{"id":622599,"date":"2026-03-14T00:52:16","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T00:52:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/622599\/"},"modified":"2026-03-14T00:52:16","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T00:52:16","slug":"twinkietown-movie-night-42-twinkie-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/622599\/","title":{"rendered":"TwinkieTown Movie Night: 42 | Twinkie Town"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"LOS<\/a><\/p>\n

LOS ANGELES, CA – APRIL 09: Actor Chadwick Boseman arrives at the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures\u2019 and Legendary Pictures\u2019 \u201c42\u201d at the Chinese Theatre on April 9, 2013 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter\/Getty Images) Getty Images<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s your link for the movie<\/a>! It\u2019s from a Strange Site, but most internet security experts consider it pretty safe (for streaming; I wouldn\u2019t try downloading). It has no commercials, so no sync issues! Sync issues are a pain on Movie Nights! Start the show at 7:30!<\/p>\n

The idea of doing a newer, franker movie version of Jackie Robinson\u2019s story began with Rachel Robinson, Jackie\u2019s widow. She\u2019d wanted there to be a new version since the early 80\u2019s.<\/p>\n

In the early 90s, sportswriter Mike Downey and his friend, journalist Don Pepper, wrote a well-regarded screenplay about iconic boxer Joe Louis. It didn\u2019t get made, but Rachel Robinson got ahold of the script and liked it. Downey\/Pepper were hired<\/a> by Lorimar Pictures to write a new Jackie Robinson movie. But there were \u201ccreative differences\u201d; Rachel Robinson wanted the script to have more of Jackie\u2019s post-MLB life, the producers didn\u2019t. The project collapsed.<\/p>\n

Next up, veteran director Spike Lee got involved, with Rachel Robinson\u2019s blessing. He wrote his own script \u2014 and made it public<\/a> during COVID for baseball\/movie fans to enjoy. It\u2019s not public anymore, the links to the script are dead now. But I read it, and I thought it was quite good. It did cover more of Robinson\u2019s life beyond baseball, like his testimony before the McCarthyite House Un-American Activities Committee about singer Paul Robeson. (Robinson was mildly critical of Robeson, and later wished he\u2019d stood up for Robeson more.)<\/p>\n

Yet Lee wanted Denzel Washington, Washington thought he was too old, there were problems getting financing, and the project collapsed.<\/p>\n

There was a early-2000s attempt by Robert Redford to get a project together, with Redford to play Branch Rickey. That fell through.<\/p>\n

And so finally, the movie got made in 2013, with Rachel Robinson\u2019s permission again, but leaving out the stuff after baseball that she had wanted. With Brian Hegeland writing\/directing. Hegeland wrote the script for L.A. Confidential<\/a>, which is a pretty overrated movie, and the script for The Postman, which wasn\u2019t overrated at all; everyone knew it stunk. That guy got to make the new Jackie Robinson movie.<\/p>\n

I remember this being\u2026 alright. Not great, but alright. With a terrific performance by the late Chadwick Boseman as Robinson. Boseman was also excellent in 2017\u2019s Marshall, about a case Thurgood Marshall defended in the early 1940s. And incredibly powerful in a Netflix version of August Wilson\u2019s Ma Rainey\u2019s Black Bottom. A beautifully gifted actor; gone far too soon, at only age 43.<\/p>\n

At the mothership, Rob Neyer mentioned<\/a> some of the small details which this movie got wrong about Robinson\u2019s life\/career. At ESPN, Howard Bryant wrote about<\/a> the movie from a Black writer\/historian\u2019s perspective; he thought \u201cthe film\u2019s conventions were predictable and unnecessary, intellectually lazy, and showed little regard for baseball\u2019s African-American history.\u201d (Bryant recently published a book, Kings and Pawns<\/a>, on the Robinson\/Robeson connection; I just requested it from the library. I wrote a little about Robeson when we had the original The Jackie Robinson Story<\/a> for our first Movie Night.)<\/p>\n

What I found interesting about the making of this one is how Hegeland was inspired<\/a> by seeing Robinson\u2019s picture on a billboard reading \u201cCharacter: Pass it On.\u201d Hegeland had been waffling about making the movie, but that billboard made up his mind.<\/p>\n

Remember when those \u201cPass it On\u201d billboards were everywhere? Encouraging everyone to be nice, and be inspired by the great accomplishments of brave souls? I remember them. And I remember being suspicious that the people behind them had some \u201cbe nice but never tax the rich\u201d agenda. (The people funding the billboards, not the people featured in the pictures, many of whom were terrific.)<\/p>\n

Guess what? The people behind them had a total \u201cbe nice but never tax the rich\u201d agenda.\u201d And \u201cglobal warming is fake,\u201d and \u201cpublic schools are rotten,\u201d and a whole lot worse<\/a>. Which makes me feel bad for many of the great individuals in those billboards. They are cool people. The money behind the billboards ain\u2019t. And THAT\u2019S what inspired (not usually very good) writer Brian Hegeland to make this movie?<\/p>\n

With Chadwick Boseman, Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey, Nicole Beharie as Rachel Robinson, Andr\u00e9 Holland as Pittsburgh Courier writer Wendell Smith, Alan Tudyk as the odious Ben Chapman, plus a host of good actors in smaller roles; Hamish Linklater, James Pickens Jr., and Benched<\/a>\u2019s John C. McGinley, among many others.<\/p>\n

(Oh, and incidentally, Ford on his<\/a> baseball background: \u201cI played about one and a half games of Little League. The whole atmosphere of anxious parents and more anxious children was too much for me. We, as a family, never went back.\u201d That was in the 1950s! It\u2019s much worse now<\/a>!)<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s your link again for the movie<\/a>! Start the show at 7:30!<\/p>\n

And, next week, our final Movie Night of the spring: Field of Dreams (1989)<\/p>\n

I might be outta town next week, but I can trust all y\u2019all to behave nicely to each other during that feelgood classic, right? You\u2019re all nice people. Most of ya. Free on the Strange Site.<\/p>\n

No more time for suggestions this year… but, who knows, maybe we\u2019ll give it a go next year, too? In any case, show starts at 7:30!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LOS ANGELES, CA – APRIL 09: Actor Chadwick Boseman arrives at the premiere of Warner Bros. Pictures\u2019 and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":622600,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2388],"tags":[5,822,60,80253,3190,4,148,80254],"class_list":{"0":"post-622599","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-minnesota-twins","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-minnesota","10":"tag-minnesota-twins","11":"tag-minnesota-twins-discussion","12":"tag-minnesotatwins","13":"tag-mlb","14":"tag-twins","15":"tag-twins-book-club"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116224797878566329","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=622599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622599\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/622600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=622599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=622599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=622599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}