“There’s no crying in baseball!” said Tom Hanks as Jimmy Dugan in the classic 1992 film “A League of Their Own.” Come August 12, the iconic movie will come to life again as a mini-series for Prime Video.
Co-creator Abbi Jacobson, star of Comedy Centrals’ “Broad City,” said they’re doing the mini-series a little differently. To start, Jacobson took the movie a step further and created narratives for the non-white women on baseball — something that was left out in the movie.
“It’s really about reimagining it. Penny Marshall made this film in 1992. She was inspired by a documentary she saw that was about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball league and she inspired so many people.” she said.
The film — a fictionalized account of the creation of All-American Girls’ Professional Baseball League — was selected to be preserved in the U.S. National Films Registry in 2017, with the Library of Congress calling it “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
The original film, which starred Gena Davis, Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell, didn’t showcase any woman of color. Jacobson said there were many reasons behind the films restrictions in 1992.
“There were limitations to the story she could tell in ‘92. We wanted to tell the stories that were overlooked, that were marginalized at the time and talk about this generation of women who played baseball and who were badasses,” Jacobson explained
Jacobson is no stranger to creating voices for the women who are often overlooked in the industry. Her hit show “Broad City,” created with friend Ilana Glazer, was a story about two broke Jewish best-friends living chaotic lives in NYC. The show focused on empowered women and their sexuality, careers, friendships and more.
“There’s a scene in the film with Penny acknowledging that a Black woman would not have been allowed to try out and then nothing happens. Our [series] is about what happens when that door opens for some women — white women and white-passing women — and that door closes for someone else. How do they go find their team?”
“A League of Their Own” is set to air August 12 on Prime Video.
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