Two Tatums: ‘The Bad News Bears’ overpaid for its record-breaking free agent, still overachieves on the stat line
Girls were banned from Little League from 1951 to 1973. 1n 1974, facing legal challenges, the organization gave in, and the U.S. Congress even weighed in and enforced that decision late that year.
For sure, the appeal of 1976’s “The Bad News Bears” has far more to do with kids swearing than with Equal Rights Amendment-type implications. But the movie’s aware of those implications. A female character complains early about how a “class-action suit” will “ruin this country.” The national legal backdrop undoubtedly added inspiration to Bill Lancaster’s tale of how adults can ruin the simplest things.
For director Michael Ritchie, it’s a casting opportunity. He might’ve been tempted to field his baseball team with just a diverse crop of boys. But it’s impossible to imagine any boy in 1975 having marquee value like that of 11-year-old Tatum O’Neal, the already-Oscar winner who is not the biggest star in “Bears” but gives it tabloid interest and at least some anticipation of box office heft. Not only heft, but storylines and punch lines. She can maybe draw a star player onto the team with the prospect of a date. She can refuse to don a jockstrap. She can trigger awkward moments just by her presence in typically all-male surroundings.
She is the extremely rare individual whose career, unfortunately, probably peaked at age 10. And when “Bears” came casting, she was right near that peak. On Aug. 1, 1975, the Chicago Tribune’s Aaron Gold wrote that, thanks to agent Sue Mengers, O’Neal would co-star in “Bears” while receiving “the biggest salary ever paid a juvenile,” despite Ryan O’Neal’s previous vow not to let her take a starring role until age 16. According to People magazine, her “Bears” salary would be $350,000 plus 8% of net profits.
It seems obvious that O’Neal should be the best player on the team. She’s not. Not only that — she’s not funny. Apparently to justify the investment, Ritchie goes out of his way to give O’Neal gratuitous screen time. He puts her in a ballet class, gives her a dugout conversation with Matthau in which she tries to reconnect him with her permanently off-screen mother (who has no interest in following the team) and he responds by slinging beer at her and breaking her heart. She should be the team’s super player who also hits home runs and whose continued participation relies on an uneasy alliance with coach Buttermaker. Instead, she and the other prized recruit, a massive troublemaker who suddenly becomes meek as a mouse after joining the team, are the two most agreeable players; it’s the other Bears who keep getting into fights.
“Bears” was the idea of Bill Lancaster, the son of Burt Lancaster. He had little of an acting career but found success at screenwriting. Affected by polio, he played and coached Little League baseball and put his experiences into a screenplay. According to an L.A. Times article of 1976, his script was sold to Paramount for $105,000 by his agent, Ben Benjamin, who had coached an opposing team. For what it’s worth, one person posted a reader comment to a blog in 2013 stating, “I played on the 1968 Pomona Elks, coached by Bill Lancaster. I was the inspiration for the Tanner Boyle character ...”
What’s not explained, from numerous sources, is how they came up with the title “The Bad News Bears.” The “Bears” part is questionable, as “Bears” is not a common baseball nickname. (It seems they are the only team in their league without a big-league club’s nickname.) The “Bad News” tag is pretty good though. It refers to one of the team’s pregame chants and implies something dubious or dirty about this gang. An even more inspired name is that of the team’s sponsor, Chico’s Bail Bonds (somebody is still selling those shirts/jerseys today).
One of the surprising things about “The Bad News Bears” is that it’s not very funny. It’s a one-note film always waiting for the next child to curse. Or tease each other. Or do something gross. The adult characters are too serious to bounce jokes off of each other. Walter Matthau, who wasn’t funny anyway — a great actor, but not funny — spends all of his adult conversations having serious arguments of principle. Hardly anyone has any good one-liners.
