West Point’s alumni association has canceled a ceremony honoring Oscar winner Tom Hanks, citing the need to focus on its “core mission” of preparing cadets.
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If you took Tom Hanks to a baseball game, he probably wouldn’t last nine innings.
The Oscar-winning actor, who starred in the 1992 sports drama “A League of Their Own,” opened up about filming the baseball flick during an appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” on Tuesday, Nov. 25.
The film, directed by Penny Marshall, is a fictionalized portrayal of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, in which Hanks plays former baseball player Jimmy Dugan, who reluctantly manages the league’s Rockford Peaches team.
“Every day, I played ball and ate frankfurters and talked to girls all summer long,” Hanks, 69, told Meyers. “It was the biggest event on the planet.”
However, not every scene was a home run for Hanks.
The actor expressed his frustration with the filming of a lengthy sequence during which the members of the Rockford Peaches commiserate over their struggle to attract fans to their game. Despite Dugan’s presence in the scene, Hank’s character had minimal dialogue.
“I read the pages, and I had the first line of the scene, and I had the last line of the scene,” Hanks recalled. “And I knew that if I didn’t get out of that shabby dugout, I was going to have to shoot that scene for three and a half days.”
To escape the long day of filming, Hanks said he improvised a bit after giving his first line, explaining that Dugan was walking away to “give the umpire the lineup”. Hanks spontaneously returned at the scene’s conclusion to say his final line.
Hanks said, “Because of where the sun was, they had to shoot for hours on end for three afternoons in a row.” “And you know what I was doing while they were shooting? I was playing Three Flies Up and eating turkey franks, baby. Because I was smart enough to get out!”
He concluded: “That’s what professionals do, baby! They read the script and say, ‘I don’t think I should be in this scene.'”
Hanks starred alongside Geena Davis, Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell in “A League of Their Own”, released in July 1992, which grossed $107.5 million worldwide and earned Hanks an American Comedy Award for Funniest Supporting Actor in a Film.
In 2012, 20 years after its debut, the film was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. A TV series remake starring Abbi Jacobson, Chante Adams, and D’Arcy Cardon premiered on Prime Video in 2022.
(This story was updated to correct a typo.)
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