The latest appearance of Fenway Park on the screen was in local boy Ben Affleck’s view of Beantown. In The Town, pleasant and upscale Charlestown serves a haven for bank-robbing Red Sox fans. Stars Ben Affleck and Jeremy Renner case the joint in the right-field stands during a Yankees game.
Affleck knows Fenway Park like a local boy with season tickets, but he primarily shows up for big games with the Bronx Bombers when he is in town, sitting next to the Red Sox dugout in the prestigious first row boxes.
Over the years, Fenway has been a backdrop to all kinds of stories, not all dealing with baseball.
During the 1950s, when psychological drama was the fashion, Fenway was in strait-jacket mode. In movies like Fear Strikes Out, Fenway was badly imitated. The 1957 tale revealed the descent of Sox outfielder Jimmy Piersall into manic-depression, better described today as bipolar disorder.
As Piersall once said of his movie counterpart (played by original Psycho star Anthony Perkins), who dramatically climbed the mesh netting behind home plate during a nervous breakdown, “I wish I had thought of it at the time.”
Old Fenway found itself played by a stand-in in those days, some generic ball field without a scintilla of the bandbox lunacy of the legendary park. The Triangle and the Green Monster have both driven many players to the brink of insanity.
Recent years have been kinder to the Boston landmark, which seems incandescent on screen. Like grand dame Gloria Stuart, who returned to the screen after decades as the old Rose Dawson in Titanic, Fenway has found itself rediscovered since Field of Dreams in 1989.
Fenway Park did a turn with supernatural shenanigans in that classic movie. You may recall Kevin Costner seeing ghostly messages on the electronic scoreboard about Moonlight Graham.
Legendary writer Stephen King often can be found in the box seats along third base, but Field of Dreams was not one of his paranormal novels. W.P. Kinsella wrote the 1982 tale of Shoeless Joe Jackson’s ghost, entitled Shoeless Joe, which was adapted into Field of Dreams at the end of the decade.
A more pleasant romantic comedy featured Drew Barrymore and, as the diehard Red Sox fan with season tickets, Jimmy Fallon. Fever Pitch, of all recent movies, used the actual bleachers and first-base box seats as essential plot devices.
Who could believe Drew Barrymore dropping out of the center-field stands near the Triangle and racing across the field with security ineptly in hot pursuit?
The Town may take the proverbial Fenway Frank for sheer mustard. The robbers plan to take down, as they call it, “the cathedral of Boston” on a Monday morning, following a big four-game series with the Yankees. It was, of course, filmed on location in the bowels of Fenway Park, near Gate D on Yawkey Way.
The area has recently undergone renovation for Opening Day, 2011. So, you won’t find too many bullet holes when you visit the Park.
The next closeup for the famed baseball chapel will be Moneyball, later this year. Brad Pitt plays Oakland's boy-wonder general manager Billy Beane, who bopped traditional scouting in favor of computerized stat sheets. The new film is not exactly a typical baseball movie on the lines of The Babe.
The latest tie-in to Fenway comes from noted statistician Bill James, who now works for the Fenway Faithful in the front pew of Theo Epstein. The movie will be released in time for the 2011 World Series.
We presume the Red Sox corporate offices and computer center will take the stage in Moneyball, and we can hardly wait to see the nerve center of Fenway Park.
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