked to read for the part of the Yankee reliever nicknamed “The Duke.” However, he and Davis found Vuckovich to be “so ugly and so menacing” to where it made more sense to cast him as the player who insults Berenger and hits home runs off of Charlie Sheen. But Chesser also said although Vuckovich looked like he could hit a baseball out of the field, he actually “never hit the ball out of the infield” and never hit a single home run in his entire career.
When it came time to film the climatic game where the Cleveland Indians play against the New York Yankees for the division title, Ward said he and Chesser promoted a night at the stadium to get extras, and 27,000 people showed up. Looking back, the evening was an amazing experience for him and the cast as they had so many cheering people to work with.
“We taught them how to sing ‘Wild Thing,’” said Ward. “We had cameras roaming around all night just picking up people. The girls who came out and danced on the dugout, they just did it! We didn’t ask them to do it, they just got out and did it! I just looked at that and said, thank God!”
Ward added there was a group of about 350 people who came out every night, and he even remembered a couple who had tickets to the Summer Olympics in Seoul that same year. The couple debated whether to travel to Seoul like they planned or stay for the last two days of the movie’s shooting. Ward encouraged them to go to the Olympics, but they ended up staying.
Moninger also asked about the late James Gammon who played head coach Lou Brown, and the mention of the actor’s name got a big applause from the audience. Ward got a bit choked up when talking about Gammon and said he never had any other actor in mind for Lou other than him.
“I was just thrilled to get him, “ Ward said. “He was everything I thought he would be. He’s a great gentleman and a wonderful man. Nothing bothered him. He was a rock of Gibraltar in every way. I remember going to his memorial service and one of the things that was really moving to me is they had his jersey from ‘Major League’ hanging up. He gave so many great performances, and yet the one everyone identifies him with is this one.”
When it came to writing “Major League,” Ward said he was inspired to write about Cleveland as he grew up there. The year this screening took place, every major sports team in Cleveland was pathetic, and Ward remembered it being pretty much the same way when he was deciding on what movie he was going to write next.
“I was thinking that probably the only way the Cleveland Indians would win anything in my lifetime is if I wrote a movie with them winning,” Ward said. “So what kept me going was I just didn’t want to be another Cleveland failure.”
One big question the audience had was why “Major League,” which takes place in Cleveland, wasn’t actually shot there. Ward responded he knew he was going to get into trouble for that.
“The reason we shot it in Milwaukee was that Cleveland is a big union town, and we couldn’t do it independently there,” Ward said. “The other thing was that they hadn’t built the Jacobs Field (which is now the Progressive Field) ballpark yet, so the team was still playing at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Also, the Browns were playing pre-season games there, and the field had football lines on it. That wouldn’t have looked very good, so it wasn’t feasible to shoot there.”
Another audience member brought up Bob Uecker who played Indians sportscaster Harry Doyle in “Major League” and asked how much of his dialogue was written and improvised. Ward replied he wrote the character of Harry and his lines, but when Uecker was cast he discovered just how incredibly funny he was. What also helped Ward was that Uecker knew a lot of things about baseball players he didn’t, and he felt he would have been an idiot not to let Uecker improvise if he wanted to. When it came to Uecker’s famous line of “just a bit outside,” Ward said he wrote it, but it didn’t sound anywhere as funny in his head as when Uecker said it.
Everyone at the Aero Theatre had a wonderful time hearing all these stories about how “Major League” came to be. After so many years, this movie really holds up as it is hilarious and has a lot of heart. While many of the actors other than Berenger and Bernsen were not able to make it to this screening, we did get a surprise guest with Jo-bu, Pedro Cerrano’s voodoo god doll. Ward and company celebrated the appearance with Jo-bu with some rum, the same kind Eddie Harris (played by Chelcie Ross) stole and took a drink from when nobody was watching. You all remember what happened to him, right?
The Ultimate Rabbit 