Cinema and Baseball’s Shared Crisis: An Interview with Carson Lund (Web Exclusive)
by Paul Risker

Eephus, American director Carson Lund’s directorial feature debut, begins on one warm New England afternoon and ends long after the sun has set over the hallowed grounds of Soldier’s Field. For longer than anyone can remember, this has been the place where the River Dogs and Adler’s Paint, two recreational baseball teams, have been meeting.

Eephus begins with the celebrated American documentarian Frederick Wiseman as the off-screen radio reporter, Branch Moreland, running through a series of local news reports. With humorous undertones, one news item sets the stage for the final showdown between the two teams. The local authority has green-lit plans to raze their beloved field and build a school on the site.

The elderly Franny (Cliff Blake), who has kept score for every game, is the first to arrive. He sets up his table and chair and dates his scorecard—he verbally builds the anticipation for this final showdown. The middle-aged men, with a sprinkle of youth, begin arriving. First among them is Ed Mortanian (Keith William Richards), the pitcher and captain of Adler’s Paint, whose slight sardonic tone towards Franny suggests he pities him for no longer being able to play, only watch. Franny tells Ed it’s perfect weather for baseball.

The air is filled with the sound of banter, arguments, and trash talking. The umpire who would rather not be there is forced to reign in the competitive egos and unsportsmanlike ploys of men acting like children. As the game unfolds, the lack of athleticism is glaringly obvious. These grown men are clinging to yesteryear and Ed refuses to step aside for a younger pitcher with more zip on his pitches. He’s adamant he’ll pitch nine innings, until his cantankerous and angry brother shows up and hauls him off for their niece’s christening.

The score winds up tied and, when the umpire leaves, Franny is charged with taking his place—from the press box. Each team is willing to do whatever it takes to keep the game going, and as the sun fades and dusk turns to night, car headlights are used for floodlights, and the competition to break the deadlock goes on.

The film borrows its name from a type of slow pitch one of the players is known for throwing. Rarely seen, it has its own lore. It’s no coincidence that Lund chose to name his film after the Eephus pitch, which is a metaphor for the story’s slow pace and drawn-out drama.

Lund draws inspiration from the recreational baseball leagues he has played in, but the film is also about America’s longstanding love affair with baseball. Massachusetts is the ideal setting given the deep-rooted enthusiasm for the game in this part of the country and being home to the infamous "curse of the Bambino," that inflicted an eighty-six-year championship drought on the Boston Red Sox. As baseball struggles to compete with other sports, parallels can be drawn to cinema’s own existential crisis and the timely realization that it’s no longer the dominant art form.

The theme of the passage of time and all things ending is integral to Eephus’s story. It’s not only a reflection of two great American pastimes confronting their mortality but also these recreational baseball players being faced with the untimely end of their leisure ritual. Eephus is a simple hangout film with a comedic charm and a specific nostalgic sensibility, which will resonate more acutely with millennials and viewers from earlier generations. It taps into that spirit of hanging out with your friends—the banter, the arguments and trash talk, playing games in the street, and finding ways to fill the day-long boredom. The determination of the characters to play into the night will also recall memories of being young and dreading the sound of parents calling you back home. You’d be eager to extend the day as late into the evening as possible.

For the postmillennial generation, the experience of growing up and leisure may contrast, offering a different experience. Lund, however, is also offering a political critique, whereby Eephus’s premise is a metaphor for the intrusion of work on leisure time, and the growing work-life imbalance that allows adults less time to pursue and develop interests.

In a recent conversation with Cineaste, Lund reflected on the parallels between baseball and art, and waiting patiently for his feature debut to present itself. He also discussed Eephus’s themes, nurturing a conversation that would include the audience, creating a microcosm of society, and the film’s political leanings—Paul Risker

Cineaste: Why did you choose Eephus as the milestone moment for your directorial feature debut?

