Movie Quote of the Day (‘Diner,’ on the World Outside)

Timothy Fenwick, Jr. (played by Kevin Bacon): “Do you ever get the feeling that there's something going on that we don't know about?”—Diner (1982), written and directed by Barry Levinson

Is Diner, released on this date 30 years ago, “the best American film of the 1980s,” as John Podhoretz proclaimed recently in The Weekly Standard? That strikes me as one of the overstated, all-or-nothing pronouncements to which the neocon scion is often subject.

But if you ask me to name another picture that, at the time, gave me such immediate, gloriously unexpected pleasure, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a suitable substitute. Barry Levinson’s directorial debut has another distinction: It’s one of those movies, like A Face in the Crowd, Network, or The Shawshank Redemption, that grows in stature as time goes on. Everything about it—from its fortuitous gathering of young talent to its very survival in Hollywood’s high-concept executive suites—seems miraculous.

Let’s give Podhoretz’s piece this: he grasps the movie’s unique texture, the way it observes how “young men make connections with each other through one-upmanship, trivia games, and references to common experiences.” (Only this film, for instance, could even think of including the hilarious scene where a prospective groom administers a football trivia quiz to his unnerved bride-to-be on the eve of the ceremony.)

But if you want an article that considers the influence of Diner more widely and deeply, then you’ll want to turn to the informative look back by S.L. Price in the March issue of Vanity Fair. We learn what a near-run thing this entire project was, from first to last. Consider:

· Ellen Barkin, playing the film’s major female character, Beth, nearly missed three different times the role that launched her career in earnest: first by tossing the script in the trash can, then tearfully resisting her agent’s advice to take the role (the play she wanted to do instead, about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, closed after two performances), then when studio execs wanted a more conventionally attractive starlet for the role.

· Hollywood uber-agent Michael Ovitz could not see the point of the film at all.

· One studio exec had a long—and, thankfully, unsuccessful—argument with Levinson about including what turned out to be one of the film’s most memorable scenes: the prolonged pitched verbal battle between Steve Guttenberg’s Eddie and Paul Reiser’s Modell over a roast-beef sandwich.

Like George Lucas’ American Graffiti, Diner is a coming-of-age movie set in the Fifties that served as a launching pad for a constellation of future stars (in addition to Bacon, Barkin, Guttenberg, and Reiser, it also exposed filmgoers to Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, and Timothy Daly). But as Price reminds us, Levinson introduced a new subject to popular entertainment: Nothing—as in “seemingly meaningless banter… tossed about by men over drinks, behind the wheel, in front of a cooling plate of French fries.” You know: what Seinfeld made famous.

Levinson has carved out a comparatively schizophrenic career as a writer-director, ranging from big-budget productions (e.g., the Oscar-winning Rain Man, The Natural, Disclosure) to a group of personal, semi-autobiographical films that might be regarded as his “Baltimore Quartet”: Diner, Tin Men, Avalon and Liberty Heights. Lack of commercial success for the latter two films left him unmoored for awhile. I continue to hope, if he has any more of these unproduced personal screenplays in a drawer in his house, that he’ll dig it out, then persuade HBO (which recently backed his teleplay on Jack Kevorkian, starring Al Pacino) to green-light this script that harks back to his best, most heartfelt work.

This Day in Sports History (Colts Beat Giants in “Greatest Game”)

December 28, 1958—With the former head football coach of my high school, Vince Lombardi, serving as offensive coordinator, the New York Giants lost the first “sudden-death” overtime game in the history of the National Football League to the Baltimore Costs, 23-17.

A number of people have called this “the greatest game ever played.” Giants running back Frank Gifford, who fumbled twice in the game, remembers it as sloppily played, pointing to seven turnovers altogether on that blustery winter day. Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid, who broke down a “coaches’ film” of the game this past spring for Atlantic Monthly writer Mark Bowden, would probably agree. So, I bet, would the notoriously perfectionist Lombardi.

Nevertheless, there’s no doubting the attention given this NFL championship game, especially when you consider the following:

* Approximately 45 million people watched the broadcast of the game, ratifying the NFL as a major TV draw 19 years after NBC became the first network to televise a contest.
* Among the people in attendance was Vice-President Richard Nixon.
* The Giants may have had the most talented assistant coaching staff in the history of the game—Lombardi as offensive coordinator and Tom Landry directing the defense.
* Besides Lombardi and Landry, 14 other people associated with the game would enter the Pro Football Hall of Fame, including Colts coach Week Ewbank and Giants owner Wellington Mara.

I am a longtime Giants fan and, as a graduate of St. Cecilia, a Lombardi aficionado. But I have to admit that one of the most inspiring stories of this game was the crucial partnership of Johnny Unitas and Raymond Berry. The pair—nothing at all like the mastodons that now roam the gridiron—would never have even stepped foot on a football field if their naysayers could have helped it.

That they could have succeeded at all was due to a blue-collar work ethic, tireless craft and undaunted grit. Two years before “the greatest game,” Unitas had been picked up off the slag heap, so to speak, by the Colts, who had found him playing in a semipro sandlot league after he’d been cut by the Steelers.

Even before that, when he was a college hopeful, Notre Dame had ignored him, never believing he could bulk up. In a way, they were right—Unitas finished up his NFL career with the San Diego Chargers, a team that, exactly a decade before, had introduced steroids into the game, and the proud old quarterback was distinctly out of place in that overgrown lockerroom. In his prime, it didn’t matter—no field general could move his forces at will and attack the enemy at the exact point where it hurt when everything depended on it like Unitas.

Likewise, those paid to know about those things discounted Berry as lacking speed. They overlooked his big hands and an obsession with detail that made the wide receiver what writer Mark Bowden, in an excerpt from his book The Best Game Ever in Sports Illustrated, called “the prototype of the modern football player.” Not only did he study 25 pages of game notes in preparation for the confrontation with the Giants, but before the fans trooped into the stadium that day he minutely inspected the turf, examining which spots he could exploit—preparation that aided him in his playoff-record 12 catches that afternoon.

Two last points and I’m out of here:

* Lombardi was halfway through his post-St. Cecilia High School life—and at a career crossroads—during the game. He badly wanted the head coaching job of the Giants, but the Mara family made too much of a fetish out of personal loyalty. They didn’t want to push out the door current head coach Jim Lee Howell, even though he cheerfully admitted his penchant for delegating to Lombardi and Landry with the one-liner, “I just blow up the footballs and keep order." In short order, Lombardi and Landry left for head coaching posts with the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys, where they forged the records that put them in the Football Hall of Fame—and even Howell had decided to hang it up after the 1960 season.

* Colts running back Alan “The Horse” Ameche, whose one-yard plunge into the endzone decided the contest, was the subject of one of the funniest scenes in the great 1982 Barry Levinson comedy Diner. You might remember the scene when a sports-fanatic groom decides that his prospective bride needs to pass a trivia test before the ceremony. “Alan Ameche” was the answer she had on the tip of her tongue when her fiance’s friend blurted it out. The capper of the scene: The groom emerging to tell his buddies that the wedding was off! As Paul Reiser’s character Modell sums it up: “We all know most marriages depend on a firm grasp of football trivia.”