Ritchie, who had several hits in the ’70s, isn’t as fascinated by its diminutive baseball team as with certain androgynous issues. The ace pitcher is a tomboy girl. The star player is a boy named Kelly who, in early looks, almost appears female. Of course, those two click together. The rest of the team, all boys, isn’t interested in girls. “Bears” is sort of telling us that up to a certain age, gender does not care. The kids in “Bears” are right on the precipice of that age, the two hired guns perhaps just across it. Gene Siskel in 1977 wrote, “Tatum, the film implies, loses her virginity to the team’s motorcycle-riding, cigaret-smoking left fielder.”
Roger Ebert gave “The Bad News Bears” 3 stars; Siskel gave it 2½. The most important rating is not from the critics but the MPAA. It’s PG. In the Sept. 28, 1975, edition of the Chicago Tribune, Marilyn Beck and Ellsworth Redinger wrote an article about Hollywood themes and claimed, “At Paramount, Walter Matthau and 11-year-old Tatum O’Neal will be making ‘The Bad News Bears,’ which the studio expects to get slapped with an ‘R’ rating because of the shock-value vulgarities with which the dialog will be laced.”
Indeed. The “F” word is not heard. But given the racial and sexual orientation slurs (even repeated) and terms like “bulls---” uttered by little kids, the PG rating today seems questionable. Then again, “Saturday Night Fever,” released a year later, has worse language, a rape scene and an ethnic fight and got an R but was able, through serious editing, to get it re-released a year later as PG. “Bears” must be one of the most important rating rulings ever. The movie is for adults. But it’s about little kids and baseball. 10-year-olds are going to beg their parents to take them to see it. An R would’ve decimated the box office. Parents who took their kids to see it may have been alarmed by what they heard. The financial result was still a home run.
Roger Ebert in 1976 says, “It’s an unblinking, scathing look at competition in American society — and because the competitors in this case are Little Leaguers, the movie has passages that are very disturbing.” But in his review of “Hardball” (2001), a movie based on a book in which the story resembles that of the Bears, Ebert writes, “There was controversy when the movie was made because the dialogue included various words that would be used by most kids on any baseball team. I think I spotted a couple of times when an eight-letter word was dubbed in for its seven-letter synonym. Why bother? Kids talk this way. We might as well face it.”
“Bears” is, structurally, the story of a drunkard inspired by an unlikely baseball team to improve his life while boosting theirs. So the veteran Walter Matthau gets star billing as the broken-down, cynical ex-minor leaguer. It’s similar to the role Tom Hanks plays in “A League of Their Own.” For Matthau, “Bears” is completely episodic. There is admittedly some story arc — his character, Buttermaker (characters regularly refer to each other by last names), goes from being completely disinterested in this endeavor to mildly interested.
Alcohol in many movies (even “A Few Good Men”) is used for humor. Believe it or not, it’s more often a serious plot point. In “The Bad News Bears,” it is there for humor. Buttermaker is intoxicated 24/7 and driving little kids around sitting on the edges of his convertible. Yet despite all this drinking, he’s somehow completely functional and never reeks of booze. He regularly dispenses important advice to the kids while protesting he doesn’t want anything to do with them. Ritchie makes him pass out, once, to keep the plot “honest.”
Matthau’s hiring seems very much like that of Alec Guinness in “Star Wars.” A veteran star was desired for a project that may have seemed like a kids film. George Lucas prodded Guinness with a percentage of the take. According to Matthau’s 2000 obituary in Variety, “At the height of his popularity, Matthau commanded $1.5 million a film, although he earned far more than that from his profit participation in ‘The Bad News Bears,’ for which he later sued Paramount Pictures.”
Matthau’s routine here is slapstick. He understands this role is about interacting with kids as though the kids are adults. He doesn’t in the slightest look like he ever played pro baseball, unlike, say, Sam Malone in “Cheers.” O’Neal, on the other hand, said in 2013 that she took three months of “heavy-duty” pitching lessons.” Pauline Kael apparently never reviewed “The Bad News Bears” but in an unrelated review said of O’Neal that “nothing could conceal the fact that she didn’t have the lean, muscular body of a girl athlete, but, at least, she gave a performance.”
