The Bad News Bears: Difference between revisions

The Bad News Bears
The Bad News Bears promotional poster
Directed by	Michael Ritchie
Written by	Bill Lancaster
Produced by	Stanley R. Jaffe
Starring	Walter Matthau Tatum O'Neal Chris Barnes Vic Morrow Jackie Earle Haley Joyce Van Patten Quinn Smith
Cinematography	John A. Alonzo
Edited by	Richard A. Harris
Music by	Jerry Fielding
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date	7 April 1976 (USA)
Running time	102 min.
Country	United States
Language	English

The Bad News Bears is a 1976 film directed by Michael Ritchie. It stars Walter Matthau and Tatum O'Neal. The film was followed by two sequels, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training in 1977 and The Bad News Bears Go to Japan in 1978, and a short-lived 1979-80 CBS television series, none of which were able to duplicate the success of the original. Also notable was the score by Jerry Fielding, which is an adaptation of the principal themes of Carmen. The title of the movie has become a popular expression to refer to bad news or the bearer of bad news. As in, "Those are the bad news bears."

A remake of the movie, directed by Richard Linklater with Billy Bob Thornton taking the role of Morris Buttermaker, was released on July 22, 2005.

Taglines:

• The coach is waiting for his next beer. The pitcher is waiting for her first bra. The team is waiting for a miracle. Consider the possibilities.
• At last, a picture of kids as they really are.
• A classic comedy about growing up!

Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau), an alcoholic minor-league baseball player, becomes the coach of a cellar-dwelling Little League team, the Bears. He works as a a pool cleaning man, while drinking endlessly on the side. He coaches the Bears, a children's baseball team with poor playing skills. They play their first game and do not even make an out before Buttermaker forfeits the game.

Realizing the team is near hopeless, he recruits a couple of unlikely prospects. First up is sharp-tongued Amanda Whurlitzer (Tatum O'Neal), a skilled pitcher who is the 12-year-old daughter of one of Buttermaker's ex-girlfriends. Buttermaker also notices the powerful throwing arm of the local cigarette-smoking troublemaker, Kelly Leak (Jackie Earle Haley). The boozing coach recruits Leak, and along with Whurlitzer, the Bears start winning games.

Eventually, the Bears make it to the championship game opposite the Yankees, who are coached by aggresive, competitve Roy Turner (Vic Morrow). Buttermaker and Turner engage in shouting matches throughout the game, leading to Turner striking his son/pitcher for intentionally throwing a beanball at Bears batter/catcher, overweight Engelberg (Gary Lee Cavagnaro). Later, Buttermaker changes the lineup, putting the benchwarmers in and taking out some of the good players. The Bears lose the game 8 to 7. After the game, Buttermaker gives the team full reign of his beer cooler, and they spray it all over each other. Although they did not win the championship, they have the satisfaction of trying, knowing that winning is not so important.

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In an important sense, the film is about the adults—the victory-obsessed Little League moms and dads who value winning above sportsmanship and enjoyment. In his 1976 review, critic Roger Ebert called the movie "an unblinking, scathing look at competition in American society." As the Bears begin to improve, coach Buttermaker gets caught up in this dynamic. Much of the film's drama is the way in which winning the league championship trophy, suddenly and surprisingly within reach, conflicts with his players' self-respect. The film culminates in the "big game," but most of the usual screen clichés are discarded in favor of a harrowing showdown between the favored Yankees' pitcher and his father/coach, counterintuitive strategy by both teams, and a game-winning play that is not.

The film was notable in its time for the amount of vulgarity (including profanity and ethnic slurs) placed into the mouths of the various child-actors who played the principal roles (specifically, a memorable Tanner Boyle, played by Chris Barnes, quoted as calling his teammates en masse "a bunch of Jews, spics, niggers, pansies, and a booger-eating moron"). However, all of the questionable dialogue was used for comic effect. A true product of the mid-70s, the film includes a now-unheard-of scene where an inebriated Buttermaker drives around the players who are not wearing seatbelts in an open-top convertible.

The Bad News Bears was filmed in and around Los Angeles, primarily in the San Fernando Valley. The field where they played is in Mason Park on Devonshire Street in Chatsworth, California. In the film, the Bears were sponsored by an actual company, "Chico's Bail Bonds," a touch that fit in nicely with the idea that the Bears were a ragtag group of misfit kids who could not find a more respectable sponsor.

Fittingly, the parody in Mad Magazine commented: Can a 52-year-old man handle a 14-year-old girl, and not go to jail?"

Saturday Night Live did a sketch with Matthau as the guest host called "The Bad News Bees" which involved dealing with masturbation among the players referred to as "Buzzing Off". John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd and the rest were wearing their recurring Bee costumes.

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• The Bad News Bears (1976) at IMDb
• The Bad News Bears (TV series) at IMDb
• Template:Tv.com show
• Fansite
• Chris Barnes...Beyond Tanner - A look back at his entire acting career
• Interview with David Pollock ("Rudi Stein")