There’s never been a book written about the sub-genre of the so-called “hangout” film. In fact, the earliest reference I’ve come across of the term was Quentin Tarantino describing his admiration for Howard Hawks’ “Rio Bravo” and Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused.” Tarantino defined the sub-genre as being, “movies that you hang out with the characters so much that they actually become your friends.”
When director Carson Lund was on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast he talked about setting out to make a hangout film with “Eephus.” The director, who used to write about movies for Slant, has become a student of the genre, and offered a more specific definition.
“[The hangout movie] is a film that prioritizes character interaction at the expense of forward plot momentum. It’s more about just enjoying, as a viewer, spending time with these people,” said Lund on the podcast. “ Howard Hawks is the master of this. They didn’t call ’em hangout films then, but I think of something like ‘Hatari!’ as definitely a hangout film, where the situation is really just an excuse to spend time with these people.”
The story of “Eephus” revolves around a baseball game, specifically two recreational baseball teams of grown men, in small-town New England, playing their last game on their beloved field before it gets torn down. And while “Eephus” is very much a baseball movie, it is decidedly not a sports drama building toward a dramatic culmination of the game.
“Baseball is a hangout sport, at the professional level there’s 162 games [a season], you don’t need to win every game,” said Lund. “It’s a game that has a lot of downtime, what people see as boredom. I think when you play it is filled with anticipation and also just filled with [socializing], camaraderie when you’re in the dugout, there’s a lot going on, even if the game itself is not very tense. I set out to make something that would capture my own feelings playing the game, like the actual experience of being a player on the field and feeling that.”
Lund stopped playing high school ball growing up in New England, having become fed up with the pressure and weight room training which drained the fun from the sport for the future filmmaker. But when he picked it up again as an adult, joining a rec league after moving to Los Angeles, he rediscovered what he loved about the game, as well as inspiration for him to make his own hangout film.
“The league is made up of those people that didn’t make it, that didn’t get to that next level, so actually the pressure’s off and it’s really more about that camaraderie and just having that sort of like refuge once a week to go play a thing that you love and that reminds you of childhood,” said Lund.
While the baseball game itself supplies the film with a loose structure — Lund and his co-writers Michael Basta and Nate Fisher started the scripting process by creating a box score for the entire fictional game— the focus is often on what happens between plays, the ritual, and the interactions, which Lund found becomes more interesting when colored by what is happening in the game and the anticipation of the next play.
Lund also wanted to capture the essence of the oddball community of a rec league team. Like with Linklater’s hangout films, such as “Dazed and Confused,” “Eephus” is structured by its emphasis on the ensemble. Whereas having a protagonist instantly leads the audience to expect goals, conflict, and character arc, Lund wanted a film about the communal experience of leaving the day-to-day of work, family, and routine behind for a few hours.
“We have a big ensemble and we wanted equity between all the different characters. It allows you a lot of freedom to decide, ‘Okay, who have we not spent time with in a little while? What team, or what player, or what person on the sidelines have we not given our attention to?’ So it becomes this exercise of moving around that ensemble,” said Lund. “We just wanted to create that fullness of the experience to get a sense of everyone who comes to this game and what it means to them. Because this is really a collective experience. Everyone’s going through the same thing, having the same kind of epiphany or lack of epiphany. It’s important to make sure we don’t sort of overlook certain aspects of that ritual.”
Like with the best of Linklater’s films, often set over a short and defined time span, Lund wanted to capture the sense of time passing, and the wistful melancholy that comes with it. In “Eephus” there’s an added emotional and narrative dimension to this with it being the last time these men will play baseball.
“That’s one of my favorite qualities of cinema is when you feel time passing,” said Lund. “I’m a big fan of Linklater and also Chantal Akerman, more of these durational filmmakers, who make you really feel a passage of time.”
Lund specifically set the game in New England during the fall, where the change of seasons is visible in the leaves, and the coming winter can be felt in the air. For Lund, the feeling of time passing is specifically tied to the light, and placing extra careful attention during production that the viewer would feel the passing of the day by shooting at specific times of day.
“One thing that gets overlooked, both in life and in movies, is that passage from magic hour to darkness. We get a lot of films that utilize magic hour for beauty, but to actually feel each minute pass, and the way that the sun changes and the way that the overall light is changing and affecting our experience, it’s a kind of a magical thing that happens every day,” said Lund. “I really wanted for you as a viewer to actually experience that, the theater darkening as the movie goes on, because that’s something that’s so visceral.”
“Eephus” opens today in New York City at Film at Lincoln Center and the IFC Center. It expands next week to other cities, including Los Angeles, and throughout Massachusetts. For more infomation, visit the “Eephus” website.
To hear Carson Lund’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
