Getting Trivial With Travis

Recently in an effort to stay out of the dungeon at Bloggingham Castle while thinking about the old Trivial Pursuit game that I'm sure so many of us have played, Travis @ Trav's Thoughts created a new meme that I just had to have a go at called -

Travis' rules are pretty simple:

1. Choose a category from one of these: Television, Stage & Screen, Nightly News, Publishing, Lives & Times, Music
2. Find 8 bits of trivia about your selected category
3. Be sure to let me know when...ok, if...you decide to play along so I can see what you come up with. (You can do that just by clicking here!)
   
4. You may tag, or simply offer the meme for borrowing or stealing as you like.

Travis did his first-ever-made-all-by-himself-and-really-cool-meme on the 8 Films In Which John Wayne's Character Dies so I thought maybe I'd select the movie category myself and do my meme on 8 things about one of my favorite movies, For Love of the Game which was released in 1999 and is one that I can watch over and over again and do!

1. The movie is based on the book, For Love of the Game, written by Michael Shaara and published posthumously in 1991 following his death from a heart attack in 1988. Shaara won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for his novel The Killer Angels which was about the Battle of Gettysburg and the source for the screenplay for the 1993 movie Gettysburg, another of my very favorites.
2. The story is about Billy Chapel (Kevin Costner), a 40-year old pitcher, who is forced to re-examine his priorities in life when he is confronted with unexpected circumstances—not only is he being traded after 20 years as the heart and soul of the Detroit Tigers, but Jane Aubrey (Kelly Preston), the love of his life, is leaving him for a job in London. During the course of the movie, Billy flashes back on his last four years with Jane and his baseball career as he pitches a possible perfect game against the formidable New York Yankees in "The House That Ruth Built".
3. The movie was shot in both New York and Los Angeles with a short stop in Aspen, Colorado for some off-season scenes. Most of the East Coast scenes were shot on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn along with five weeks at Yankee Stadium during one of the warmest Novembers in New York ever.
4. The production used between 800 and 2000 extras for filming at the stadium along with cardboard characters and computer graphics to fill out empty seats in the stands to make it look like a typical packed-house game at Yankee Stadium.
5. The shots of Billy Chapel's parents at the beginning of the movie are Kevin Costner's actual parents.
6. Both the Tigers and Yankees management insisted that anyone who wore their uniforms had to be either a former or current member of their organization or an actor. Ultimately, every player cast was either a professional or an actor with at least some organized baseball experience. Even actual major league umpires Rick Reed, Jerry Crawford and Richie Garcia were cast in their real-life profession.
7. The soundtrack features 15 songs and some of the best music from a movie ever featuring artists such as Lyle Lovett, Roy Orbison, Vince Gill, Steely Dan, and others. I suspect I've just about worn it down!
8. My very favorite song from the movie does not appear on the soundtrack album - "It Don't Matter to the Sun" by Chris Gaines, a fictional alternative rock singer created as an alter ego for Garth Brooks. The song can be found on the CD Garth Brooks: In the Life of Chris Gaines or you can listen to it here!

So, there you have it, eight rather long trivial facts about one of my favorite movies. I know it's been out almost ten years now but if you like a good baseball movie and a good love story and haven't seen it may I suggest you rent a copy at some point and indulge yourself? Just to get you more interested, here's the trailer:


Thanks, Travis, for this great new meme! It was really a lot of fun and I hope you get lots of people playing along with it. I'm not going to tag anyone in particular but come on people, you know you want to do this!