“A League of Their Own” series on Amazon Prime goes woke with “queer stories” and “women of color,” the show’s co-creator Will Graham explained about the twist on the hit 1992 film.
The Prime series debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival Monday with the co-creator discussing the series — inspired by the fictionalized film about the Rockford Peaches and the real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Graham said the series will focus on the untold stories of black women who did actually play baseball in the 1950s and more, Vanity Fair reported.
“There was a much bigger story there that wasn’t just about a team, but that was really about a whole generation,” Graham explained. “That’s a big part of why we wanted to make it. It was just this feeling of—especially with queer stories, women of color—having a story that’s really centered on joy.”
“There were between eight and nine hundred women who played in the AAGPBL,” he added. “There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds more who either weren’t allowed to play or played on industrial teams or weren’t in the right cities. There was just such a wealth of characters.”
Abbi Jacobson and D’Arcy Carden take the field in the first footage of the ‘A League of Their Own’ reboot. https://t.co/StpseZzdq7
— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) June 7, 2022
“That includes straight people, queer people, people of color, you know, all the people who couldn’t get fit into the two-hour 1992 movie,” Graham continued. “I think our focus is just on telling those stories joyfully, truthfully, and in a way that resonates with the world now.”
Graham said he loves Penny Marshall’s 1992 classic and recalled a conversation he had with co-creator Abbi Jacobsen as the two talked “about what our version [of A League of Their Own] would be and how it would incorporate more real stories of women who wanted to play baseball in the ’40s.”
“Queer people didn’t just come out of the blue at Stonewall,” Jacobson, who, like Graham, identifies as queer shared. “I do think so much of the stuff we’re dealing with today and the way you talk to your friends was there.”
Chanté Adams, who plays Maxine in the film — a girl who tries out for the league but is turned away because she’s black — said “to this day, they are the only women to ever play professional baseball on a major league level. And yet we don’t hear about them.”
“We don’t know their names,” she added of the three Black women her character is based on that played in the Negro Leagues, the outlet noted. “I didn’t know about them until this project came to me. And so just kind of uncovering the forgotten history, that’s what I really love to do—whether it’s about an actual person or just based on stories from the past.”
“A League of Their Own” hits the streaming site in August.
Source: Dailywire
