42: The True Story of an American Legend

Boseman played Floyd Little.

 

IS the movie through the '47 season or is it a complete bio pic through his death? or something in between? Lots of stories to tell on the Dodgers between 47 and 57. Boys of Summer would make a helluva HBO series.

 

Wesley Morris also was lukewarm on it. Spike Lee's with Denzel Washington would've been intriguing.

 

Roughly, the film's scope starts with Jackie in the Army and Negro Leagues in '45 and ends with the Dodgers clinching the pennant in '47.

 

And for all the white people "worried" about this — seriously, this is a fucking epidemic on Facebook this week — I can assure you that no Jay-Z song appears in the actual movie and there is no uppity "bat flip" in the movie. So you can sleep well tonight.

 

Spike Lee's proposed biopic has nothing to do with this one. Helgeland's screenplay is a completely separate project and has only been in the works for about three years.

When I interviewed him, he told me this movie was made about "as quick as any movie can be made" from start to finish, in terms of getting everything approved, casted, shot, edited, etc.

 

Interesting though that some of the trailers were cut to make it seem as if those exact things are in the movie.

 

I'm sure they were until the movie showed to premiere or sneak preview audiences and they got the negative feedback. I've done articles about movies and gone to those previews, and then the final version doesn't have some of the scenes. It all happens in a pretty short timeframe.

 

Well, the filmmakers don't have anything to do with the promotion side of it. The trailers come from the studio. I think the Jay-Z trailer was produced simply for added buzz — which has worked — and more cynically, to help attract a specific audience to come see this movie.

They may well have had that bat scene and Jay-Z music in the original cut, but the screening I went to was on March 20 and included nothing like that. So if they did take it out in post-production because of negative feedback, they took it out at least a month ago.

 

A Jay-Z song, "Ain't No Love (Heart of the City)," was used heavily to promote American Gangster, which didn't feature any rap on its actual in-movie soundtrack. (I think they may have used the Jay-Z song for the closing credits, though.)

 

Saw it this morning and was quite disappointed. I thought it was chock full of cliche, of what you'd expect the first African American in baseball to deal with and not much else. No new information, no new story, just the same story that's been told for years. The scene with Alan Tudyk as Ben Chapman was really, for me, the only compelling scene of the entire film because you got the real idea, whether it was embellished or not, about what Robinson had to deal with.

I'd tell anyone who doesn't know anything about the story to go see it, otherwise it's a waste of time, I think.

 

I saw Red Tails and it made me think that films documenting historical black people almost have to be hagiographic because you don't know when the "next one" will be made. Truman Capote had two films made about him within a couple of years, Kennedy has had more than a handful.