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Out of Print and Unavailable
The Baseball Effect (2005)
While I was still working on the first Baseball Effect, I got the idea to make a completely different version of The Baseball Effect, with different characters and more elaborate, interconnecting storylines.
This second Baseball Effect wasn’t really in conflict with the first Baseball Effect – the idea was that the two would stand on their own, as two very different movies that happen to have the same name, and that tell the same story, but in a very different way.
So the story of this second Baseball Effect was still the same story: a bunch of lovably goofy people who run a Newsletter that’s basically an in-joke between friends and isn’t meant to be taken seriously, until one of them gets the idea to turn it into a seriously profitable business, and tries to achieve this by attracting attention through publishing lies about managing a successful baseball team – ultimately, it does attract attention, but none of it leads to anything profitable, because these people don’t know how to run a business under capitalism – we love them anyway, and the moral of the story is: capitalism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
The main thing I added for the second Baseball Effect was the subplot of how my character (whose name is Jesse in the first Baseball Effect, and Jack in the second and third ones) had been involved in a mysterious organization called the Spies before starting his Newsletter – so there’s this whole arc about how he had lived this violent and difficult life in the Spies, and then the Newsletter was his way of breaking out of that and doing something kind of lighthearted and wholesome. But when he starts trying to turn the Newsletter into something profitable, he attracts the attention of the Spies once again, inviting the same awful patterns he had been trying to break free of back into his life, which also endanger his friends who he runs the Newsletter with.
So it gets into this sense of how capitalism and the state go hand-in-hand, and you can’t have one without the other.
And – on a more personal level – how a person has to deal with their problems at the root, internally, or the same patterns will keep repeating even if they try to change their external circumstances.
Which is something I was thinking about in real life, because of how I’d been illegally thrown out of the state-funded public school in my neighborhood as part of their scheme to attract wealthier families to that school district, thereby increasing their funding – so the Department of Education started paying for me to go to these experimental private schools in other neighborhoods, which meant I was constantly traveling in and out of my own neighborhood, and in and out of my own culture and the community I knew – but I saw how similar patterns persisted in different places in different ways, and how anything I and the people around me did internally also had an external effect.
The David Lynch movie Lost Highway tackles a very similar theme, but I didn’t watch that movie until years later, and I hadn’t even heard of David Lynch at the time – a lot of my inspiration was coming more from my personal experiences and the world around me than from other people’s work – there was already so much to draw from, because I was living in such a strange time – which was not necessarily a good thing, but it did allow for some interesting art that might not have existed otherwise.
Unlike the first Baseball Effect, Beth doesn’t play my bandmate in this one – instead, she plays a character named Jenny who is a bit like an adopted mother figure for a lot of the characters, and she’s not as involved in the Newsletter – this was a commentary on how our real lives were getting busier and we couldn’t keep up with what we’d been doing as a band in the same way as we had when we made The Scarf and the original Baseball Effect – there were other folks involved in the Newsletter this time, but the idea was that they were not very serious about it and they were mostly just (unintentionally) causing trouble for Jack, and Jenny would often recommend that Jack stop working with them.
Just like with the other 2 Baseball Effects, the much more serious trouble was caused by the character I was playing – who really insisted on making the Newsletter into a profitable business at the expense of his safety and his friends’ – but Jenny wasn’t aware of this until later – and, ultimately, nothing really horrible happens, because it’s a comedy.
The other big difference with this one is that it’s over 40 minutes long, more than twice the length of any other short film I made in 2004-’05, including the other Baseball Effects – there were a lot of different scenes that were mostly about getting to know the various characters, including a whole montage of Jack and Jenny’s friendship set to a song I wrote and recorded called “Jack and Jenny” – and, there was more original music in this one than most of the short films we were doing at the time – oddly enough, most of the films we made as The Band Of The Land didn’t have any songs in them, and there weren’t even that many instrumentals or that much sound design involved – I think the idea was that we were putting most of our musical energy into writing songs, recording albums, and gigging, and our short films also seemed to benefit from a more minimal soundtrack.
Much like the other 2 Baseball Effects, this one was never released online, and I no longer have any of the files for it – it was rarely screened, and I don’t think we ever did a physical release of it – people who saw any of the Baseball Effects, in full or in part, seemed to like what we were doing, and everyone involved seemed to enjoy working on these projects – but none of them are projects I have much interest in reissuing or releasing to a wider audience.
from Out of Print and Unavailable Filmography (with Band Of The Land Films)
BOTL Lite Season 1 (2007-’08)
BOTL Total Season 1 (2007-’08)
BOTL Radio Seasons 1-3 (2005-’07)
Road to Fame Season 1 (2005-’06)
The Baseball Effect* (2005)
The Baseball Effect* (2005)
Skits and The Baseball Effect (2004)
(or, go to the beginning for the full list of out-of-print and unavailable projects)
* In total, we made 3 different short films called The Baseball Effect. 2 of them were made in the year 2005, but they are not the same movie – they just happen to have the same exact title and were made and released in the same exact year.