Cobb is a 1994 American biographicalsports drama film starring Tommy Lee Jones as baseball player Ty Cobb. The film was written and directed by Ron Shelton and based on a 1994 book by Al Stump. The original music score was composed by Elliot Goldenthal. The film is told through the partnership between Cobb and sportswriter Al Stump who served as a ghostwriter of Cobb's autobiography. Some critics lauded the film and Jones's performance, but the box office results for the film were underwhelming, grossing little over $1 million on a budget of $25.5 million.[1][2]
In 1960, sportswriter Al Stump is hired as the ghostwriter for an authorized autobiography of baseball player Tyrus Raymond "Ty" Cobb. Now 74 and in failing health, Cobb wants an official biography to "set the record straight" before he dies. In addition, Stump will get to accompany Cobb at the annual Baseball Hall of Fame ceremony in Cooperstown, New York, where Cobb is due to be inducted.
Stump arrives at Cobb's estate on Lake Tahoe, where he finds Cobb to be a continually-drunken, misanthropic and bitter racist who abuses everyone he comes in contact with. Even though Cobb's darker reputation was already a known secret by many, including Stump, the sportswriter is still shocked at the length of Cobb's behavior and ill temper when seen at face value. Although Cobb's home is luxurious, it is without heat, power, and running water due to long-running violent disputes between Cobb and utility companies. Cobb also rapidly runs through domestic workers, hiring and firing them in quick succession. Although Cobb is seriously ill and prone to frequent physical breakdowns, including sexual impotence, he retains considerable strength and also keeps several loaded firearms within easy reach at almost all times, making the outbreak of violent confrontation a constant possibility. Stump finds himself butting heads with Cobb from the first day of the job, when the two men differ on the structure of the book, with Cobb wanting to empatize his self-proclaimed greatness, while Stump argues that Cobb can't call himself great, but needs to rely on others proclaiming his greatness.
Before heading for Cooperstown, Cobb plans a quick trip for him and Stump to Reno for fun. Cobb almost gets killed in an automobile accident off the Donner Pass, driving recklessly in a blizzard. Stump rescues him, but Cobb then seizes control of Stump's car until he gets into another accident. The car has to be towed to Reno. There, Stump and Cobb see a show at a resort hotel featuring Keely Smith and Louis Prima, whose act Cobb rudely interrupts.
One morning, Cobb comes into Stump's hotel room and looks at some notes Stump had written that decry the ballplayer as "pathetic" and "lost in the past". In a rage, Cobb argues with Stump that people aren't interested in Cobb's personal issues. Only his achievements as a great player are important. He then gleefully reveals that Stump's agents agreed, behind the writer's back, to allow Cobb final editorial approval on his book, breaking the standard clause Stump has in his contract. Despite Cobb's preferred vision for the book, the player does start opening up to Stump about the pivotal event of his life, the death of his father by his mother, which he tells Stump was a result of his dad's jealous personality.
A cigarette girl, Ramona, becomes interested in Stump, but when Cobb barges into the hotel room, he's in a jealous rage. He knocks Stump out, takes Ramona to another room, where he physically abuses her, while still failing to achieve sexual arousal. Stump comes to just in time to see Ramona storm out of Cobb's room, viciously mocking the player as "Georgia trash." Horrified with what he's seen of Cobb since meeting him, Stump decides to focus on writing the true story of Cobb, instead of Cobb's intended version.
Aware of Cobb's editorial approval, Stump writes two books concurrently, the one Cobb expects ("My Life in Baseball") and a sensational, merciless account that will reveal the real Cobb, warts and all. Stump continues writing notes for the expose on different forms of hotel stationery, including hotel napkins which he hides. Stump then places the typewritten pages of "My Life in Baseball" on his workspace for Cobb to see and approve. Stump plans to complete Cobb's version while the old man is still alive, guaranteeing his payment for the project without violating Cobb's approval clause, and letting Cobb die happy. Stump will then issue the hard-hitting follow-up after Cobb is gone.
As Cobb and Stump resume the road trip, the two work on Cobb's book during the day, while Stump works on his book late at night, as Cobb sleeps. Stump soon goes from just being Cobb's ghostwriter to a general caretaker for the player, making sure Ty takes his various medications during the trip. Stump is amazed by the ill Cobb seeming to maintain some vitality despite his various ailments, which include cancer.
