Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film is "Eight Men Out," an historical drama based on the notorious Black Sox scandal of 1919, when eight members of the Chicago White Sox were charged with accepting bribes to lose the World Series.

John Sayles directed from his own screenplay, and has a role in the film as the sports writer Ring Lardner.

The ensemble cast of "Eight Men Out" also includes John Cusack, John Mahoney, Michael Rooker, Clifton James, Michael Lerner, Christopher Lloyd, Charlie Sheen, David Strathairn, D.B.

Sweeney, and Studs Terkel.

After winning the American League pennant, the 1919 Chicago White Sox are the favorites to win the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.

But despite the team's successes on the field, all is not well with the White Sox.

There is friction among some of the team members.

And owner Charles Comiskey, who puts on lavish parties for his friends, is less generous to his players, rewarding their pennant win not with monetary bonuses, but with a case of flat champagne.

His stinginess leads some of the players to look for other less reputable ways to make money.

Two small time gamblers, Sleepy Bill Burns and Billy Maharg, figured the discontent of the team gives them an opportunity to pay some of the players to throw several games at the upcoming series, allowing them and other gamblers in the know to make a lot of money by betting on the Reds.

They approached Chick Gandil, the Sox first basemen, who readily agrees to the scheme and recruits other members of the team, including Eddie Cicotte, who believes Comiskey has ripped him out of a $10,000 bonus he was promised.

Gandil also approaches shortstop Buck Weaver, who wants nothing to do with this scheme, and outfielder Shoeless Joe Jackson, who's limited education and understanding make it unclear how well he comprehends the plot he's involved in.

Burns and Maharh work to get other gamblers involved, ultimately including Arnold Rothstein, a prominent New York gangster.

When pitcher Eddie Cicotte begins to make errors in the first game of the series, it arouses suspicions in sports writers Hugh Fullerton and Ring Lardner, who decide to keep track of the Sox players to see who seems to be doing less than their best on the field.

When the Sox loose the first two games, Coach Kid Gleason says they'll rally and start winning, while Fullerton and Lardner become more and more convinced that the fix is in.

The Black Sox scandal is one of the most notorious episodes in American baseball history, led to several changes in the way the game was played and managed.

The best known account of the scandal is "Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series," written by Eliot Asinof and published in 1963.

The film rights of the book were bought by producers Midge Sanford and Sarah Pillsbury in 1980.

Over the next several years they considered some well-known directors for the project, including Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola, before settling on John Sayles in 1987 Sayles himself had been wanting to make a film version of Asinof's history of the scandal since the mid-'70s when he wrote an adaptation of the book as a sample screenplay to show to prospective film agents.

Sayles had once hoped to cast himself as a member of the White Sox, but after the film's long confinement to development purgatory, he ended up instead taking the role of sports writer Ring Lardner, to whom he bore a striking physical resemblance.

Other actors originally envisioned as members of the team, including Gene Hackman and Martin Sheen, were too old to play the roles by the time the film was made.

Sayles later said, "My original dream team had Martin Sheen at third base, and ended up with Charlie in center field" It took Sayles 11 years to bring his vision to the screen.

He recalled, "People said, oh, you'll never get this made.

There's a curse on it.

People have been trying to make it for years."

In fact, the production company was sued by family members of some White Sox players, and Orion Pictures turned the movie down twice before ultimately deciding to distribute it.

But that's not a curse, that's show business.

The making of "Eight Men Out" was a complicated affair, apart from the initial difficulties in its development.

Once John Sayles finally began the work of directing his own screenplay, he had to recreate the look and feel of the game of baseball as it was played in 1919, back when it truly was America's pastime.

The scenes of the baseball games were filmed in Indianapolis at Bush Stadium, a field built in 1931, more than a decade after the events depicted in the movie.

Since the stadium had to stand in for both Comiskey Park and Crosley Field, the set designers had to make modifications to its look and setup to credibly depict the two different ballparks.

They succeeded.

Most baseball historians approved of the look created for the movie's ball games.

Filling the stands was a different matter.

The filmmakers had a difficult time recruiting extras to get costumed and sit through the often tedious business of shooting a movie while still reacting like an excited crowd at an actual championship baseball game.

Ring Lardner's, son, Ring Jr., himself an Oscar-winning screenwriter for 1942's "Woman of the Year" and 1970's "MASH," visited the set and marveled at how skillful camera work managed to make a few hundred extras look like a World Series crowd of thousands.

He also listed some of the inducements used to attract extras and keep them happy.

The producers offered free entertainment, bingo with cash prizes, and as much of a stipend $20 a day as the budget permits.

One contest for the extras even offered the winner a lunch with Charlie Sheen.

But even so, the crew had to pad out the crowd with cardboard cutouts in the higher bleachers to fill up the stands.

Sheen, who was 22 when he appeared in "Eight Men Out," had already been acting in films for five years, including roles in "Platoon" in 1986 and "Wall Street" in 1987.

But his reason for being in the film was purely personal.

"I'm not in this for cash or my career or my performance," he told the Chicago Tribune.

"I wanted to take the part in this film because I love baseball."

The actors who portrayed baseball players had three weeks of spring training under the guidance of Ken Berry, a former center fielder for the Chicago White Sox.

Some did additional training.

Sheen went to batting practices with the Los Angeles Dodgers and D.B.

Sweeney, who played Shoeless Joe Jackson, worked with the Kenosha Twins, a farm team for the Minnesota Twins.

He chose Kenosha because he believed the conditions and atmosphere of a modern Class A minor league team were comparable to those of a Major League baseball team in 1919.

Critical reaction at the release of "Eight Men Out" was mixed, but generally favorable.

Some critics felt that Sayles own political leanings, he was an unabashed liberal, led him to overemphasize the players' grievances at a time when they had little choice but to work under the conditions the owners dictated.

Others felt that the movie, despite the notoriety of the Black Sox scandal, would be too hard to follow for those who are not already baseball fans, but most critics disagreed.

Sheila Benson wrote in a review in the Los Angeles Times: "'Eight Men Out' is the very devil of a story to tell with either urgency or clarity.

It's a tragedy in farce tempo with Damon Runyon characters and an O'Henry kicker.

Yet Sayles has done it.

He's woven each of the story's complex strands, moral, psychological, political, journalistic, personal, into a watershed American drama that's rich and clear."

There were a few quibbles from baseball fans over some of the details of the film.

This player was actually left-handed.

They didn't use that brand of baseball during those years, but for the most part, "Eight Men Out" was lauded for its authenticity to the time and events.

In an article for American Film Ring Lardner Jr. said Sayles film version was pretty much in line with what Lardner had learned about the events from his own father.

But he also knew how much more John Sayles had done than just craft an accurate screenplay to make the final movie both moving and engaging, even if most viewers wouldn't notice.

"The audience," Lardner wrote, "won't have the satisfaction of knowing exactly why everything worked out the way it did."

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.