Carson Lund: I’ve probably written one or two feature scripts in the past, just as an exercise, but I never intended to make them. I’m not someone who writes a lot of different scripts, and I was being patient, trying to wait until something struck me as the story that felt the truest. Eephus is just what presented itself over time. I finally had that Eureka moment where I said this is the movie I want to make. It’s because baseball is such a big part of my life, and I see a parallel between the crisis that baseball is in and the crisis for independent movies. I see that parallel with maybe cinema as an art form in general, and I just felt like there was something I could tease out of that.

I also have personal experience of playing in a league here in Los Angeles as well as other leagues in the past. I had all these memories of different teammates, and I felt this is a world I can consider, understand, and write about. I can also ask these deeper questions about change, time, and mortality, in a very contained structure that felt achievable.

I’m always thinking about what is within my means as an independent filmmaker—without a lot of money, how can I go about something? So, I was always trying to find the narrative container that made sense, and one baseball game made a lot of sense to me.

Cineaste: So, the themes, ideas, and questions are at the forefront of your intentions when you set out to tell a story?

Lund: The ideas are what drive me. It’s not like I am burning to tell a conflict-heavy story. I’m not trying to keep audiences on the edge of their seats. I think movies are a conversation; they’re an invitation to experience something new and enter an atmosphere that you maybe aren’t familiar with, and you feel what the characters are going through. I’ve always been drawn more to movies as a way to experience space and time differently; not to be wrapped up in a plot. Of course, I love a great thriller, but that’s not what I wanted to do.

So, yes, themes and the ideas are what drive everything, and for me, it was the idea. I’m someone for whom a lot has changed in the last ten years. I moved across the country, and I made new friends. I obviously retained a lot of my old friends, but I was thinking about the changes in our lives and how much happens—how many goodbyes we have to say without even realizing that they’re goodbyes, whether it’s to people or to ways of life that we once had. Everything is always in flux.

Cineaste: Listening to you, I’m thinking about how we habitually and naively expect things to continue. In Eephus, the characters encounter the reality that everything comes to a natural end.

Lund: We always ignore reality, and sometimes we look back and say, “Oh my gosh, that was the last time I did that thing.” Or “I didn’t realize it was ending in the moment.” There are so many reasons why this can happen. Sometimes it’s an external factor, like a school being built. Sometimes it’s a physical factor because our body is ailing, or we move away. There are so many reasons why things just disappear from our lives, but the underlying constant is that it’s going to change. All things pass, and so the idea for the film is as simple as that.

It’s also profound and kind of haunting that we must think about how we’re always dealing with things being in flux. And, especially with sports, there’s a clock—it’s finite, and you can’t play forever, because the body is going to get to a point where you’re not going to be able to run around. If that’s something that brings you great joy, it’s obviously existentially unsettling when that maybe can’t happen anymore. So, yes, I was thinking about all of that because it’s a game that connects you to childhood in a way.

Cineaste: Franny has watched all their games, and despite the audience being introduced to this rivalry at its end, one of the successes of the film is how it taps into this personal history to make you feel what you haven’t seen unfold. To your point, the characters are connecting with their inner child, and the film is collapsing time.

Lund: Yes, that’s a good point. It was a very conscious choice not to show too many flashbacks, and to not show the outside world. Instead, only show this little moment in time, because this field is a refuge for them. And yet, the field has history within it. The players all have decades of experience bonding with one another, and I wanted you to feel all of that without showing it. I wanted the world outside the field to be clear through the radio advertisements without us having to see it.

So, you have a sense of what context these players are emerging from. They all have their lingo, their jokes, and their banter, that indicates years of comfort with one another within this very specific context. Franny’s the outsider in a way—he’s inside and outside at the same time. He’s with this group, but he’s not playing. He is a spectator, and I think he’s a surrogate for the audience, because he’s the only guy who’s there the whole time. He keeps track of things and tries to make a record of it. He’s trying, however imperfectly, to capture his experience and work through it in his own way, and on his own terms. He feels gratitude for having done that and appreciates having been a part of that in whatever way he was.

