'Long Gone,' the HBO baseball flick: WTF is the deal?

Same here. Found it cheap at Best Buy. Watched it once just to see how it held up and I doubt I'll ever look at the set again.

 

Doesn't hold up great, but still laugh at some of it. Bubba and Jethro were the best characters among players, Coach DiNardo was pretty good too. Jethro reminded me a little of an out of shape Reggie Theus.

 

"Think wicker!"

 

YouTube alert: a full copy, pretty good video quality, is up. A few of the soundtrack songs have been muted out, though.

 

It might be blasphemy, but I honestly thought Virginia Madsen was better in that role than Susan Sarandon was in hers.

 

Thank you, Starman. I hadn't checked in a while. Looks like the video was posted in March.

 

She was good, but I couldn't buy her as 20 years old. 23-24, maybe.

(I always thought SS as Annie Savoy was a bit over-the-top, too.)

Stud was supposed to be close to 40, so the exact age difference wasn't that important. Although theoretically it might have been important to keep her under 21 so theoretically Stud could be on the hook for CDM charges.

Maybe this copy is edited differently than the way I remember it, but I seem to remember originally they leaned on Stud a lot harder with their blackmail threats. Wasn't the running dollar-a-game bet he had going with the "Col. Sanders" dude supposed to be a big deal in threatening to have him banned if he didn't go along with the plan?

 

That really is odd with the music muted. Maybe the issues with the music copyrights are why it's so hard to find on DVD or online.

 

Watching it for the first time on a 40-inch HDTV screen, it did hit me what always kind of (subconsciously) bugged me about "Long Gone" -- the ballparks were way too clean, too bright, for Class D ball in the Deep South in the 1950s. The scoreboards were way too "digital" looking and the grass looked too cleanly manicured -- in several long shots it looked like they were playing on turf.

My dad had covered some Class C minor league games in the early Fifties, and he said the parks at that level were more like county-fair carnival wooden grandstands from the late-60s/early 70s when I was a teenager -- dingy, dusty, smoky, gritty, grungy, peanut shells and cigar butts all over the place. Not really flat-out dirty, but definitely weathered and worn with a lot of peeling paint. The grass and grounds would have been a lot shaggier too -- Class D teams didn't mow the fields every day like MLB teams do now. They'd get mowed once or twice a month if you were lucky.

And the lights. Even in MLB games in the early Sixties, brilliant lighting was by no means universal. Games at the Polo Grounds, especially in the Mets years (and some other older parks), were notorious for zones of gloom in the outfield where the lights didn't cover. These were in the days long before the teevee networks sent out decrees on how much candlepower they wanted for games. Class D games in 1957 would have been like playing with Coleman lanterns.

Oh yeah, the cars too. They did go to a lot of trouble to get a lot of vintage Fifties cars, and they look great -- the problem is, too great. Every single car looks sparkly and shiny like it just rolled out of a showroom (which, of course, most of them did). In the Florida-Alabama League it's a good bet they'd mostly have a coating of red-clay dust and mud on the fenders.

But those are just minor quibbles -- the HBO budget probably didn't allow a lot of special modifications to "age" the parks and cars. Other than that, the movie was a lot of fun, and still is. Hopefully at some point HBO de-mothballs it and rolls it out on the main channels.

 

I'd guess they muted some of the more recognizable songs to evade automated copyright search programs which flag copyright violators (which they are kinda doing anyway, of course).