American director Carson Lund will be in attendance for a one-off screening of Eephus at Toronto’s Paradise Theatre on March 23.Supplied
Early in the 1990s-set indie comedy Eephus, a pair of baseball players make pregame small talk about the problems of going to see films. “I just don’t have the energy for that,” one says. “Looking up all the movies and driving to all the theatres?”
It is a throwaway line for everyone except the filmmakers, who spent five years making a thoughtful movie that isn’t easy to find in theatres. It’s tough for a small film such as Eephus to make money on big screens. If people were too lazy to attend cinemas in the nineties, there are more reasons than ever to avoid them today.
Which is perhaps why, despite rave reviews from media outlets such as The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, The Washington Past and GQ – “best sports movie of the decade” – Eephus doesn’t have a theatrical run in Canada. So, the team behind the baseball-as-a-metaphor-for-life film are making their pitch to audiences by bringing it here themselves, joining a growing trend of indie filmmakers who are hauling their films to select cities, in the United States as well as Canada, barnstorming one-night-only style.
American director Carson Lund will be in attendance for a one-off screening at Toronto’s Paradise Theatre on March 23. The film was previously selected by festivals in Vancouver, Montreal, Victoria and London, Ont. No other Canadian screenings are scheduled at this time.
Eephus, named after a looping baseball thrown toward the batter at a mesmerizingly slow speed, is being presented here by Alan Jones and Ethan Vestby, co-founders of the Toronto-based screening collective Bleeding Edge. When it appeared the film wouldn’t be shown in the city, they stepped up to bat.
“It’s almost like an orphan film in Canada,” says Vestby, an educator and journalist. “It’s a really acclaimed film that didn’t play at the Toronto International Film Festival and it doesn’t have any Canadian distribution.”
The low-budget Euphus represents some of the problems of film distribution in Canada. It is simply not financially viable for the country’s small distributors to take on such movies. With Bleeding Edge, Vestby and Jones aim to fill the need in Toronto for movies that aren’t selected for TIFF or picked up by a distributor.
Vestby and filmmaker Jones created Bleeding Edge in 2022, initially showing a collection of shorts in a Yorkville bar that was “packed” according to Vestby: “We did it on a whim, with films that hadn’t made it into the festivals.”
With that successful event behind them, they moved on to feature films and into bigger venues, first Innis Town Hall (capacity, 250) and now, six times a year, the 208-seat Paradise. Among the films they’ve screened before are Braden Sitter Sr.’s comedy The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man, Zach Clark’s satirical sci-fi feature The Becomers and the Nate Wilson thriller The All Golden.
“We have a preference for films that have a DIY aesthetic or an underdog appeal,” explains Jones, who co-produced The All Golden. “They’re movies that might wear festival rejection as a stamp of honour instead of something that is disappointing.”
Their Eephus presentation represents a step up in league. Making its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and its North American debut at the New York Film Festival, the autumnal film captures a beer-league baseball game played by fading semi-athletes at a New England ball field destined to be torn down. As explained by one character, the titular pitch, if thrown correctly, “looks like it stops in mid-air.” In the same way, Eephus is at its best when it stands perfectly still.
Though it’s more a sunsetting film than a sports flick, there are winks at the great baseball movies of the past when former major league pitcher (and eephus thrower) Bill Lee mysteriously appears from the woods. After pitching an inning and calling strikeouts “fascist,” he disappears.
Tom Waits’s existential Ol ‘55 plays over the closing credits: “Well, my time went so quickly, I went lickety-splitly.” Bob Dylan’s Not Dark Yet would have worked just as well, not that the filmmakers could have afforded the licensing fee.
It will be hard enough for them to make a profit.
“Everybody wants the big names,” says veteran Toronto film presenter Gary Topp. “The days of art-house films and specialty films getting distribution are long gone, because nobody goes to the theatre. The eclectic movies can’t make money.”
One outlet for niche films in Toronto is production company and distribution entity MDFF (Medium Density Fibreboard Films), which works with TIFF Lightbox to present monthly cinematic offerings that otherwise might go without theatrical exposure in one of the largest markets in North America. The MDFF programmers have only so much screen space, though, which is why Bleeding Edge adopted the orphan Eephus.
“It’s a film that is a little hard to classify,” Vestby says. “It’s not totally an art film, but’s it’s not mainstream entertainment, either. It straddles these lines, and it’s exactly the kind of thing we like to showcase.”
Eephus screens at the Paradise Theatre, 8 p.m., March 23.
