Looking forward to “The Perfect Game” movie
My recent interview with author and screenwriter William Winokur was one of the most enjoyable I’ve had in a while. My column about Winokur’s latest novel and movie project, “The Perfect Game,” can be found here:http://www.scnow.com/scp/sports/other/article/bundy_perfect_game_looks_to_be_perfect_read/12799/
For the better part of 30 minutes, Winokur and I not only discussed “The Perfect Game,” we also touched on life in general, writing philosophies and the differences between books and films of the same title.
Winokur grew up in New Jersey went to high school at the prestigious Horace Mann School in the Bronx and college at MIT in Boston.
After MIT, Winokur put together a lucrative Wall Street career that spanned some two decades. Around 2000, Winokur was approaching middle age and was thinking he wanted to make more of a mark on humanity than his dollar dealings had. So, Winokur moved to California to ride horses in the Santa Monica mountains, clear his mind and write.
“It’s been a transition,” Winokur was saying. “Not only going from New York City to California, but going from Wall Street to being a starving artist.
“Writing is not the most lucrative career. You have to really be driven by a passion much greater than a paycheck.”
Winokur’s “The Perfect Game” is based on the true story of a group of kids from the industrial slums of Monterrey, Mexico, who became the first team outside the United States to win the Little League World Series in 1957.
To Winokur’s knowledge, other than some newspaper and magazine stories from the late 1950s-60s, little has ever been written about the team’s feat.
“I liken this story to the Seabiscuit phenomenon,” Winokur told me. “There was a time back in the late 30s when the story of Seabiscuit was known to everybody. It was front-page news. It was a dominant news story. Then for decades, it kind of faded into oblivion until Laura Hillenbrand wrote her book about Seabiscuit.
“Some stories fade into semi obscurity for a while before they’re brought back to the surface.”
Prior to embarking on “The Perfect Game,” Winokur’s first novel “Marathon” had been well received by critics. But “The Perfect Game” movie project is Winokur’s first screenplay.
The movie, which is finished but was pushed from its Aug. 8 release date, stars Clifton Collins, Jr., Emile de Ravin, Cheech Marin, Jake T. Austin and Ryan Ochoa.
“(Screenwriting) is a completely different medium than writing a book,” Winokur says. “It’s like oil painting and sculpting. They’re both art forms, but the two are so different.
“When you’re writing a script, you’re really laying down the blueprint for a movie. You’re putting on paper something that has to be built by others into the three-dimensional world. It’s such a collaboration of every discipline of the arts – music, visual, acting, etc.
“When you write a book, within the four corners of the page is everything the reader gets. You have to describe to him or her what they are seeing, smelling, tasting, feeling – everything. You have to be a reader’s eyes, ears, nose, hands – every sense.”
Winokur says the toughest part about writing a screen play from a book is deciding what to leave in, what to leave out.
“There are two extremes of writing. There’s writer’s block, and then there’s what I call hemophilia of writing. When you start writing, you don’t clot,” Winokur said with a chuckle. “When doing a screen play, it’s a challenge to realize when less is more.
“The book obviously tells a broader story than a movie can given the constraints of the length of a movie. I hope the book makes people anxious and excited to see the film. It’s a beautiful film.”
While I’m not a huge movie buff, I am a huge baseball fan and I’m looking forward to seeing this film on the heels of the book. When I hear of a new release date, I’ll blog it here.
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on 08/18 at 10:59 AM
