Over its 97 years, the Music Box Theatre — which opened the year the Cubs lost the 1929 World Series to the Philadelphia Athletics — has shown plenty of baseball movies, from “Pride of the Yankees” to “Field of Dreams” to “A League of Their Own.”
Now, the Music Box is presenting its first-ever baseball film series, eight movies in all, with some enticing guests with stories to tell, and a few intriguing wrinkles in the lineup to ensure audiences aren’t just getting another look at the stuff they already know they love.
“Play Ball! A Baseball Series” is what they’re calling it, opening Saturday with an 11:30 a.m. screening of the 1976 charmer “Bingo Long and the Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings.” Set in 1939, based on 1973 William Brashler yarn rooted in Negro League lore, the ensemble comedy features a cast headed by Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones (MVP) and Richard Pryor.
Other titles in the March film series include “Bull Durham” (11:30 a.m. March 8-9), as much about love and lust as it is about balls and strikes), and “A League of Their Own” (11:30 a.m. March 15-16). “Eight Men Out” (11:30 a.m. March 23) closes the series and it’s a natural, dealing as it does with the 1919 Black Sox scandal, with a cast featuring Chicago-trained ringers John Cusack and John Mahoney alongside Bill Irwin, D.B. Sweeney, David Strathairn and others.
There’s also a brand new baseball movie, amid the familiars, and it’s running 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. “Eephus” (7 p.m. March 21), a bittersweet comedy named after the high, loping pitch rarely thrown and just as rarely hit, tells a nostalgic story about the final game played in a New England town about to lose their ballfield (Soldier’s Field, it’s called.)
“I’ve been pitching this series since 2021,” says Music Box front-of-house manager and programmer Jeremy Marder, “but they couldn’t figure out how to get it on the schedule.” Then Music Box Films, the acquisitions and distribution company under the same ownership as the theater, caught the world premiere of “Eephus” in the director’s fortnight series at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.
They liked it, they bought it, and suddenly that idea for a baseball mini-fest at the Music Box made sense. Marder and his Music Box cohort Rebecca Lyon, repertory programmer and assistant technical director, went to work on curating “Play Ball!” And “Eephus” premieres locally as part of it, with director Carson Lund introducing his cinematic valentine to diamonds in the rough.
The idea, Marder says, is to “celebrate the baseball movie in all its forms, with something to suit everybody’s taste and personalities.” Meaning, for fans of backroom managerial crises and budget-minded roster metrics, there’s the improbably excellent “Moneyball” (7 p.m. March 18).
For those whose love of the game is large enough to encompass a provocative examination of more than one kind of celebrity, “Eephus” director Lund will introduce a film he loves, “American Dreams: Lost and Found” (11:30 a.m. March 22). It’s a docu-essay by James Bennin that blends personal history — the filmmaker once pitched batting practice to the 1962 Milwaukee Braves — with more sinister all-American traditions.
This Saturday, late-show appearance of the feverish mid-’90s thriller “The Fan” (Wesley Snipes, stalked by superfan and knife aficionado Robert De Niro) takes the midnight-movie slot and, says programmer Marder, provides a handy bookend to the less threatening “Bull Durham.”
“It’s certainly one of the more ridiculous movies on the list,” he acknowledges. “But baseball is also about obsessive fandom. And with De Niro in ‘The Fan’ and Susan Sarandon in ‘Bull Durham,’ we have two very different examples.”
It wasn’t easy, Marder says, to start with a massive list of baseball movies (more than 50) and then whittle it down to eight. Plenty more remain on deck for an encore series, if business warrants it. If that’s the case, he says, and if the rights can be arranged, Chicago baseball fans can expect a midnight movie to remember: the manga-dervied 2003 Japanese splatterfest “Battlefield Baseball.” In brief, “it’s about a baseball league where players really go to extremes to win, including committing murder,” says Marder.
Then, without being entirely clear whether he means playing the movie or cosplaying it, he adds: “I’d love to play that in the future.”
March 1-23 at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.; musicboxtheatre.com
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.