The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos
Steve YaegerAs of today, “Eephus” is the best baseball movie. See it on the big screen while you can. #movies #EephusMovie https://youtu.be/7g-bxQwmU0s?si=3cqkweee5tzrF_VW
EEPHUS | Official Trailer | In Select Theaters March 7
John R Smith JnrOur fearless leader on #EephusMovie - Carson Lund posted an update on our #kickstarter.
It’s a quick read and a fantastic summary of an October well spent.
#SupportIndieFilm
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/eephusfilm/eephus/posts/3488661
Update 7: Rolling into the Postseason · EEPHUS
Well....[fumbles with mic for an extended beat]....the guys played hard. We had some incredible victories and some tough losses, but we gotta put all that behind us now. All that matters is the postseason. It's a great group of guys and I feel good about our chances to close this one...[trails off mid-sentence and storms off the podium in a daze, a trail of empty Narragansett cans left in the wake]. That's right, I feel like the manager at the end of a season, fielding everyone's inquiries with only a deer-in-the-headlights gaze and a stream of platitudes. We wrapped principal photography on Eephus on November 5th, which in a remarkable bit of serendipity coincided with the curtain call on the MLB season. Game 6 played in the background at our wrap party, but no one cared much to look over at it. We had a movie in the can. Celebration was priority #1. Here's where the baseball metaphor stops dead: when you wrap a movie, unlike when you wrap 162 games and gear up for the postseason, the phase you enter in its immediate wake is completely different. A period of intense focus and communal solidarity is followed by silence and solitude, the dim glow of an editing monitor and the cold comfort of a metal box housing the 1s and 0s of an entire month's work. You trade one reality for another, and the adjustment period can be startling. None of this should be mistaken for complaining, only as partial justification for my delay in updating my lovely backers and preliminary context for those who weren't able to witness the shoot firsthand as to how difficult it can be to summarize the magic of our production. I've always been in awe of the kind of filmmaking atmosphere portrayed on Dazed and Confused (1993) behind-the-scenes supplements: basically, a raucous summer camp where a motley crew of cast members learns to love one another while living, working, smoking, drinking and hooking up together. Trade the hooking up for marathon poker sessions and communal meals and Eephus essentially created that same chemistry. It was baseball fantasy camp for a group of men who by all accounts relished the escape from normal life, and real-deal lifelong friendships were forged. By week two, the natural chemistry I'd labored to achieve on screen no longer had to be mimed. We had created two rec baseball teams whose concentrated camaraderie created a sense of decades of familiarity and friendship. Some said it was The Sandlot (1993) for adults. On the crew side, things were equally convivial, though very little of that was from the ground up. I was fortunate to assemble a squad of my closest friends to work on this film. We all lived together half a mile from Soldiers Field, and long days on set were followed by long nights of carousing (when call time wasn't at the crack of dawn). Nearly every diner in the Blackstone Valley of southern Massachusetts and northern Rhode Island was patronized at one point or another (shoutout to Miss Worcester), and ditto for every bar and restaurant (Grille on Main 4 Lyfe). There was even some pickup baseball on an off day. I'm not sure scores were kept as diligently as they are in Eephus, but suffice to say there were two games: one with live, rapidly degenerating arms and one with short toss from behind an L-screen. There were more hits in the second game. Obviously, it wasn't all horsing around. Somewhere along the way we shot approximately 50 hours worth of footage over 24 days of shooting. To the best of our abilities, we kept our cast and crew well rested, well fed and healthy. It's all rather miraculous that it went as smoothly as it did, and that we got a movie in the can amid the unpredictable autumn weather of New England with a cast of dozens for a fraction of a fraction of what a movie like this should have cost. And part of our gratitude must go towards you, altruistic Kickstarter backer, for believing in this ambitious project from the jump. It has been three years in the making, and our crowdfunding campaign was such an integral step in the project's realization and its public profile. Give yourself a pat on the back. Now it's on to the postseason (edit, sound mix, color correction, VFX work), where we'll take it one game at a time, and we promise to manage our bullpen (budget) wisely and not throw any scrubs (bad footage) in the field. The movie's going to be very funny (kudos to the cast and to Nate Fisher and Michael Basta, my co-writers), very pretty (kudos to Greg Tango, our DP), and very interminably long (kudos to me, the stubbornly uncompromising editor). Just kidding on that last one; it will be just the right length by the time it gets to your eyes. Until then, I hope I can tide you over with a few production stills, straight out of the camera and ungraded. Needless to say, there is a LOT more to come.