I think he’s someone who has that self-consciousness or that self-reckoning, whereas a lot of the other characters are still going through it, and they still don’t know, as we said, that it’s the end. They know that field is coming to an end, but maybe they’re just starting to consider that this is also the end for them as a group.

Some of them have played their last game on that field, others maybe not, but they’re all coming to terms with it very gradually and in a repressed kind of way. They don’t know how to address it. Maybe it’s not even conscious for them, but they are going through the pain of a loss. Franny is not okay with it, but he’s at peace in some way. As a viewer, you are there with Franny—he’s the soul of the film.

Cineaste: There are moments where the film cuts to the sidelines, but there are no flashbacks or scenes set outside this space. Some of the periphery encounters with stragglers, who turn up to watch and often tease the players, or when the players search for lost baseballs, are some of the film’s most entertaining moments. They serve to create this mini-universe of movement and activity within a claustrophobic space.

Lund: I think it’s a little microcosm of society at large or for life—the world. The field itself is that space of comfort and ease, and they all have their own little place within it—for example, the dugout where they sit. A lot of other games are about territory, and then there’s this game, where you’re always going home—it’s more inviting. There’s a lot of space between everyone. You’re out there on real grass and you feel the breeze. It’s a game that’s really connected to nature, and so, it’s a refuge in a way for all these guys. Without the game, they wouldn’t quite know how to access it. Whatever they’ve created on that field together, whatever version of themselves they have on the field, they don’t have access to outside of that. So, to lose it is to lose a version of themselves.

That’s also why, as it gets darker, the field itself gets a little more abstract—it loses its clarity and shape. With all the shadows, you lose the organization of the field, and so the field and the space itself is decaying over the course of the movie.

Cineaste: Thinking about the film as a mini-universe, if Franny is the soul of the film, he’s like the sun. He’s the first character we see other than hearing Frederick Wiseman’s voice on the radio. Then, the other characters enter, who are like the planets orbiting Franny.

Lund: Thank you, and it makes me realize that, yes, the only time we use a dissolve in the film is from the stars to Franny. So, it’s from the galaxy, and I think ultimately there’s a parallel here between Franny, spectatorship, and cinema.

Franny is the viewer, and he’s making meaning of it in his own way, and you, the audience, are making meaning of it in your own way. It’s interacting with your own thoughts and feelings and memories. Then, the film becomes whatever you make of it or whatever you project onto it. That’s part of why Franny is the soul of the movie, because whatever you take from him, might also be what he takes from the game. The movie doesn’t really propose any answers or clear messages, but it gives you a lot of information, and it shows you a world. Then, you must make of it what you will. So, Franny is that inactive or passive observer—he’s the audience for cinema.

In a world where cinema’s value is seemingly lessened in the culture at large, it doesn’t have the same place it used to have. So, we all must consider our own relationship to it. I think Franny, especially when he goes up to the press box, and he has this great view of everything, he’s like a cinema viewer. The only way to move forward is to light the field, and much like we do when we make a movie, we need to light the scene. [Laughs]

Cineaste: In the past year, there have been discussions about how cinema is no longer the dominant art form, which feeds into what appears to be an existential crisis. Attending festivals, I witness the enthusiastic appetite for cinema. If its dominance has peaked, it has lost none of its power to affect us and stir our humanity. Films can touch and connect with us individually, enabling us to relate to meaningful conversations and moments. To return to the earlier comparison between cinema and baseball, how far can we go in positioning them as mirror images or metaphors for one another?

Lund: You’re preaching to the choir. You’re saying many things I agree with. I certainly don’t think cinema’s dead; I never have thought that. They’ve been saying that for twenty-five years; probably longer. It’s always in a state of crisis, and we can always find a way forward, and that’s also the movie. 

The characters find a way forward; they keep going, but it must end eventually. I’m not saying cinema will end, but the movie ends with a lot of unresolved questions. I feel that’s where we’re at with movies, but I approached this from an American context, where baseball and cinema have been the pastimes of American life for a hundred years or more.

