Inspired by the true story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which operated from 1943 to 1954, Penny Marshall’s 1992 film “A League of Their Own” is a ’90s comedy classic starring Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, Lori Petty, Rosie O’Donnell, and Madonna. It spawned a short-lived television show of the same name and was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2012 for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
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For many people of a certain age, the film was not just a foundational text but a movie so ubiquitous in their lives that they can’t remember life without it. One such person was Abbi Jacobson (“Broad City”), who, along with Will Graham (“Mozart in the Jungle”), pitched a modern spin on the beloved film to Sony Pictures in 2017. Cut to five years later, and their reimagined series is finally up for bat on Amazon Prime Video later this week.
Where Marshall’s film had queer subtext and a nod to the Black women who were excluded from the league, Jacobson and Graham’s take on the story brings both angles to the forefront. The pilot, directed by Jamie Babbit (“But I’m A Cheerleader”), introduces a whole slew of new characters allowing the new series to explore what this era was like for queer women of multiple races, including Black and Latinx. Along with Jacobson in the lead role, the impressive cast includes Chanté Adams (“A Journal for Jordan”), Roberta Colindrez (“Vida”), Gbemisola Ikumel (“Famalam”), Kelly McCormack (“Departure”), Priscilla Delgado (“Julieta”), Melanie Field (“You”), D’Arcy Carden (“The Good Place”), and Dale Dickey (“A Love Song”).
Jacobson spoke to The Playlist over Zoom about researching the era and expanding the kind of history and stories television can tell now.
From a showrunner and creator perspective, what kind of research did you do about the queer communities you showcase in the show?
When Will and I began to talk about embarking on this journey to make this reimagining of the film, we really focused on some of the stories that were untold. Queerness was one of the things that felt really missing from the film. Even though it is an iconically queer movie, no one is really talking about it. It’s just a vibe or sort of like a hint. We had a full-time researcher and a lot of consultants on the show. A big part of that was diving into queer history. We went back before where we were starting the show, which is 1943. We started earlier, and went even later, just to get a context of what was happening around the time. We also had to focus on the Midwest versus what was going on in New York. We really had to dig deep there. Queerness now is way more represented, which is part of the reason why we really wanted to represent more queer stories in the show. We found a lot of different personal stories from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and we also equated the experiences on the show to a lot of experiences around the country that we found.
The show mentions the Chicago Defender a lot. Did you dig through their archives at all?
Yeah, I mean, we really wanted every character’s experience to feel as authentic as possible. And the Defender was such a huge news source for the Black community, and was such an important part of delivering information to Black America, that it felt like it had to be in the show, even if we just mention it. So for Max (Chanté Adams), to be in it was a big deal for her character. That was part of our research deep dives. We just felt like any way that we could use specifics to inform the story and where people were getting their news through those kinds of details really enhances the world.
At what point in the process did Jamie Babbitt come on board to direct the pilot?
Jamie came on in the fall of 2019 when we were prepping the pilot. I had known Jamie a little bit before she came on. I’m just a fan of her work. She’s definitely sort of a queer pioneer. So it felt really significant that she would do it. She dove into the research. We were really excited to have her.
Do you remember the first time you saw Penny Marshall’s film and what it meant to you when you were younger?
You know, I’ve been asked this a lot, and I wish I could remember the exact first time. I think it was one of the first films I saw in a theater. But I don’t remember the first time because it was just such a constant in my childhood. I think there was like a rotation of like four films. I think it was like that, “Sister Act,” “Home Alone,” and “The Mighty Ducks.”
That sounds right. Yes.
Right? So. it was just such a part of my childhood that it influenced me and inspired me in a lot of ways.
Can you talk a bit about the way the characters were diversified for this new series?
The original film focuses on the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which is mostly white women – straight white women and white-passing women. So that was this flaw of the league that we really wanted to explore. We wanted to show the realities of the time. In the film, there’s that iconic scene where a Black woman picks up a foul ball and chucks it back to Geena Davis. Penny Marshall is alluding to the fact that the league did not allow Black women to try out. We really wanted to lean into that, and think, well, if this incredible baseball player is not allowed to try out, what does she do if she’s incredible at baseball? So Max’s character is based on three real women: Toni Stone, Mamie Johnson, and Connie Morgan, who played in the Negro Leagues. They were this fascinating trio of real-life women. Everyone on the team felt that these stories needed to be told. They’re a big part of baseball history.
So the diversification of the cast was not to revise history at all. It was really to show what was happening with women in baseball in the 1940s. We got the opportunity to show what that would have been like for Max’s character. And also to show that although the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was mostly white, there were also some Latinx players on the teams. We were able to show what those experiences were because they were sort of encouraged to be more white-passing. That was a very important experience we really wanted to show.
“A League Of Their Own” debuts August 12 on Prime Video.