Breakfast All Day Podcast: A La Carte With Dan Shaughnessy

Image result for dan shaughnessy

Dan Shaughnessy is a legendary sportswriter, author and a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He’s also a really old friend of ours, someone we stay with whenever we’re in Boston, which we did recently. This time, I also had the pleasure of sitting down with him for a Breakfast All Day A La Carte conversation about his lengthy and storied career. Dan talks about growing up a huge sports fan in small-town Groton, Mass., getting his start in sportswriting, and covering iconic Boston teams like the Celtics in the ’80s and the Red Sox through their many heartaches and triumphs. After all, he is the author of “The Curse of the Bambino.” But Dan also loves movies, so we discuss his favorite baseball films and the ones that really get Boston right (including that tricky accent). This was so much fun, so please enjoy this on-location episode.

5

  1. Talks of Journalism and Time Passing

    Christy,

    What I find interesting, isthe representation of the journalist or writer, in the movies. It’s a very commonly used film script writer’s approach. What I feel a lot of these interviews might be a preparation for? A Christy Lemire original screen play, based around the same? Recently, I came across an old Guardian obituary column, written about a very interesting editor of a weekly journal during the post war years in London. The obit is written by Andrew Saint, for the Guardian newspaper. When I was young and growing up in Dublin, the odd time I’d get to hear in person a talk from one of the veteran architectural journalists, who’d come across for a visit to Dublin and talk from memory about the very old days. I liked the bit in this 2006 obituary about Colin Boyne, and about always been at the place as a reporter as the right times.

    https://www.theguardian.com/media/2006/oct/26/pressandpublishing.artsobituaries

    “The mood in British architecture after 1945 was for rolling up sleeves and getting on with replanning and rehousing the nation. Architects were no longer to be amateurs and aesthetes, hanging about the clubs. With a vast social and technical job to do, they had to grow up, learn and put their shoulders to the wheel, dispensing with individualism and vanity”.

    Back very long ago, in the days long hence of my very own individualism and vanity, I once remember attending a talk given in Dublin by John Heyduk, one of the original gang of ‘the New York Five’ (Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Meier and Heyduk). He read some of his poetry about houses, that was 25 years ago. Maybe I was younger back then, but these memories of live lectures and talks given by many of these characters remains with me. I don’t know. Nowadays, we’ve got YouTube. People just invite you straight in and go look, here is my new fancy home. Not really the same thing, as listening to John Heyduk poetry.

    This convinces me, that I must sit down some day and try to write a screen play on the subject of Britain and it’s society in post war times (Clem Attlee had just replaced Churchill as Prime Minister, and Truman had just replaced Roosevelt over there). There’s definitely something though about personal stories, one to one interviews like these which is valuable. The experience of listening to them, enters in and sort of remains locked in there for a very long time after. Even more so I’d imagine, where one is sitting beside the microphone. That’s why I’d like to return to the ‘blank page’ some time and develop into a story. It’s been done on screen to a certain extent. The Good German, The Quiet Man, Lawrence of Arabia in the First War. But something different to any of those, with a journalism figure at the centre (the adaptation of ‘All the King’s Men’ by Robert Penn Warren comes to mind, where Jude Law played a Louisiana upper class toff).

    Jude Law playing a slightly older and more mature journalism editor, of a magazine tasked with providing the assistance to re-build Britain’s crumbling infrastructure after the war. Now that I think of it, no less than Spielberg himself has visited that space in the character of James Donavan lawyer, played by Tom Hanks. I’d love to put Tom Hanks with Jude Law in the basement pub of the architect’s journal circa 1945, or thereafter. And let them argue over architecture. That would be funny. Law as the upper class point of view, and Hanks as the working man. And allow them to become louder and more rambunctious (Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Jude Law together again, that would have been a sight, both ‘rolling up the sleeves’ together). I don’t know what prompted me to think about that today. But yeah, talking to the lifelong journalists on the podcasts, and practitioners in the industry has certainly been of interest. Brian

    Reply

  3. Christy, I guess this is really my point. Marion Cotillard, Brad Pitt in a large, flashy production such as Allied. When reviewed on WTF or elsewhere, may have been described as a classic Hollywood homage. Here’s the point. We’ve got these very skilled productions, Zemeckis and Steven Knight writer. Where i’m looking at starvation really for better research on better character and story making.