That Matthau doesn’t seem into method acting in this instance is not a strike against the film, but maybe its dialogue. Buttermaker’s career path is irrelevant. He could be an insurance agent or accountant; it’s the same movie. His minor league career is regularly mentioned — including in one awful reading where the script decides that one of the child players has to recite his stops and statistics — but it has no bearing on the film.
That’s one of several scenes in which “Bears” will find itself forced to use lengthy dialogue exchanges to supply viewers with what it deems are necessary facts. First we have an L.A. councilman explaining why this team is in this league. Then you have other adults explaining a lawsuit. There’s also a tedious introduction to O’Neal’s Amanda in which she and Buttermaker have to explain out loud why they know each other. We’re told the team is suffering because one kid took on the whole seventh grade in a fight (even though it’s baseball season and presumably school’s out.) And some kid has to relay Kelly Leak’s prodigious background to Buttermaker.
“Bears” strangely shrugs off the typical drama of a youth baseball team. Roger Ebert, in one of his “Bears” reviews, complains that youth baseball is just a “meritocracy” favoring select kids. Indeed, the sport is not so egalitarian. Apparently, Ritchie thought it would only clog matters in his film. For example, on most teams, nearly every kid wants to pitch. On the Bears, only one player does. Other positions are also a source of controversy. Everyone wants to play shortstop or first base; no one wants to play right field. And batting order ... it’s a big deal on every team, except the Bears. These are competitive situations in which a grown-up has to make firm decisions. In real life, a character such as Buttermaker would be dreaded by his players for his lack of organization and control.
There are echoes of “Hoosiers,” in which the local star player must be recruited, but the entire roster at some point will contribute something to the cause. (The drunkard in that film is the assistant coach.)
But Ritchie adds flourish with his creative use of operatic music from “Carmen.” The seemingly ridiculous pairing with footage of kids stumbling around the ball field tells us, ironically, how the hard-core adults see this activity. “Bears” in a few moments, mostly during the pregame festivities, will have Ritchie’s documentary-like feel of “The Candidate.” Ritchie keeps nearly all of the action on the field, in contrast with his next film, “Semi-Tough,” although Kael says the games in each film are “deliberate muddy chaos.” The general lack of off-field situations deprives “Bears” of pretty much any underlying drama other than who wins the championship. But as the season progresses, the action we see on the field isn’t always predictable.
How did the kids do? It sounds like the child actors were more defiant than the characters in the movie. The Washington Post’s Gary Arnold interviewed Ritchie in May 1976 about the making of the film. “The location was an insane asylum by 4 o’clock each afternoon,” Ritchie said. “The kids would just run away after every take ... Alfred Lutter, who plays the brainy benchwarmer, was especially quick to spot all the loopholes in my so-called authority. If I’d threaten to replace somebody, Lutter would wonder out loud how expensive it would be to recast and reshoot.” Ritchie indicated there was little he could do in terms of discipline; “there’s a social worker on the premises all the time.”
Ritchie in his comments is inadvertently revealing something about Matthau — he brings stature to this production. The kids probably had never heard of Ritchie, but they likely had heard of Matthau. The conversations he has with them in the film about baseball sound like conversations he might’ve had with them off-camera about the movie business, where it’s the kids who are the minor leaguers and Matthau the HOFer. But maybe there weren’t many such conversations. According to Matthau’s Variety obituary, “Even prior to his ascendance, Matthau had a reputation as difficult and demanding. Billy Wilder once observed that there were two Matthaus: ‘One minute he can be St. Francis of Assisi, and the next, very, very cantankerous and tough to work with.’ ”
Like Matthau’s routine, a lot of the kids’ antics feel episodic, sort of like Richard Dreyfuss’ adventures in “American Graffiti.” But with little kids, it can get really silly. One fat catcher chomps on chocolate during an at-bat. Another kid peels off his clothes after a disappointing game. One obscure player can somehow make a martini. There’s an undeniable gross factor in “The Bad News Bears.”
