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Features
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Fairweather Fan Fallon
When exactly did the luck of the Boston Red Sox change? Maybe it had something to do with the casting of a lifelong New York Yankees supporter in Fever Pitch.
Monday, April 11, 2005
By Todd Gilchrist
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Jeffrey Mayer/Wireimage.com
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Fallon at recent Kids' Choice Awards
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In marked contrast to today’s presentation of World Series championship rings to the Boston Red Sox before their 8-1 home opener victory over the New York Yankees, the team was 10 ½ games out of first place last year when the Fever Pitch team first rolled into to town. And like most everyone else, leading man Jimmy Fallon was convinced he was going to be the latest tasked with holding true to the lore of ‘The Curse.’
“Of course in the script, we didn’t have it that the Red Sox would win the World Series,” recalls Fallon during a recent interview with FilmStew. “If we did, that would be like bullsh*t. They’ve lost for 86 years, all of sudden they’re gonna win? This really is a comedy.”
So convinced were 20th Century Fox and the Farrelly brothers that the Red Sox would eventually lose, they almost found themselves rudderless when the team began winning. “As we started shooting, they started winning,” Fallon explains. “And we were like, what do we do if they win? And Boston fans were like, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll lose, pally. I’ve done this for too long - we’re not going to win.’”
But of course they did, and before long – like a manager summoning their best reliever from the bullpen – the filmmakers put in a panicked call to screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. The pair, who first worked together on the TV shows Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley, have since become known for polishing facile comedy, everything from Splash to A League of Their Own to the recent animated hit Robots.
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Brothers Bobby (l) and Peter (r)
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Fallon says he, Barrymore and the rest of their cohorts quickly began improvising material at the playoff games, including one particularly quick change to squeeze into seats for some of the film’s final scenes. “[At] the St. Louis game, we arrived about the first inning,” he says. “We got changed in Toronto into our wardrobe. Drew put my makeup on in the airplane; I didn’t do hers.”
“We got there and [co-director] Pete [Farrelly] was like, ‘Just act like you’re two of the biggest Boston Red Sox fans and what you’ve waited for you whole lives just may happen,’” he continues, shaking his head. “How would you react? It was insane.”
The beauty of filming on location is that the atmosphere is provided by real, everyday folks rather than slightly bored and/or slightly hungry members of the Screen Actors Guild. Sure enough, as the stakes of the 2004 Red Sox season kept getting higher, Fallon was continually reminded of the importance of his mission.
‘Better not f*ck this f*cking movie up, f*ckin do us justice,’ was pretty much the way the advice went. Still, Fallon says that overall all, the Boston fans couldn’t have been nicer about the idea of a Yankees fan and native New Yorker being hired to play one of their own. That is, except for those times when they insisted on staring straight into the cameras.
“Pete and Bobby [Farrelly] would say, ‘Look, if you look in the camera, you’re not going to be in the movie,’” says Fallon. “And they were like, ‘Yeah, yeah whatever. C’mon Manny. Let’s go.’”
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Dimitrios Kambouris/Wireimage.com
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Barrymore on TRL
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“The way we did it was real guerilla filmmaking,” he continues. “Pete and Bobby were like, ‘We do not want to disrupt the game at all in any way; we do not want to have anyone blame us for losing the game.’ So we’d get direction by the beer and hot dog stand and then we’d run in like guerilla filmmaking and sit down and they’d film us saying really great game or just cheering or singing “Sweet Caroline.””
With a choice of endings for Fever Pitch seemingly predicated by the baseball gods, it begs the question as to what was the original ending for the movie. Fallon says that the filmmakers intended to stay true to the novel by Nick Hornby, which was previously made into a British film in 1997.
“We go to outer space; I’m happy they changed that,” Fallon jokes. “No, the original ending is basically like the Nick Hornby book, which is a great book, but it’s really sad. It’s more of a memoir of how fans really are; it’s a love letter to the fans, which is why we picked the Red Sox; because they lose.”
“Man, you hang in Boston for a week and you get it,” he concludes. “It’s really like it’s beyond baseball when you’re in Boston. It’s not even about baseball. It’s deeper. It’s almost like a religion. It’s family, really. It’s crazy. I get emotional thinking about it.”
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