    We should all really get rid of that phrase out of film criticism really, that one of ‘the plot twist’. My memory of ‘Allied’ really, was a sequence of fairly banal plot twists and reveals, but no real story there to tell. And especially given, that one scratches the story to any depth at all. There is so much that is truly interesting, to work with. That’s my point. But why is it so hard for the film industry to develop these stories into projects? It baffles me always.

    Reply

  4. Re: Journalism, Sport, Combat in Movies

    Christy, your interview with the sports journalist made me think of a few representations of the journalist in movies (George Clooney did one on early history of professional sport, ‘Leatherheads’, Renee played a mean, tough lady aspiring editor in it, which was by far the most entertaining thing about it). I’ll quickly jot down some references, and cross references while I can. My favorite one would definitely be ‘Eight Men Out’, although I think the narrator was a player, but it felt like a story told from the journalistic point of view too.

    The one I really was reaching to remember was about Edward R. Murrow, and there again I think what Tarantino has never done is that. To follow the early careers of Murrow, Cronkite all of the rest of them to Europe in the forties. To the best of my knowledge, no one has done that. Tarantino did put us behind the lines, into a basement pub in Germany alright and in so doing, proved that it could be done. Heck he even brought us to a French movie theatre under occupation by Germany. That was a trip, looking back at it (complete with David Bowie to boot?).

    Woody Allen put us in Paris in the Twenties (Midnight in Paris), with one of Picasso’s many wives played by Cotillard very well. Remember that Hemingway who appears in Woody Allen’s feature with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and left then to go on Safari in Africa with somebody (can’t remember but I think it was Picasso’s wife), did leave behind Cuba later on in the forties. The man who started as a journalist in pre- World War One and was friends with Gary Copper I think, ended up again in Paris with Murrow and company in the forties. Hemingway in the forties discovering that he could write news or fire live ammunition at the enemy, but times had changes and he wasn’t allowed both like in the first great war.

    This is where I’m getting to.

    The George Clooney film from 2006, ‘Good Night, And Good Luck’, that was the film which this interview with Dan Shaughnessy (‘shock-nessy’ we pronounce it here in Limerick as, where many of ’em came from originally), reminded me of. It’s that point immediately after the war was over that these war journalists returned to. It’s the untold part of that story in Clooney’s feature, is where I’d pick it up. That’s where Colin Boyne and those other fellows in the basement in London come into it too.

    Another individual would died last March of 2019, was someone of that generation who emerged from architecture school in Dublin in 1945, and left for America. Alonso, who is fond of documentaries and Dave who are both astute critics, may have reviewed the documentary ‘Kevin Roche: The Quiet Architect’ (2017) for their podcast. If not, considering Alonso’s long attachment to multi-disciplinary art expo’s in Europe like the one in Venice, I think would enjoy it. It’s director a man named Mark Noonan.

    I’m leaving out another one of my absolute favorites, a Dino De Laurentiis production from 1968 and starring Robert Mitchum as Dick Ennis (who was kind of represented something like in the mould of the characters that I mentioned above in Paris). Named ‘Anzio’, is was set over there and situates an audience inside of a hell raising party inside an Italian villa shortly after a landing in Italy. Long before Quentin or anyone else, brought us back to those situations in a movie viewing experience.

    Also, it was written by H.A.L. Craig, who was from Limerick too, around where those Shaughnessy folk are from too. Just my tup’pence worth about it all. Brian

    Reply

Post a comment

Top