Tom McComas |
Growing up in Wilmette, Illinois, McComas dealt with a fact as hard as the streets: "Everybody was a Cubs fan! We're talking about the late 40s, and early 50s. The Sox were awful. I used to cry in bed when they lost. I spent my youth in tears! I learned how to deal with defeat and disappointment by being a Sox fan."
McComas pitched the project to Ed Short, the White Sox general manager. "They were OK with it. They didn't care one way or the other." On a crisp day in late September, between the second-to-last and the final series of the 1966 season, McComas, his crew, and Peter Sandquist, a young boy whom McComas knew from his neighborhood and who was the son of a state representative, gathered at the park and spent the afternoon filming exterior and interior footage. Particularly memorable are shots inside as an elated Sandquist runs past the long line of photographs of former White Sox players, their faces and bodies a blur of action. "Those photos were inside, right opposite the stairs leading into the park. So we used a hand-held subjective camera to show Peter's point-of-view as he runs past the photographs. That's why the picture is jumping up and down." Also evocative are interestingly-composed shots of Sandquist running past closed concession stands and empty seats, and along steeply angled ramps.
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McCamos, on location at Comiskey Park |
Also key: verisimilitude. McComas grew up, as so many in Chicago did, listening to the great Bob Elson call White Sox games on the radio, and he hoped to get the broadcaster to narrate the fantasy sequence in his film. "In those days they had debutante balls and coming-out parties," McComas says. "I met Elson's daughter at one of those and asked her if I could get to her dad." The ruse worked. Elson met McComas and his crew at a recording studio on Hubbard Street in Chicago. "I had listened to him for years so it was a big deal for me." Elson arrived in style, rolling up to the studio in a big Buick. "It was tough to find parking there, but I had a spot," McComas remembers. "I stood in the spot for him but he was late—I probably got into ten fights protecting that parking space! But he got in and we went upstairs, where I played the film for him once, and he said, 'Alright, I get it.' The idea was for Elson to ad-lib the action just like he would if it were a real game. So when the bases are loaded, Elson says 'Koufax into the stretch.' I said, 'Cut, cut! Bob, with the bases loaded he'd go into a full windup.' And he said, 'You're right!'
"So I corrected Bob Elson!" McComas laughs at a memory that still delights him a half century later.
McComas felt some pressure to finish the film, as he was anxious to submit it to the Chicago Film Festival, then in its second year. In post-production, he recognized that the film needed more work, "five or six re-dos or shots that I didn't anticipate." Alas, running the bases wasn't the only physical activity Sandquist had been enjoying that late summer: "He broke his arm skateboarding! I talked to his mother and asked how long the cast would be on, and she said, 'Well I think the cast will come off on October 10.' So there was about two weeks between the cast coming off and the screening at the Chicago Film Festival." In mid-October, McComas and his crew hustled back to Comiskey for re-shoots. At the doctor's office, McComas had told Sandquist to make sure he wore the same t-shirt, but some continuity suffered: "In the background there's a wagon with wheels on it, way out in center field. The season was over and they had equipment all over the place, working on the field, preparing it for winter, I guess. When he's running toward second that was before the broken arm, and sliding into second and leading off was after the broken arm, and there are three or four shots where you can see him holding his arm kind of awkwardly, like it's still in a cast. And I'm saying, 'C'mon slide, Peter! Your arm's fine!'" McComas and his crew "edited night and day to get it ready for the festival. It was shown, but it was too late for the judging. We submitted it the day before the screening. It turns out they judge these things before they show them to the public."
The image of a tow-headed, striped-shirted boy jumping a fence and running the bases is strangely eternal, yet also, in its innocence, very much of the era. I asked McComas if he feels that he could make his film today. "They'd probably want money," he sighs. "Everybody wants money." Of no small surprise to McComas is the the general indifference with which his film was greeted by the White Sox organization. "No one ever picked up on the film. Years ago, I sent it to the White Sox marketing guy thinking that, once they'd moved to U.S. Cellular Field, there'd be nostalgia, a yearning for old Sox fans to see the old Comiskey again. The first 20,000 would get a free DVD of the film, or they could show it on the screen during a rain delay. But I never heard back from them. I don't know that it got to the right guy. They can still do it."
"It was fun for me to get into the park and to do all that stuff," McComas says. "They say you should do what you know. And I definitely knew that."
Here are some screen grabs, followed by the film:
Photo of young McComas via Tom McCamos.
3 comments:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. A million times, thank you for posting this precious movie.
Dennis Anderson
Dunlap, Ill.
It's something else, isn't it. More people should know about it!
I like this. Thank you.
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