Eight Men Out is the real life story of the 1919 Chicago White Sox's team that threw the world series for a big pay day. In the early 20th century, baseball players were barely payed enough money to live on, so when organized crime stepped in and offered a big pay day for throwing the 1919 World Series, half the team said yes. The film Eight Men Out is based on the book by Eliot Asinof, the first to officially tell the story of what happened. Until this book, people knew the outcome, but not the particulars. While the book goes into great detail, the movie does not. The film gives us the basics in a very simplistic form, in order to make it more dramatic, and that's the one part of this film I didn't really care for. The things I really wanted to know more about never seemed to materialize and a lot of what we saw in return was the Hollywood exaggeration effect. Don't get me wrong though, the film was very entertaining as it showed a lot of the action on the field and touched on some aspects of the scandal. The acting was stellar and it was really fun to see Charlie Sheen and John Cusack right as they were first starting out. As for the ending, well that was expected, but I still really enjoyed the sports action, back stories, and even the over the top dramatics surrounding the story. It may not be very in depth or even historically accurate, but seeing it again all these years later, I can now appreciate and understand why it is considered one of the top ten sports films of all time.

My perspective on Eight Men Out is different than most...I was an extra, recognizably (if you knew me) visible in at least two scenes. In fact, so close in focus was I that the assistant director eventually told me that they couldn't use me any more, because I had been "seen", meaning, I guess, that people would notice me in several different scenes. Not only did I learn about the baseball history depicted, but I learned about movie making, too. I worked at several of the Indianapolis shooting locations, including the Scottish Rite Cathedral, and what was then "Victory Field", the home of the Triple A Indianapolis Indianapolis Indians. It was trippy filming there, as I had been there for many games over the years as an Indians fan. For some of the shots, they couldn't get enough extras to show up to make the crowd, so they had to put cardboard cut-outs (called "standees" now?) in the stadium seats. The first day I showed up, I met the extras casting director, Avy Kaufman...she said, "I like your face", and sent me to wardrobe to get my period suit, shoes and hat---I was in! Thus began what would be a string of very long---but rewarding---days, for the grand sum of $20 per day, cash, paid out of a box in the semi-darkened parking lot. One day we did a double shift---16 hours---and got paid $40. We were fed in the same room, but not at the same table, as the actors. It was really neat being just a few feet away from these actors, some of whom I had seen in sitcoms and movies...Mahoney from Cheers, Lloyd from Back to the Future, Anderson from, among others, a Twilight Zone episode, and, of course, Studa Turkel and John Sayles. And note one other young actor in the cast: Charlie Sheen---should have gotten his autograph while I had the chance! The man who played the jury foreman, Rich Komenich had, years before, dressed up in a costume for a popular areas pizza franchise, and I had partied with him thanks to a woman I date. I remember the frequent chemical odor from the "smoke" or "fog" machine,since they fogged most of the indoor shots, apparently to cover up certain set details. Then there were the crude antique flash units we "reporters" had to hold up when when they shot the press conference held by Clifton James' character, Commiskey, the laborious to lace up period shoes that were closer to boots,the molded plastic ice cubes in the cocktail glasses we used in Michael Lerner's Rothstein scene, and the infrequent mouthing of nonsense lines to fake conversation of the background extras. If I had been a smoker, I would have been standing right next to Lerner in that scene, but I couldn't fake proficiency at a habit I didn't have. Perhaps what was more surrealistic than anything else was the contrast between how some of the extras looked in their period costumes, and how they looked in their street clothes before or after we changed...everything from gym shorts and t-shirts to overalls. I got such a big kick out of watching myself when this movie premiered the next year...realizing my screen "performance" will outlive me. A great movie and a great experience....

When the team that couldn't be beat threw the World Series in 1919 they did more than deliberately lose a few baseball games; they corrupted the National Pastime and ushered the sport out of its age of innocence. Writer director John Sayles succeeds in showing exactly how and why eight players on the best team in baseball set in motion what had to be one of the most poorly conceived, organized and executed conspiracies in the whole history of graft, and in his usual role as a champion of the working class portrays the guilty players as victims of money-grubbing corporate exploitation (represented both by team management and organized crime).But it's all the cynical wheeling and dealing behind the Black Sox scandal which make the film so fascinating. The story might have been unbelievable if it wasn't entirely true, but like any aspect of real life the details are messy and inconclusive. Most of the film recounts the mechanics of the fix; events during the subsequent exposure and trial are telescoped too quickly into the final forty minutes or so, which makes sense: in any conspiracy the crime is always more interesting than the punishment.It helps to be at least slightly familiar with the huge cast of characters involved: players, gamblers, reporters and so forth. A few scenes have been added for dramatic unity, and others were abbreviated to maintain a consistent pace, but all the facts are there, and Sayles manages to pull them all together in an entertaining history lesson from our collective adolescence, re-creating that fateful moment when the boys of summer grew up for good.

The shrine, better known as the Baseball Hall of Fame remembers well that Abner Doubleday invented the game. To this day in America, in many parts, Baseball is still considered America's pastorals pastime. Back in its infancy, the early game was also the birthplace of many a sport's legend. Here in this movie entitled " Eight men Out " is the true story of the biggest scandal ever to darken the memory. The Chicago White sox's were in the eyes of many the finest baseball time every assembled. At the top of the sport, they were considered by their manager William Gleason (John Mahoney) unbeatable. This was the fertile ground upon which a half dozen con-men, hoodlums and gangsters, led by infamous gambler Arnold Rothstein, tried to 'Put the fix ' on the 1919 World Series. Vastly underpaid for their extraordinary efforts on the field, by Charles Comiskey (Clifton James) their team owner; the players included George Weaver (John Cusack), Oscar Felsch (Charlie Sheen), Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn) and Joseph 'Shoeless' Jackson (D.B. Sweeney) decided to accept a bribe to purposely lose the world series. Although the seven players accepted the money, they came under tremendous pressure by the public, their fans and the sports writers of the day. The film is quite sincere in its efforts to seek out those most responsible for the awful mess. In the end, everybody lost something and Baseball was never the same. The actors selected created a wonderful atmosphere of baseball in the early days and just watching them made one feel they were there in 1919 to watch it all unfold before them. A great movie and easily recommended. ****