Taken from Video ETA‘s newsletter:
I can imagine that there’s nothing worse than working on a movie and then an outside event, which you have no control over, makes your script obsolete. That was precisely the case for the Farrelly brothers when the Red Sox clinched the World Series on Wednesday night.
The Farrelly brothers are in the middle of filming Fever Pitch for Fox about a woman, played by Drew Barrymore, who falls in love with a crazed Red Sox fan played by Jimmy Fallon. The original story was set in the midst of the 2004 Red Sox season and banked on the 85 years of futility to continue. The ending showed the perseverance of love as their relationship survives yet another heartbreaking post-season loss to the Yankees.
When the Red Sox won game 4 of the American League Championship series, the Farrellys brought the writers back in to work an alternate ending in case the improbable comeback became reality. In September, the production filmed at a couple Red Sox games in Fenway Park and figured their location shooting was over.
But, those with excellent vision might have caught a brief moment of filmmaking during Fox TV’s coverage of the the post-game celebration. Jimmy Fallon, who is a die-hard Sox fan in real life, had charged onto the field to help celebrate the World Series victory and passionately embraced an unknown (at that time) woman in the midst of the revelry.
Later, the woman was identified as Drew Barrymore and rumors of a romance began to surface on the Internet. In actuality, the Farrellys brought a skeleton production crew to St. Louis for Game 4 and the actual post-game celebration will make its way into the movie that is scheduled to hit theaters next October.
In 1994 a friend of mine had been working on theoretical calculations of what would happen in the event that a foreign body struck a planet as part of his Ph.D. thesis that he was nearing the end of.
Then someone noticed that that summer comet Shoemaker-Levy was going to hit Jupiter.
“How excellent!” I said to my friend. “Your research is so timely, and you get to see what happens in real life!”
“Yeah,” he replied, “but what happens if I’m completely off base?”
He spent the rest of the school year scrambling to finish up his Ph.D. before the real comet impact so that it could still be released as a theoretical prediction and not get delayed a couple of years to make sense of the mountain of real data that would start pouring in.
Goes to show how sometimes you have to accept whatever life gives you and make the most of it.
thank you so much for posting this!!
because i TOTALLY caught the split moment of jimmy fallon rushing the field and dipping a woman into a kiss. and i immediately thought two things: 1, “wow, i didn’t know jimmy fallon is a huge sox fan!” and 2, “who the hell is that woman?”
mystery solved! awesome!
What a great story!
Doesn’t it? 🙂
Hee! I wondered how many people would be wondering that. I didn’t catch that, myself, but I can see where it would have been intriguing. 🙂