The kids may have pushed Ritchie to exasperation — he told Arnold that he got “very worried” by the talent level he saw in juvenile actors in L.A. — but Ritchie could lean on his first-class crew. The cinematographer was John Alonzo (“Chinatown,” many others), and Jerry Fielding did the music scores. Polly Platt, who worked on “Paper Moon” with O’Neal, was the production designer, a term that probably doesn’t begin to define her contributions to any movie. Ritchie told Arnold that Platt had the idea of putting the Bears in flannel uniforms that rumpled easily, while the Yankees “wore uniforms made from some plastic material that never wrinkled.”
Ritchie, who attended Harvard, worked in TV in the ’60s and broke into films directing Robert Redford in “Downhill Racer” and “The Candidate,” a satire about how politics perhaps really works that is probably his finest film. Just before “Bears,” he directed 1975’s “Smile,” about a beauty pageant in California. Kael reviewed it and praised how it “seems to be rediscovering America.” She describes Ritchie as “not a director for depth, he’s the man to turn loose on marginalia and surfaces.” She also states that “Ritchie has had trouble with his women characters.” Ebert calls it “sometimes funny, more often harrowing” and says Ritchie misses some of his “messy targets” in that film.
There isn’t just one youth baseball organization. You will hear “league” throughout “The Bad News Bears,” but not “Little.” Little League apparently lodged a protest with Paramount about the film’s content in early 1976 that was rejected; Little League opted not to pursue its complaints further out of concern of giving the movie extra publicity. It doesn’t seem like the New York Yankees had any issue with a dubious youth team in a commercial movie being named the Yankees.
Joyce Van Patten’s Cleveland, some sort of league official, is only there to show that it’s not just males who may be opposed to opening up the league a bit. About all she does is distribute equipment and chase down troublemakers in the outfield. Her position is obscure and irrelevant enough that it has to be based on a real person from Lancaster’s memory.
Maybe the strongest character in “Bears” is Vic Morrow’s Roy Turner, the manager of the hated Yankees. He’s an excellent coach. He’s made the league into what it is. Sure, he’s condescending. But there is no faulting his initial gripe to Buttermaker, which is that this league is a “highly competitive program” that may not be the best fit for Buttermaker’s team. He argues, “It’s not us ... it’s the boys” who want it this way. Out of the blue, Turner is turned into a monster for one disturbing scene, to prove the point about the grown-ups taking this thing far too seriously.
But Turner’s right. Kids want to have sharp uniforms (which the movie admits), kids want to play under lights and kids want to have announcers calling out their names at-bat. And the troubling fact that the movie doesn’t want to admit: Kids want to win. Lancaster’s ending maybe doesn’t believe that. Notice that enthusiasm on the ballclub only revs up after the Ws start appearing in the standings. In the dubious championship game, we see both coaches, Morrow and even Buttermaker, crossing the line in their instructions and behavior. The adults have become the children, and vice versa. The kids act offended and refuse orders, willing to sacrifice a championship game, out of either sportsmanship or loyalty to teammates. Is that really how it would go?
“The Bad News Bears” was filmed in Chatsworth, a suburban neighborhood of Los Angeles. In real baseball, places like Fenway Park, Wrigley Field and Ebbets Field are the hallowed grounds. In Hollywood’s version, Chatsworth’s Mason Park is second only to the diamond(s) in Dyersville, Iowa.
There are the fictional characters. And then there are the actors who play them. Gene Siskel writes that “O’Neal turns in a solid performance that is genuinely affecting.” Is it? She is adorable, but however harsh it sounds, she’s older than her “Paper Moon” role and not as cute. She apparently earned an undesirable nickname on the “Bears” set.
“Well, there are two Tatum O’Neals,” Ritchie told Gary Arnold. “The first is the kid you see selling maps on the Sunset Strip. That’s Tatum the smug, spoiled, Beverly Hills brat, the one who gets a salary of $350,000 a picture, the one who stays up late and hobnobs with Mick and Bianca Jagger, the one you love to hate. That’s the Tatum in the fan magazines and gossip columns, Tatum the Monster, and there’s no denying she exists. In fact, ‘Monster’ was our term of endearment for her. When we needed her, Phil Epstein would walk over to her trailer and yell, ‘Send in the Monster!’ At the same time, there’s a Tatum O’Neal who’s a rather shy 12-year-old girl who wants to be liked and wants to make friends with kids her own age. I think both Tatums are in the movie, and I wanted the audience to feel a certain transformation take place. ... Tatum likes playing the Monster, especially with strangers, but the non-Monster worked very hard to earn the respect of Walter Matthau and the boys in the cast. It mattered a lot that they accepted her and liked her.”
