‘These stories changed my life’: How Penny Marshall shaped the new ‘League of Their Own’
In adapting “A League of Their Own” into a new drama series for Amazon, co-creators Will Graham and Abbi Jacobson weighed every potential Easter egg, callback and quote from the beloved 1992 film with a fan’s sensibility: their own.
“We were pinching ourselves with excitement and fear that we get to do this,” Graham said of their reverence for the film, set against the formation of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and for the female ballplayers of the 1940s and ‘50s who inspired it. When it came to a certain famous line, though, they weren’t sure it fit the story they wanted to tell.
“They’d hear the name of the film and say, ‘There’s no crying in baseball!’” said Jacobson (“Broad City”), who also stars in the series, of those they told about the adaptation. Then Graham dropped it into an episode draft, thinking, “We’ll probably not wind up doing it,” he said. But in the context of the series’ new lineup of characters, each of whom is navigating both the pressures of the league and her place in America circa 1943, the words took on new dimension.
With more room to explore an array of racial, gender and sexual identities within the ensemble, “League” deepens thematic seeds planted in
