Michael Ritchie (The Bad News Bears) Bad News Bears
Michael Ritchie (November 28, 1938 – April 16, 2001) directed The Bad News Bears (1976). By 1976 he had built a small body of work that did one specific thing better than any other American director of his generation: he picked an American competitive ritual and dismantled it from inside while it was still in motion.
Ritchie's first three films built the method
| Year | Film | Subject |
|---|---|---|
| 1969 | Downhill Racer | Olympic ski racing |
| 1972 | The Candidate | A US Senate campaign |
| 1975 | Smile | A California beauty pageant |
Each of those three films treats its institution at the level of procedural detail — the chairlift logistics, the campaign-bus interior, the pageant rehearsal hall — and lets the institution's logic indict itself without authorial editorializing. Downhill Racer refuses to celebrate Robert Redford's gold medal. The Candidate ends on Redford's senator-elect asking "What do we do now?" Smile watches teenage girls compete for the title of Young American Miss without ever staging the redemptive arc the genre would require.
The Bad News Bears is the next title in the same project. Little League is the institution; the dismantling is the same.
Ritchie's documentary realism shaped the kids' performances
"Ritchie has a gift for creating the documentary feeling of life as it really happens." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (1976)
Ritchie's casting and shooting approach on The Bad News Bears was the one he had used on Smile — bring in mostly non-professional young performers, run the production loose enough to let their actual personalities come through, shoot in real locations under available light. The Bears look like a real Little League dugout because most of them were boys cast off open calls in Los Angeles, with two professional exceptions (Jackie Earle Haley and Alfred Lutter). See Production History (The Bad News Bears).
The cinematographer was John A. Alonzo, fresh off Chinatown (1974). Alonzo's flat California-sun look — no diffusion, no gauzy summer-of-1976 nostalgia — is the visual equivalent of Ritchie's editorial position: this is what a Little League field looks like, the way you remember it, not the way the genre wants you to remember it.
The Bad News Bears was Ritchie's biggest commercial hit
The film grossed roughly $32 million domestically against a $9 million budget — Ritchie's biggest commercial success and the one that defined his public profile from that point forward. It was the #5 highest-grossing film of 1976.
His follow-up was Semi-Tough (1977), another sports comedy, this one with Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson and an Erich Segal–Bud Shrake screenplay that did not have Bill Lancaster's edges. Ritchie's later career drifted into more conventional commercial work — The Island (1980), Fletch (1985), The Golden Child (1986). The institutional-dismantling project ended around the time the Bad News Bears sequels Paramount made without him began arriving.
Ritchie's career
| Year | Film | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1969 | Downhill Racer | Olympic skiing; Redford |
| 1972 | The Candidate | Senate campaign; Redford |
| 1975 | Smile | Beauty pageant satire |
| 1976 | The Bad News Bears | #5 film of 1976; biggest hit |
| 1977 | Semi-Tough | Pro football |
| 1978 | An Almost Perfect Affair | Cannes-set romance |
| 1980 | The Island | Peter Benchley adaptation |
| 1985 | Fletch | Chevy Chase comedy |
| 1986 | The Golden Child | Eddie Murphy supernatural comedy |
| 1989 | Fletch Lives | Sequel |
| 1992 | Diggstown | Boxing comedy |
He died of prostate cancer in 2001 at age 62. (wikipedia, imdb, nytimes-obit)