My, how times have changed. When A League of Their Own came out in 1992, it did so without much reference to “coming out.” While the vastly popular film did bring much deserved yet overlooked attention to the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, one of the contemporary complaints is that it did not address the lesbian issue. (The Apple series — which saw its second season recently cancelled — did take that on, as well as the exclusion of African-Americans from the League).
Regardless, ALOTO was a lot of fun for a lot of people. Erin Carlson just published a book titled with perhaps the signature pull-quote: No Crying in Baseball, an inside look at the making of the film. It’s fun to speculate how it would have been with different actors in the lead roles. Debra Winger as Dottie Henson? Jim Belushi as Jimmy Dugan? Did director Penny Marshall, still glowing from Big, favor actors who could play ball or athletes who could act?
While I thoroughly enjoyed the work, I could understand how some fans of the film might not be so enamored; not everyone want’s to know how the sausage is made. No Crying looks at the often tenuous relationships between the actors, as well as the difficulties the crew had dealing with the constantly-anxious Marshall. You want to think that everything was a perfect fit, that everyone got along, but, like life in general, that’s not the way things work.
Nevertheless, as Carlson points out ALOTO paved No Crying sheds light on this important movie and belongs in the library of both film and baseball lovers.
Here’s the audio version.
is available on Amazon.com,
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