Cobb and Stump finally reach the Hall of Fame's induction weekend in Cooperstown, New York, where many star players from Cobb's era are in attendance, including Rogers Hornsby and Mickey Cochrane. In the runup to the dinner, Stump learns that Cobb has secretly been financially helping some old former teammates who have been struggling, which further shows layers to Cobb's person. During the Hall of Fame dinner, A hallucinating Cobb becomes haunted by images from his violent past as he views film footage of his career. Despite publicly honoring Cobb, many of the same players attending the dinner block Cobb out of their private hotel afterparties, having been fed up with his bad behavior. From Cooperstown, Cobb and Stump drive south to Cobb's native Georgia, where his estranged daughter refuses to see him, which Cobb later tells Stump is the same case with the rest of his surviving children and his ex-wives.
Continuing to write his dual accounts, Stump starts drinking heavily himself as he realizes that by doing his secret book and Cobb's book concurrently, Stump was becoming what Cobb, for all his faults, wasn't; a liar.
Despite still seeing Cobb as a man who treats people like dirt, Stump gains a grudging respect for the player's legendary intensity, competitive fire, and no-holds-barred honesty about his reputation as a tough player, taking pride in how hated he was by fellow players and even spectators. Cobb, in turn, begins to regard Stump as a friend of sorts; it is clear his conduct has driven away virtually all his legitimate friends and family. Having mockingly called Al "Al-imony" in reference to the writer's impending divorce, Cobb helps Stump finally accept that his marriage is over. Cobb also continues to open up more about his father's death, which Stump realizes was partly responsible for Cobb's antagonistic personality, despite the player's denials. Cobb finally reveals to Stump that his father's murder was not committed by his mother, as he had earlier told Stump, but by his mother's lover.
After a long night of drinking, Stump passes out. Cobb accidentally discovers Stump's notes for the no-punches-pulled version, bringing on an epic explosion.
As he aims his pistol in his mouth to kill himself, Cobb begins to seriously cough up blood and is taken to a hospital. Stump, waking up to discover Cobb saw the notes and knows the truth, finds Cobb at the hospital wielding a gun and treating doctors and nurses as harshly as he has everyone else. Cobb begrudgingly gives Stump his blessing to continue with the warts-and-all version, even admitting he respects the sportswriter for "beating" him, in a sense by fooling Cobb about his real intentions. Cobb's parting request to the sportswriter is to remember, "The desire for glory is not a sin."
Stump completes his twin books by the time Cobb passes away on July 17, 1961. As Cobb is buried alongside his parents, Stump, in voiceover, reveals that he ended up publishing the glowing autobiography Cobb hired him to write, instead of the real story.
Much of the Cobb location filming was in northern Nevada. The hotel check-in was at the Morris Hotel on Fourth Street in Reno. Casino, outdoor and entry shots were done outside Cactus Jack's Hotel and Casino in Carson City and outside the then-closed, now-reopened (2007) Doppelganger's Bar in Carson City.[citation needed]
Baseball announcer Ernie Harwell, a Ford Frick Award recipient, is featured as emcee at a Cooperstown, New York awards banquet. Real-life sportswriters Allan Malamud, Doug Krikorian, and Jeff Fellenzer and boxing publicist Bill Caplan appear in the movie's opening and closing scenes at a Santa Barbara bar as Stump's friends and fellow scribes.[citation needed]
Tommy Lee Jones was shooting this film when he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Fugitive. As his head was already partially shaved in the front for his role as the balding, 72-year-old Cobb, the actor made light of the situation in his acceptance speech: "All a man can say at a time like this is, 'I am not really bald ... But I do have work." In addition to his partially shaved head, Jones also endured a broken ankle, suffered while practicing Cobb's distinctive slide.[4]
The film shows Cobb sharpening his spikes as a means to keep infielders from tagging him out as he ran the bases, and was accused of spiking several players who tried. Cobb, however, always denied ever spiking anyone on purpose. Tyler Logan Cobb, a descendant of Cobb's, played "Young Ty".[citation needed]
Reception
Box office
The film opened in limited release in December 1994. It earned a reported $1,007,583 in the U.S., on a budget of $25.5 million, making it a box-office bomb.[1]
Critical response
Cobb currently has a 65% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 48 reviews. The site's consensus states: "Tommy Lee Jones's searing performance helps to elevate Cobb above your typical sports biopic; he's so effective, in fact, that some may find the film unpleasant."[5]Peter Travers of Rolling Stone hailed it as "one of the year's best" and Charles Taylor of Salon included it on his list of the best films of the decade. Others took a harsher view of the picture. Owen Glieberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "D", claiming it to be a "noisy, cantankerous buddy picture" and presented Cobb as little more than a "septuagenarian crank". He noted that while the film had constant reminders of Cobb's records, it had little actual baseball in it, besides one flashback where Cobb is seen getting on base, then stealing third and home, and instigating a brawl with the opposing team. He explained: "By refusing to place before our eyes Ty Cobb's haunted ferocity as a baseball player, it succeeds in making him look even worse than he was."[citation needed]
