Tom Hanks and baseball — they go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Aside from always wanting to be an astronaut, Hanks has always been a great baseball fan and eagerly jumped at the chance to be in Penny Marshall’s 1992 film about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. The film is a crowd pleaser and drew in the crowds when it was released, which was great because it shined a light on an aspect of sports history that had sadly been largely forgotten. Join us — Pete Wright and Andy Nelson — as we finish our Tom Hanks series with a dip back into our spring Baseball series of past years. We talk about how this film came to be, and how Penny Marshall couldn’t even find any female screenwriters to come on board to write the script. We discuss the performances and how everyone, from top to bottom, really fits their parts and puts in the work, even if we don’t always care for their performances. We chat about the script and how that might be what’s leading to some of our struggles with performances as the script really does feel straight out of screenwriting basic training. We talk about the roles of women in sports and in media, how skewed toward men it all is, and how this film does help give better role models for young girls. And we close it out discussing Hanks himself and what these four films in the first decade (for the most part) of his career showed us about who he is and where he’d be going. It’s a great film, albeit with a basic script, that highlights a key time in our history, and we have a great time talking about it. Tune in!
