American helmer Carson Lund uses the baseball diamond as a deeply cinematic space in his feature debut, “Eephus.” The esoteric title is the name of one of the game’s rarest pitches. “Eephus” marks the second film from the L.A. collective Omnes Films to screen in the Directors’ Fortnight along with “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” which Lund shot. Film Constellation is handling sales.
The New Hampshire-born Lund grew up loving and playing baseball. When he moved to Los Angeles as a young adult, after some seven years away from the sport, he joined a recreational amateur league. “I was struck by the once-a-week relationship I developed with my teammates: there was a distinct lack of ego, just fun investment in the game,” he says. “Suddenly, I realized that all the cinematic imitations I’d tried in the past were a distraction from the raw material that’s closest to me, and that I ought to just embrace the idea of baseball devotion as a valid cinematic subject.”
Set in the autumn of 1994, “Eephus” follows the progression of the final game played on a small New England baseball field before it is demolished. The two ragtag teams of beer-swilling rec-league guys can’t quite face the implications of the field’s loss on their futures in baseball, as friends or even just friendly rivals. Lund notes, “And yet they still can’t truly relate to one another in a way that’s not tinged with competition or obscured by jokes and baseball lingo.”
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Lund and his co-writers Mike Basta and Nate Fisher mirror the game’s regulation nine innings in their narrative structure. “I’ve always felt a bit alienated by the three-act structure that is the dominant industrial mode of screenwriting,” Lund notes. “I’m more moved by films that prioritize something other than a single character’s evolution, and I’m especially drawn to cases in which a structure or syntax that is not native to storytelling is grafted onto a film and creates a self-imposed set of creative rules.”
As a player himself, Lund brings an intimate understanding of how the game feels on the ground, which is essentially a constant push-pull between sudden bursts of action and sustained periods of repose. “It dawned on me that this experience could be seen as a microcosm of something larger and more universal: the mysterious process by which we perceive time and aging, where sometimes it feels like years pass in the blink of an eye and certain hours can feel like an eternity,” he says.
Since “Eephus” is ultimately a film about loss and change and gentrification, even those with no knowledge of baseball can appreciate its message. Lund believes that it is first and foremost a humanist film about everyday people who share a hobby, a hobby that could be anything. “Recreational baseball just happens to be my main extracurricular endeavor, and I see it and other activities like it as essential respites from the relentless profit-seeking thrust of our lives under late capitalism, which drives us into isolation from one another,” he says.
Lund is currently helping to produce the next Omnes Films feature from a script by Basta. “It’s an escalating comedy of errors set around a dental convention and pitched in the style of ‘After Hours.’ We have Tim Heidecker attached to play the lead. I’ll shoot the film and Mike will direct.” He’s also developing several of his own scripts that continue to explore working-class New Englanders and center around single locations.
