Movies Made Here: Game 6 (2005)

Walking down Tarrytown’s Main Street, I often get the sensation that I’m on a film set – the quaint but chic Mom-and-Pop shops populated by attractive families and their groomed dogs. And that of course, the most movie-ready site of all. Of the many movies made here, a large majority have scenes filmed in our grand ol’ Hall, many of which we will review here. This week, in the spirit of baseball season, we start with Game 6, among the lesser known of the list but one of the best.

Michael Keaton stars in this richly textured day-in-the-life drama leading up to two notable events – one fictional and one historic. It is October 25, 1986, and this evening playwright Nicky Rogan’s play will debut on Broadway as the Red Sox play the Mets in the World Series. Despite being a lifelong NYer, Rogan has always taken the masochistic approach and rooted for the Sox; parallel to this is his protective I’m-a-hack-not-an-artist stance toward his career. Luckily you needn’t be a baseball fan to appreciate the poetry of his affiliation, as his irrational loyalty probes the deepest questions of existence, examining the pain of losing and repeated heartbreak.

As the day ticks by, cab ride by cab ride (eight!) – Rogan seems to measure time by this expensive meter, which hints that he must be more successful than he realizes – there’s the growing menace of the drama critic, Steven Schwimmer, who ruins careers with his words. Robert Downey, Jr. makes the most of this one-note role, creating a strange and misunderstand villain who must appear in disguise and armed at plays in order to do the hard work of telling the truth.

Several short scenes were filmed in the Music Hall (starting at around 30 minutes in, then the one-hour mark), standing in for a NYC theater whose shiny midtown exterior belies the shabby grandeur of the red-seated theater we know and love. The main character of the play-within-the-movie, Peter Redmond played by Harris Yulin, has a parasite in his brain and keeps getting jammed in rehearsals on the simplest line of all, “This could be it.”

“This could be it” repeats like a mantra, perhaps too much. But finally, it’s show time, and we witness this tell-tale moment, as Rogan’s rebellious but bright Madonna-punk daughter sits a few rows ahead of our wacko reviewer. One wonders how his Bowie wig could possibly make Schwimmer anything but obvious, but it’s dramatic, and seems to prompt his subsequent hook-up with the daugther. The audience hangs on the pregnant pause of Peter trying to find his line. Then these two costumed characters in the audience get together, moved by that pause to tears.

Rogan, who spent the show watching the game on a bar TV, is riled enough with the loss from Game 6 to hunt down his nemesis. Sure enough, there’s the daughter and the nemesis, but everyone soon shares their love of the play, and their tragic love of the Sox. Ah group hug. Well, not quite, but it’s a relatively happy ending to something that could have all gone down much worse.

As you might imagine from a Michael Keaton movie, there’s no good gossip from the filming (though I did wonder about Robert Downey, Jr). “Obviously it was a big deal to have Michael Keaton in there, everyone enjoyed that, but it was a very low-key, well run shoot,” said Music Hall Director Bjorn Olsson. “We love having film shoots here, and to see the end results later. It can be such a great time capsule.”

Despite the thrill of having some stars around, there’s still the tedium of the reality of film-making. “Oftentimes, though, watching a film shoot is a bit like watching paint dry,” Olsson admitted. “It's a very slow laborious process, where it takes hours to prepare for a scene that takes maybe a couple of minutes to actually shoot.” We the audience win; we just get the final product. 

Game 6 is available for live-streaming or purchase on Netflix and Amazon.