Roger Ebert's review of December 2, 1994 in the Chicago Sun-Times described Cobb as one of the most original biopics ever made and including "one of Tommy Lee Jones's best performances," but he notes Stump (played by Wuhl) and his lack of development in the film. However, he also criticized the length of the film, giving it 2 stars out of 4. [6]
In his 2015 book Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, author Charles Leerhsen asserts that the film is based on Al Stump's 1961 and 1994 biographies of Ty Cobb, books noted for glaring inaccuracies regarding Cobb's life, as well as a True magazine article, also by Stump, published after Cobb's death. When the author Leerhsen contacted director Shelton concerning the inaccuracies, Shelton refused to provide documentation for some of the most extravagant aspects of the movie, and admitted to fabricating scenes along with "Al" because they believed it was something the real Cobb could have plausibly done in real life.[citation needed]
Previously, in 2010, an article by William R. Cobb (no relation to Ty) in the peer-reviewed The National Pastime, the official publication of the Society for American Baseball Research, had accused Al Stump of extensive forgeries of Cobb-related baseball and personal memorabilia, including personal documents and diaries. Stump even falsely claimed to possess a shotgun used by Cobb's mother to kill his father (in a well-known 1905 incident officially ascribed to Mrs Cobb having mistaken her husband for an intruder). The shotgun later came into the hands of noted memorabilia collector Barry Halper. Despite the shotgun's notoriety, official newspaper and court documents of the time clearly show Cobb's father had been killed with a pistol. The article, and later expanded book,[12] further accused Stump of numerous false statements about Cobb, not only during and immediately after their 1961 collaboration but also in Stump's later years, most of which were sensationalistic in nature and intended to cast Cobb in an unflattering light.[13] Cobb's peer-reviewed research indicates that all of Stump's works (print and memorabilia) surrounding Ty Cobb are at the very best called into question and at worst "should be dismiss(ed) out of hand as untrue".[13]
Tyrus Raymond Cobb, nicknamed "the Georgia Peach", was an American professional baseball center fielder. A native of rural Narrows, Georgia, Cobb played 24 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB). He spent 22 years with the Detroit Tigers and served as the team's player-manager for the last six, and he finished his career with the Philadelphia Athletics. In 1936, Cobb received the most votes of any player on the inaugural ballot for the National Baseball Hall of Fame, receiving 222 out of a possible 226 votes (98.2%); no other player received a higher percentage of votes until Tom Seaver in 1992. In 1999, the Sporting News ranked Cobb third on its list of "Baseball's 100 Greatest Players."
Walter Perry Johnson, nicknamed "Barney" and "the Big Train", was an American professional baseball player and manager. He played his entire 21-year baseball career in Major League Baseball as a right-handed pitcher for the Washington Senators from 1907 to 1927. He later served as manager of the Senators from 1929 through 1932 and of the Cleveland Indians from 1933 through 1935.
Samuel Earl Crawford, nicknamed "Wahoo Sam", was an American outfielder in Major League Baseball (MLB).
Robert Wuhl is an American actor, comedian and writer. He is best known as the creator and star of the television comedy series Arliss (1996–2002) and for his portrayal of newspaper reporter Alexander Knox in Tim Burton's Batman (1989) and Larry in Bull Durham (1988).
The 1909 World Series was the championship series in Major League Baseball for the 1909 season. The sixth edition of the World Series, it featured the National League champion Pittsburgh Pirates against the American League champion Detroit Tigers. The Pirates won the Series in seven games to capture their first championship of the modern Major League Baseball era and the second championship in the club's history. This Series is best remembered for featuring two of the very best players of the time, Pittsburgh shortstop Honus Wagner, and Detroit outfielder Ty Cobb.
Ronald Wayne Shelton is an American film director and screenwriter and former minor league baseball infielder. Shelton is known for the many films he has made about sports. His 1988 film Bull Durham, based in part on his own baseball experiences, earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
Frederick George Lieb was an American sportswriter and baseball historian. Lieb published his memoirs in 1977, which documented his nearly 70 years as a baseball reporter. He received the J. G. Taylor Spink Award from the Baseball Writers' Association of America in 1972. Born in 1888 in Philadelphia, Lieb died at age 92 in Houston.
