Lights! Camera! : Play Ball!

Question: When is a baseball movie not a baseball movie?

Answer: As soon as it hits the movie screen.

Orion’s just opening “Bull Durham” would appear to be the harbinger of a swinging season of baseball pics. Several others baseball movies are waiting in the on-deck circle--but they’re not baseball movies. Say what?

Well, there’s a tradition among film makers to not want to “categorize” their movies. For example:

-- “I’m tired of saying, ‘This isn’t about baseball,’ ” said Mark Burg, co-producer of “Bull Durham.” “So, I say it’s the best baseball picture ever made. You might call it a baseball romance that touches all the emotional bases.”

-- Producer Thom Mount (co-produced “Bull” and in private life co-owns the minor league Durham (N.C.) Bulls), called his “Stealing Home” for Warners, opening in August, “a metaphor of life. The act of stealing home (in baseball) becomes a symbol of confidence lost for the lead character (played by Mark Harmon). It’s about facing becoming an adult.” It has two brief baseball sequences, Mount added.

-- Vista’s “Trading Hearts,” now playing in various regions, stars Raul Julia as a pitcher who’s cut from spring training and learns there are other things in life. So it’s “not about baseball,” said producer Herb Jaffe. “It’s a romance. There’s some baseball but it’s the backdrop.”

-- “Shoeless Joe” writer-director Phil Alden Robinson said baseball “is an element no more important to the story than farming or literature. We have maybe five minutes of it.” The story has a farmer (it’s filming in Dubuque, Iowa, with “Bull Durham” star Kevin Costner) visited by a spirit who instructs him to build a baseball field. “It’s kind of a mystery about someone who doesn’t know what he’s searching for until he finds it.”

-- Anson Williams, who’ll direct Orion’s “The Scout” with Rodney Dangerfield in September, insists the film is “very funny, very ‘Rocky’ and has a lot of heart. I’d say it’s about 30% baseball.”

-- John Sayles’ “Eight Men Out,” about the 1919 Black Sox scandal, is described by co-producer Barbara Boyle as “a baseball picture and much more. It’s about morality and corruption. We’re thinking of using the ad line: ‘When the national past time became a national scandal.’ ” Also from Orion, it opens in August.

-- Well, there may be one “baseball movie”: Chris Chesser, co-producer of “Major League,” filming next month with Tom Berenger and Charlie Sheen, noted that his film--the saga of a perennially losing team that’s suddenly galvanized into champions--was turned down by everyone five years ago because it was “a baseball movie.” Now, people are warning that “everyone’s doing baseball pictures.”

Stated Chesser proudly: “We’re unabashedly about baseball!”

And: And there are other non-baseball projects in the works, like, we hear, a bio-movie called “Branch,” on legendary Dodger General Manager Branch Rickey, who brought Jackie Robinson to the majors, breaking the so-called color line.