A baseball-loving crowd packed into West Newton Cinema on April 26 for a screening of “The Natural” — and then stayed for a lively post-movie chat with 1970s Red Sox pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee and Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy. When Bill Lee talks, a “chat” can quickly turn into philosophy, comedy, and the occasional curveball.
The 1984 film (directed by Barry Levinson and based on Bernard Malamud’s novel) stars Robert Redford, Glenn Close, Robert Duvall, Kim Basinger, and Wilford Brimley. Redford plays Roy Hobbs, a preternaturally talented ballplayer whose shot at greatness nearly ends before it begins.
Asked to name his favorite baseball movie, Lee cited “Eight Men Out,” John Sayles’s 1988 take on the 1919 Black Sox scandal — a film that, in Lee’s view, gets to the heart of the eternal baseball matchup: players vs. owners. “What’s bad about baseball are the owners,” Lee said. “I was the union representative on the Red Sox. I got suspended from the Red Sox because I was the union rep.”
Shaughnessy connected Roy Hobbs to another local legend, describing how the character borrows plenty from Ted Williams, from the swing to the No. 9 jersey, and down to Hobbs’s ideas about how he wanted to be remembered. Williams had his own preferred epitaph: “All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say, ‘There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived.’”
Lee, who seems to have collected stories the way some people collect baseball cards, offered his favorite Ted Williams stories. “Ted Williams hit on my first wife at Red Sox spring training,” he said. “Then he hit on my second wife at a Red Sox fantasy camp, and when he was in a wheelchair at the Breakers Hotel, he hit on my third wife. Ted Williams is the greatest hitter who ever lived.”
Before the lights went down, Mayor Marc Laredo introduced the film and put in a plug for the theater itself. “We’re so happy that the Cinema is thriving,” he said. “And I am really hopeful that we all together will continue to support the Cinema, as it’s a vibrant part of our culture.”
