Eephus with Filmmaker Carson Lund
After the screening, join us for a discussion with filmmaker Carson Lund and former Red Sox Hall of Famer Bill “Spaceman” Lee!
Two recreational baseball teams, the River Dogs and Adler’s Paint, have been meeting on their New England field on Sunday afternoons for longer than anyone can remember. These middle-aged sportsmen can’t run as fast as they used to or connect as reliably with a pitch. Still, their vigorous appetite for socializing, squabbling, and busting chops remains undiminished. After the know-nothing county board opts to raze the baseball diamond to make way for a school, the teams meet for one final game at their beloved Soldier’s Field, with girlfriends, kids, and local hooligans as intermittent spectators.
As day turns to night and innings bleed together, the players face the uncertainty of a new era. Lovingly laid in a vanished Massachusetts of the mid-1990s, Carson Lund’s poignant feature debut plays like a lazy afternoon, perfectly attuned to the rhythms of America’s eternal pastime. Named for a rarely-deployed curveball, Eephus is both a ribald comedy for the baseball connoisseur and a movie for anyone who’s ever lamented their community slipping away.
About Carson Lund
Carson Lund is a founding member of Omnes Films, an independent, Los Angeles-based filmmaking collective named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Film.” Lund marks his directorial debut with Eephus, which he also wrote and produced. The film premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight and screened at the 62nd edition of the New York Film Festival in October. Lund also served as cinematographer and producer of Christmas Eve at Miller's Point starring Michael Cera, which also premiered in Directors’ Fortnight. Previously, Lund lensed and produced Ham on Rye 2020)– which premiered internationally at the 2019 Locarno Film Festival and received critical acclaim from The New Yorker, The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone. A New Hampshire native, Lund is also a musician and film critic.
ABOUT BILL "SPACEMAN" LEE
For 14 years as a left-handed pitcher (1969-1982), ten with Boston and four with Montreal, Bill Lee was anything but a conventional major league ballplayer. His career record is 119-90, including three consecutive 17-win seasons with the Red Sox (1973-1975) and a 16-win season with the Expos in 1979. Bill Lee was selected to the American League All-Star squad in 1973 and pitched in the World Series in 1975 against the Cincinnati Reds.
Drafted by the Boston Red Sox in the 22nd round of the 1968 amateur draft following a brilliant college career at the University of Southern California, where he won a College World Series title, Bill Lee was called up to the major leagues less than 18 months after he was drafted. He became one of the game’s few counterculture symbols: he talked to animals, championed environmental causes, practiced yoga, ate health foods, pondered Einstein and Vonnegut, quoted from Mao, and studied Eastern philosophers and mystics. It was in this context that former Red Sox teammate John Kennedy first dubbed him “Spaceman,” a nickname writers thereafter used as shorthand to describe his free spirit.
Bill Lee resides in Vermont, where he tends to a farm and continues to play baseball regularly. Bill Lee still has a cult following in New England, and is one of the most popular Red Sox players of all time.
