The rise and fall of former major leaguer Lenny Dykstra certainly makes a good story.
He was the starting center fielder of the Mets’ 1986 World Series championship team. From there, he went from the highs of leading the Phillies to the 1993 World Series and finishing second in National League MVP voting to the lows of filing for bankruptcy after building a supposed financial empire and serving nearly seven months in federal prison.
Oh, Dykstra was also named in MLB’s Mitchell Report on steroid use. A few years after that report’s release, he admitted in a book to taking steroids, calling himself “a pioneer for that stuff,” which would seem to cast some serious doubt on those 1993 achievements.
More than a decade after his baseball career ended, Dykstra reinvented himself as a stock-picking guru who was given a financial advice column on The Street by CNBC’s Jim Cramer. That stuff has to go into Dykstra’s story too.
But would that story make a good movie? We could soon find out. According to Variety, a Dykstra biopic has been in development over the past couple of months, with producer Gil Netter and director John Lee Hancock attached to direct. If those names aren’t familiar to you, they helped bring us 2009’s The Blind Side. Hancock also directed 2002’s The Rookie, so he’s pretty good at this sports biopic thing.
However, both of those projects were heartwarming, family-friendly films, meant to make your eyes get dusty while entertaining viewers of all ages. Does the Lenny Dykstra story fit into that same category? Not unless Hancock has quite a different take on Dykstra’s life, especially what’s occurred over the past six years.
Maybe Hancock sees an opportunity to work with different material and take a new approach. If he wanted to get dirty and a little crazy with a sports biopic, putting Dykstra’s story on film would a good one to pursue.
That really is the only way to tell Dykstra’s story, isn’t it? No one wants to see a brash personality with seemingly no remorse for the turn his life took, choosing instead to cite his record in picking stocks and the interest in telling his story, portrayed sympathetically. Besides Hancock’s film, Dykstra is also working on an autobiography with author Peter Golenbock (who wrote a history of the New York Mets, among his many other books), according to the New York Times‘ Richard Sandomir.
Though it might now seem derivative, The Wolf of Wall Street seems like a model to follow — a frenzied, cocaine high of a movie telling an unlikable lead character’s life story with so much energy that its three-hour run time just whizzes by. But let’s not make a Lenny Dykstra movie that’s three hours long, OK? It’s just an example.
Oliver Stone’s George W. Bush biopic, W., could also provide a template, in terms of telling a story in which the filmmakers are clearly casting judgment on the story’s subject with no interest in being fair and presenting several real-life people as outlandish caricatures. If Dykstra is involved in this film, that approach obviously won’t be taken. But there’s no indication that he is.
However, when interviewed after being released from prison and discussing his movie rights being purchased, Dykstra suggested Mark Wahlberg or Matt Damon portray him on screen. There’s the keen eye that helped him bat .285 in his major league career and impress Wall Street with his stock picks.
[Variety]
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