‘Bears’ a family film? Well, not exactly
Nearly three decades after they first took the field, the young “Bad News Bears” baseball players are as hapless as ever.
But in a sign of evolving movie ratings and shifting pop-culture politics, they have cleaned up their act. They no longer smoke, they don’t drink and they aren’t given to racial epithets.
Other than that, they are raunchier than ever, and the new “Bad News Bears” remake has nearly as many four-letter words as it does bats and gloves.
Just as the “Austin Powers” movies pushed the edge of the ratings envelope, so too did the original “Bad News Bears.”
Released in 1976, eight years before the PG-13 rating was created, the movie earned a PG – a broad category that then ranged from “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” to “Paper Moon” and gave little warning of the film’s ribald content.
The new “Bad News Bears” also occupies an unusual place within the film-ratings spectrum. Although its PG-13 mark allows children of any age to attend the film, the film’s makers are cautioning parents that it hardly represents a safe night out for the entire household.
“This is a pretty hard PG-13,” director Richard Linklater said. “It’s not a family movie. I wouldn’t take children under 10.”
Paramount Pictures ultimately was able to win the PG-13 rating – the filmmakers reworked one scene involving some potentially R-rated dialogue about a crack pipe – with the warning that the film includes “rude behavior, language throughout, some sexuality and thematic elements.”
Filmmakers also excised a number of scenes from the original 1976 movie that were considered too politically incorrect for today’s audiences.
One of the most notable exclusions is an iconic line spoken in the original film by a character named Tanner Boyle, in which the ballplayer denounces his team’s ethnic and religious makeup, using slurs for Hispanics and blacks.
“Bad News Bears” screenwriters John Requa and Glenn Ficarra (“Bad Santa”) initially included the insults in the remake’s screenplay. When the scene was finally read aloud by the actors in an early rehearsal, they quickly reconsidered their choice.
“There was dead silence,” said Linklater. “It just reminded us how much humor and the culture changes over time. It’s a different time and place now. It’s just not funny.”
He and the screenwriters also cut out scenes from the Walter Matthau version in which members of the Bears drink beer and smoke cigarettes.
“We were told in no uncertain terms that showing the kids smoking or drinking was a guaranteed R (rating),” Requa said.
The kids were allowed to serve their alcoholic coach (Billy Bob Thornton) cocktails and also are seen drinking nonalcoholic beer.
The idea for the remake was hatched at Thornton’s manager’s office and was pitched to Paramount, which had made the original. At the time, the studio was looking through its vast library, searching for titles worthy of revisiting.
Thornton’s off-color comedy “Bad Santa” had been a recent hit, and Paramount’s thinking was to marry that film’s star and its audacious writers with what it felt was a topical story about competition, sportsmanship and redemption.
“There’s a message in it for kids that is really good, and they are not going to watch the older movie,” Thornton said.
That message, he said, “is that it doesn’t matter if you’re not as big or fast as the other kids, because maybe you’re better than you think you are. We’ve always loved movies about underdogs and misfits.”
Paramount’s marketing campaign has tried to emphasize the mature elements of the film, essentially saying that “Bad News Bears” is to Little League what “Bad Santa” was to Father Christmas.
Already, the movie is getting mixed reviews from some younger kids. Says Linklater, who took his 12-year-old daughter to a recent screening: “She said the parts that weren’t disgusting were pretty funny.”