The Scout

The Scout (1994)

He was praying for a miracle. What he got was Steve Nebraska.

When his star recruit botches a Major League Baseball debut, humiliated talent scout Al Percolo gets banished to rural Mexico, where he finds a potential gold mine in the arm of young phenom Steve Nebraska. Soon, the New York Yankees put a $55 million contract on the table—provided a psychiatrist can affirm Nebraska's mental stability.

Date of release
1994-09-30
TMDB
5.2 / 10 (124)
Runtime
1h 41m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Michael Ritchie

Casting

Interesting facts

The Scout is a 1994 American comedy film starring Brendan Fraser and Albert Brooks and directed by Michael Ritchie. The film is based on the 1976 The New Yorker article "Scout" by Roger Angell.

Production

The film was based on a Roger Angell article "Scout" published in The New Yorker in 1976, which had been optioned by Andrew Bergman's producing partner. Bergman wrote his script for Peter Falk to play the scout Al Percolo and Jim Belushi to play the player Steve Nebraska. "There were honestly five different versions of this movie," says Bergman.

Falk was not available then Walter Matthau was going to make it with Michael Ritchie. The project did not proceed until years later with Ritchie directing and Albert Brooks playing the scout Al. "That wasn’t my conception at all," said Bergman. "The original conception was much more bananas.

In a July 1999 interview with Gavin Smith in Film Comment, Brooks said that The Scout was originally intended for Rodney Dangerfield. "It was lying around, never going to get made, and I said I would like to do that."

Brooks said that he contributed to a rewrite of the script because "it was written very silly." The version he worked on, he said, "did not end like Rocky with that bullshit big ending." But according to Brooks, the studio forced Ritchie to change the ending.

Bob Costas, Tim McCarver, Tony Bennett, John Sterling, Keith Hernandez, Bret Saberhagen, George Steinbrenner, Ozzie Smith, Bob Tewksbury and Bobby Murcer, among others, play themselves in the film.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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