They used to be the two main entertainment outlets—going to a baseball game or going to the movies or a drive-in theater. This was just like part of our American life. It was a way to escape and experience time differently. Now there are so many other things that compete with that. Now, baseball and movies are trying to fit within the shape of those things. They’re trying to speed up, or they’re trying to fit within the structures of those other outlets, by trying to have certain run times or be made in a way that’s more applicable to the streaming service and what it demands in terms of quality or structure. We lose something when these forms change, and they don’t allow the same kind of patience that they once allowed. That’s true of baseball, which has had some rule changes in the last few years. These changes have sped it up and have tried to make it a more digestible piece of entertainment, instead of a whole experience that is offering something unique, and escapist.

Cineaste: I’m fascinated by the idea of how we change without losing the essence of who we are. Change is inevitable, and sometimes we need to circle back to reconnect with a part of what once made us who we are. It’s easy to change parts of ourselves, only to realize years later that we should have valued that part of ourselves. Eephus is exploring these specific ideas about human nature.

Lund: The circumstances around us change but how do we retain the core of what was meaningful in that space or in those circumstances that used to be different? I don’t know. That’s what the movie’s asking.

Cineaste: Do you see Eephus as having a political interest or commentary?

Lund: Yeah, I think so. The reason why we don’t have the time for leisure that we may have once had is because our politics are rotten in America right now. There are not enough jobs to go around, and no one has health care, and everyone’s stressed out. People must work two or three jobs just to make ends meet, and this stress is basically one accident away from poverty. It means we don’t have time to just hang out and do the things we love—to have leisure time, to have “meaningless time,” or time for trivial things. The very notion of the trivial and the mundane, the importance of that, has been destroyed by contemporary politics.

It’s all about optimizing our value and making sure that every moment of our lives is spent working toward profit. So, I’m disgusted by that way of living, and it has a lot to do with the structures of late capitalism and how everyone and everything has been turned into a commodity. What the movie’s doing, when the umpire leaves, is to try to envision a little world where there’s a kind of imperfect but fluid democracy at work. They’re just trying to keep going no matter how messy it is—there’s no authority figure anymore, and they’re trying to figure out what to do.

The movie doesn’t propose that it all works when there’s no authority figure, but it does kind of. They find their own way to move forward, so I do see it as political, maybe radical even, because it’s asking us to value the dead time and try to find a way for that to be part of our lives again. Maybe it has never been a part of our lives, and maybe we should look at this film and say, "We should let this be a part of our lives."

Cineaste: Since Eephus played on the festival circuit, there have been tectonic shifts in American politics. Attempting not to be too drawn toward Trump, if Eephus is doing what you’re saying, is it subtly taking on the system? I can’t help but see it as a provocative and subversive film that challenges political and other systems.

Lund: I appreciate that. I do think it’s subtly subversive by not giving us a clear conflict; by not giving us a clear plot or character to root for. By making us just simply experience this passage of time, it’s asking us to be more present and alert and not make these prejudgments. To have a film that’s just a decrescendo is in itself a bit of a rebuke to the inherited ideas of what narrative cinema should be. It’s always a buildup to a big climax, and this is the opposite.

I don’t want to overstate the film’s radical nature, but I’m trying to make you think differently about space and time, and make you question time, and how you use it. In the current world, that’s one of the most political gestures you can make, because time is so weaponized, like I said, to make everything have some sort of monetary value.

Eephus is distributed in the United States by Music Box Films.

Paul Risker is a U.K.-based film critic and PopMatters contributing editor. He’s on the advisory board of Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration (MSJ), the official film studies journal of Kwantlen Polytechnic University, for which he is the interview editor. His work has been published by RogerEbert.com, Little White Lies, Quarterly Review of Film & Video, Film International, Filmmaker, Dirty Movies, and VideoScope.

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Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 3