Hubert Benjamin "Dutch" Leonard, was an American left-handed pitcher in Major League Baseball who had an 11-year career from 1913 to 1921, and 1924 to 1925. He played for the Boston Red Sox and Detroit Tigers, and holds the major league modern-era record for the lowest single-season ERA of all time — 0.96 in 1914.
True, also known as True, The Man's Magazine, was published by Fawcett Publications from 1937 until 1974. Known as True, A Man's Magazine in the 1930s, it was labeled True, #1 Man's Magazine in the 1960s. Petersen Publishing took over with the January 1975, issue. It was sold to Magazine Associates in August 1975, and ceased publication shortly afterward.
Somewhere in Georgia is a 1917 silent film, starring baseball great Ty Cobb. It was based on a short story by sports columnist Grantland Rice.
Lawrence Columbus "Crash" Davis was an American professional baseball player whose name inspired that of the main character of the 1988 movie Bull Durham.
Alvin John Stump, was an American author and sports writer. Stump spent time with Detroit Tigers' Hall of Fame baseball player Ty Cobb in 1960 and 1961, collaborating on Cobb's autobiography. My Life in Baseball: A True Record was released shortly after Cobb's death. From this research, Stump went on to write at least two books and at least one magazine article on Cobb.
The Ty Cobb Museum is a museum located in Royston, Georgia, that honors Baseball Hall of Fame player Ty Cobb. The museum contains art and memorabilia, film, video, books and historical archives of Cobb as well as several other notable people from Franklin County, Georgia.
The score to the film Cobb by Elliot Goldenthal was released in 1994.
"Ty Cobb" is a song by the American rock band Soundgarden. Featuring lyrics written by frontman Chris Cornell and music written by bassist Ben Shepherd, "Ty Cobb" was released in April 1997 as the fourth single from the band's fifth studio album, Down on the Upside (1996). The song was included on Soundgarden's 1997 greatest hits album, A-Sides.
The 1909 Detroit Tigers won the American League pennant with a record of 98–54, but lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1909 World Series, 4 games to 3. The season was their ninth since they were charter members of the American League in 1901. It was the third consecutive season in which they won the pennant but lost the World Series. Center fielder Ty Cobb won the Triple Crown and pitcher George Mullin led the league in wins (29) and winning percentage (.784).
The 1921 Detroit Tigers finished in sixth place in the American League, 27 games behind the Yankees, with a record of 71–82. Despite their sixth-place finish, the 1921 Tigers amassed 1,724 hits and a team batting average of .316—the highest team hit total and batting average in American League history. Detroit outfielders Harry Heilmann and Ty Cobb finished No. 1 and No. 2 in the American League batting race with batting averages of .394 and .389, and all three Detroit outfielders ranked among the league leaders in batting average and RBIs. As early proof of the baseball adage that "Good Pitching Beats Good Hitting", the downfall of the 1921 Tigers was the absence of good pitching. The team ERA was 4.40, they allowed nine or more runs 28 times, and only one pitcher had an ERA below 4.24.
The 1907 Detroit Tigers won the American League pennant with a record of 92–58, but lost to the Chicago Cubs in the 1907 World Series, four games to none. The season was their seventh since they entered the American League in 1901.
Ulysses Simon Harrison, known as Li'l Rastus and Rastus Simon, was an African American teenager who served as a mascot of the Detroit Tigers baseball team from 1908 to 1910.
Samuel Saunders Greene was an American sportswriter. He covered sports in Detroit, Michigan for more than 40 years, first with the Detroit Free Press (1922–1924) and then with The Detroit News (1924–1963). He was the sports editor for The Detroit News from 1958 to 1963. He was the Detroit correspondent for The Sporting News from 1924 to 1960.
↑ Denerstein, Robert (January 1, 1995). "Perhaps It Was Best to Simply Fade to Black". Rocky Mountain News (Finaled.). p.61A.
↑ Cobb, William R. (2013). The Georgia Peach: Stumped by the Storyteller. William R. Cobb. p.67. ISBN978-1628408034.
1 2 William R. Cobb (2010). "The Georgia Peach: Stumped by the Storyteller". In Ken Fenster; Wynn Montgomery (eds.). The National Pastime: Baseball in the Peach State(PDF). Cleveland, Ohio: Society for American Baseball Research. ISBN9781933599168. Archived(PDF) from the original on 24 September 2010. Retrieved 2014-08-05.
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