Decades later, O’Neal indicated that unlike Peter Bogdanovich, her director in “Paper Moon,” Ritchie “wasn’t going to tell me how to do every line. He wasn’t going to tell me how to react.” She credits Matthau instead for giving her the encouragement she needed.
Because of its box office success — $9 million to make, $42 million gross, if you believe Wikipedia — “The Bad News Bears” was a common brand through the ’70s. Too common. Hollywood bean counters immediately started thinking sequel and quickly got not one, but two in two years: “The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training,” and “The Bad News Bears Go to Japan.” Except Matthau, O’Neal and Ritchie weren’t interested. So William Devane and Tony Curtis were brought in, and new directors hired. Lancaster did write the third movie, and Ritchie produced. The most interesting thing about the latter two films is the court battle. According to Matthau’s Variety obituary, he sued Paramount for selling all three films to television for a “roughly equal amount, although the original, in which he appeared, grossed far more than the other two. He claimed the studio had allocated a lesser amount to the first film in order to lessen his profit participation. The case was settled out of court,” Variety reported, but it was regarded as “an important indicator of an actor’s value to a film.”
Jackie Earle Haley, whose roller coaster career took a dive after this series only to eventually find his way into Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” and a couple other players appeared in all three films. That should’ve been more than enough of this concept. But no. CBS tried a TV series in 1979-80 starring Jack Warden. Twenty-five years later, Hollywood tried again on the original movie, this time featuring Billy Bob Thornton. Roger Ebert gave that one, like the original, 3 stars.
Sports films are interesting investments. Nobody, including critics, seems to realize they tend to hit more often than they miss. Some produce inspiration. Others produce tripe. Most of them, it seems, connect with viewers at the lowest gut levels. “The Bad News Bears” is a race to the bottom.
2.5 stars
(September 2024)
“The Bad News Bears” (1976)
Starring
Walter Matthau as Coach Morris Buttermaker ♦
Tatum O’Neal as Amanda Whurlitzer ♦
Vic Morrow as Roy Turner ♦
Joyce Van Patten as Cleveland ♦
Ben Piazza as Bob Whitewood ♦
Jackie Earle Haley as Kelly Leak ♦
Alfred W. Lutter as Ogilvie ♦
Chris Barnes as Tanner Boyle ♦
Erin Blunt as Ahmad Abdul Rahim ♦
Gary Lee Cavagnaro as Engelberg ♦
Jaime Escobedo as Jose Agilar ♦
Scott Firestone as Regi Tower ♦
George Gonzales as Miguel Agilar ♦
Brett Marx as Jimmy Feldman ♦
David Pollock as Rudi Stein ♦
Quinn Smith as Timmy Lupus ♦
David Stambaugh as Toby Whitewood ♦
Brandon Cruz as Joey Turner ♦
Timothy Blake as Mrs. Lupus ♦
Bill Sorrells as Mr. Tower ♦
Shari Summers as Mrs. Turner ♦
Joe Brooks as Umpire ♦
George Wyner as White Sox Manager ♦
David Lazarus as Yankee ♦
Charles Matthau as Athletic ♦
Maurice Marks as Announcer
Directed by: Michael Ritchie
Written by: Bill Lancaster
Producer: Stanley R. Jaffe
Music: Jerry Fielding
Cinematography: John A. Alonzo
Editing: Richard A. Harris
Casting: Jane Feinberg, Mike Fenton
Production design: Polly Platt
Set decoration: Cheryal Kearney
Makeup and hair: Caryl Codon, Jack Obringer
Unit production manager: Jack Roe
