SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Late afternoon falls on Soldiers Field, in a small New England town in the mid-1990s, and the middle-aged players of rec league teams called the Riverdogs and Adler's Paint start to fill the dugouts as the town bell tolls.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "EEPHUS")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Hey. What's a young gun like that going to do after this?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) After what?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) After this goes the way of the Hindenburg.
(SOUNDBITE OF TOWN BELL TOLLING)
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Hell. What are these guys going to do?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) I don't know.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) I just don't have the energy for all that, you know? Looking up all the movies, then driving to all the theaters.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) Yeah. I'm into reading books.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As character) Oh, I just got a book that doesn't have any pictures.
SIMON: That bell tolls for them. The ballpark in which they play will soon be leveled to build a school. It's their last game. "Eephus" is the debut film from Carson Lund, who joins us now from our studios in New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
CARSON LUND: Thank you for having me.
SIMON: And we ought to explain that title. "Eephus" is a looping, off-speed pitch, isn't it?
LUND: That's right. It's sort of an endangered species, actually, within the sport. It's thrown very rarely nowadays, but it was invented by Rip Sewell but then thrown by Bill "Spaceman" Lee in the 1970s for the Red Sox, and he makes an appearance in the film.
SIMON: Yep. He's got quite a cameo. We'll talk about it. I gather you play recreational baseball yourself.
LUND: I do. Yeah. I played very competitively when I was younger. And I actually left the sport in high school and returned to it as an adult when I moved out west and could play kind of all year round. So I joined a rec league, and I felt that the tone of the game really had shifted for me, and it became so much more about, like, sharing a pastime with like-minded people, connecting back to childhood joy and having this sort of, like, refuge outside of the daily work week. So I felt like I wanted to make a film about that kind of community that I hadn't witnessed in a lot of other places in life.
SIMON: Film takes place on the field into the dark, and we don't - except for a half sentence here and there - learn a lot about the lives of the people off of the field. And is that the point, the lives they have on the field?
LUND: Yeah. I think you create a version of yourself when you play a game like this or really have any sort of third space - a place where you get together with people and pursue a passion, and there's no money on the line. It's just about, you know, pursuing that activity, that hobby or that ritual. And I think, especially, in a competitive context, people develop these personalities. They almost fall into these archetypes that maybe they've seen in other baseball movies or, you know, on baseball broadcasts even. So I think they've all created a version of themselves that might be quite different from the version that they have at work or in their family lives, and they don't necessarily want to let those different personas converge.
SIMON: So like, guy to guy, when this ballpark is gone, why can't these men, I don't know, have a weekly book club or volleyball team?
LUND: This film is an ode to the toil involved in maintaining friendships. And for men, sometimes that is very difficult. It needs to come in a competitive context. It's not a global statement, but in this case, that is the way it works. And they don't quite know how to relate to each other outside of this field.
SIMON: Yeah. Well, tell us about the challenges of casting because I think we could both mention baseball movies that are, at least to those of us who love the game, sometimes undone by a big-name star who clearly can't throw a baseball.
LUND: That's right. Yeah. I really wanted this to look like people who live in the region where the film is shot in New England, you know, many different ages. And I was really attracted to these kind of faces that maybe you don't see in movies as much anymore but might have been more popular in, you know, the '70s - faces that have a lot of wrinkles, that have a sense of history kind of carved into it.
SIMON: The field in the film is so authentic looking, I thought it had to be a set. Apparently, it's not.
LUND: No, no. It's - I scoured New England - dozens of fields. And I'm so grateful to have found this field in Douglas, Massachusetts, just south of Worcester. It is a historic field. It's one of the few surviving in the New England area that has kind of these very old, still all-wood fences, chipped green paint, has a beautiful press box behind home plate. And then we are just lucky to have received the yes from the town.
SIMON: Tell us about the cameo from Bill Lee, the former Red Sox star - I think he played for the Expos, too - and, I think it's safe to say, personality.
LUND: Yes. Oh, my gosh. He's a legend and really kind of a mystic and the - kind of the ultimate performer. You know, we had written lines for him that, you know, when we sent it to him, he said, these are great, but no one puts words in my mouth. But he has a really deep sense of narrative, I think, and of great comic timing. But I really wanted him - this character to feel like kind of a spirit of baseball's past. He kind of emerges from somewhere on the outskirts of the field and then recedes back into the woods. And he pitches an inning, and he shows everyone else up.
SIMON: He can throw the eephus - still can - Bill Lee - can't he?
LUND: Absolutely. Yes.
SIMON: I gather you've been influenced by the films of Robert Altman.
LUND: Certainly, among many, many others, but absolutely. When I was thinking about making a large ensemble film, he's naturally someone you gravitate towards. And especially, actually, in the edit, that became more and more apparent. Altman was known to use many - this, like, radio narration throughout his films - using that as a sonic element to kind of create a collage of...
SIMON: Like the PA announcer...
LUND: Yeah.
SIMON: ...For that matter, in "M*A*S*H." Yeah.
LUND: Exactly. It almost sometimes competes with the dialogue on screen, but you get this richness, wou know, all this detail and texture.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "EEPHUS")
FREDERICK WISEMAN: (As Branch Moreland) Route 472 in Bridge Ridge (ph), a pickup truck lost its brakes and skidded off the road for about 500 feet. Thank God this happened at Bridge Ridge. Otherwise, he might have hit something.
LUND: And that's something I realized I wanted in the edit because I wanted to imply the outside world without showing it.
SIMON: You know the "Ball Four"?
LUND: I do.
SIMON: Jim Bouton's great diary of being a major league pitcher. It closes with the line that came back to me at the close of your film, where Jim Bouton wrote, you spend your lifetime gripping a baseball in one way, you realize - you know the line I'm talking about?
LUND: Yeah. That it was actually the other way around. I think it really gets at the heart of what's so special about this game, and why I chose to set this film in the fall in New England, because it is a precious time to play baseball. And you feel the precarity of it because you know it's getting colder. The leaves are falling and the days are getting shorter, and then you have a long winter ahead. And I think everyone, throughout that winter, people who really love this game, are kind of waiting for it to come back.
SIMON: Carson Lund. He's directed his debut film, "Eephus," in theaters now. Thank you so much for being with us.
LUND: It's an honor. Appreciate it. Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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