Review: Paper Lion (1968)
This adaptation of a George Plimpon book is an odd mix of pseudo-documentary and madcap comedy
“Paper Lion” (1968)
Directed by Alex March
George Plimpton (1927-2003) will probably go down in history as the founder and lifetime editor of the Paris Review, one of the 20th century’s most pretigious literary magazines. Coming from east coast old money — like most of the millionaires’ fortunes, his family’s was at least partly based on criminal acts1 — he had a partician accent, degrees from Harvard and Cambridge, and for many years made up the Paris Review’s budget shortfalls out of his own pocket.
But for many in the Baby Boom generation, Plimpton was also famous as a sportswriter. He was among the highly-lettered men recruited by the founding editor of Sports Illustrated, Sid James, to bring a high-toned perspective to the magazine.2 Several years into his career as a writer, Plimpton managed to convince the people who ran what we now call Major League Baseball to let him try his hand at pitching to baseball all-stars, and turned his resulting article into a book with a title that could have been used for many of his subsequent “participatory” experiences: “Out of My League.”
In the mid-1960s, he followed up with a similar, if longer and more personally dangerous, stint. He convinced the Detroit Lions to let him participate in training camp alongside the team’s players, at the end of which he was allowed to quarterback the team for a serious of (disastrous) plays. His book about this experience was called “Paper Lion,” and it was a hit. Before the 60s, pro football3 was a minor sport, something like pro hockey is today. But television’s ability to illuminate the game, especially with the invention of instant replay, led to it eventually overtaking baseball as the most popular American spectator sport. Plimpton’s book landed in the middle of this new enthusiasm. A year later, a nonfiction account of the 1967 season of the Green Bay Packers, “Instant Replay” by Jerry Kramer, became a best seller4.
Plimpton’s books about his diletante experiences in professional sports (he followed baseball and football with golf, boxing, and hockey) are wonderful yarns, as much about the trainers, coaches and fellow players as about himself. The weeks-long Detroit Lions training camp gave him the opportunity to hang out with Alex Karras, a true character whose hard-hitting play was matched by his intelligence and wit. Karras, who appeared as a professional wrestler on occasion, was also a natural performer. He plays himself in the film of “Paper Lion,” and subsequently turned that into a short Hollywood career of his own.
After having read “Paper Lion” the book a couple of times back when it came out, along with Plimpton’s “Out of My League” and his golf book, “Bogey Man,” I had high hopes for “Paper Lion” the film, which I had never seen before catching it on Amazon Prime earlier this month.
Plimpton’s books are full of wit, observation, and great storytelling. In Karras, the patrician Plimpton recognized a fellow traveler — or, as we might put it now, game recognized game. The book is a comic and pleasantly paced account of Plimpton and Karras’s summer, but even more, a discovery by the author about how smart and talented you have to be to be a professional athelete.
Unfortunately, the film fails to capture Plimpton’s sense of adventure and wastes Karras’s talent in addition to that of star Alan Alda. The first segment shows that Plimpton enjoyed playing touch football in Central Park with fellow New Yorkers, all of whom look like they’d rather be playing racquetball at their club, and his fictional girlfriend, a magazine photographer played by Lauren Hutton. Then there’s a sequence in which he tries, and finally succeeds, in convincing an NFL team to host his silly project. (The most believable thing in this part of the film is that all the teams he contacts tell him that attempting to participate in their summer workouts will just distract everyone and probably lead to serious injury.)
When he moves in with the Lions — whose coaches and players play themselves — the film tries to pretend that he’s keeping his amateur nature secret from the other players, whom he tells that he’s a former Harvard player who has played semi-pro football in Canada. More believable is that when they finally suss out what he’s up to, they try to frighten him off. But led by Karras — game recognizes game — the other players grow to accept him and eventually Plimpton fulfills his desire to run a few plays during a preseason game.
Up to this point, the movie has been played as a straight comedy, from Plimpton’s rejection by the other NFL teams to the hazing he suffers from the Lions players. At times the action is madcap, as when the players insist he come out with them on the town and bundle him from pyjamas into a suit and tie and carry him out of the college dorm where they’re bunked for training camp.
But when they get to the game that he’s set to appear in, the film suddenly turns into a documentary. We see Alda and all the others at a pregame hotel breakfast (they’re set to play in St. Louis against the then-Cardinals), in the locker room calmly preparing for the contest, and from the sidelines as they play the game, and the details of them getting taped up and putting on their game faces are somehow fascinating. The big lunks looked awkward re-enacting their summer with Plimpton, but once they’re unself-consciously going about their real business, they acquire gravity, purpose, and grace.
This part of the movie, having shed its pretentions to being a comedy, is certainly the most interesting, and there’s a reason: the day-of-game footage was done by NFL Films5, the league’s own film company. The skill of these professional documentarists far surpasses that of director Alex March, whose career was almost entirely in episodes here and there for television series in the 60s and 70s. Some of March’s direction of the episodic scenes is competent; more often, the viewer is distracted by amateurish line readings from the coaches and players. It’s not Marsh’s fault that the producers chose the real Lions players to play themselves, but the director fails to cover them well; some dubbing of the worst line readings would have been better. It’s also not March’s fault that fashion model Lauren Hutton, appearing in her first feature, is equally awkward. But a director is supposed to coordinate all the parts so that they add up to more than their sum, and Marsh isn’t capable. Nor can Alan Alda carry the whole thing on his shoulders. Viewers who happen to have read Plimpton’s book will have to look elsewhere for the charm found there.
According to Plimpton’s Wikipedia entry, an ancestor “was implicated in the Crédit Mobilier railroad scandal of 1872.”
"[Publisher] Henry Luce … founded Sports Illustrated [in 1954] with the hope of targeting men of leisure. The editors had as much interest in hunting, boating, and polo as in the major spectator sports; the main athlete profiled in the debut issue was the Duke of Edinburgh, an enthusiastic amateur archer, cricketer, and high jumper. The first significant paid writing assignment of Plimpton’s career was a 30,000-word cover story, published over four consecutive issues, about Harold Vanderbilt’s passions for yachting and bridge.… Sid James, who had previously edited Ernest Hemingway at Life, sought novelists to serve as contributors: William Faulkner covered hockey and the Kentucky Derby, John Steinbeck wrote about fishing, Budd Schulberg about boxing…. ” — Link
I.e., American football.
Kramer, an offensive guard for the Packers, dictated his diary of the season into a tape recorder, and sportswriter Dick Schapp edited the entries into a best-selling book. — Link
“For the climactic game footage, the makers of Paper Lion wisely made the handoff to Steve Sabol and NFL Films, and the end result offers one of the most punishing and memorable depictions of gridiron play ever captured for a feature film.” — TCM, “Paper Lion” article