Fast And Furious director will adapt Sundance documentary Battered Bastards Of Baseball

By Kevin McFarland | January 27, 2014 | 9:13pm

Aux Features Film

Baseball documentary The Battered Bastards Of Baseball debuted to acclaim at Sundance earlier this month, and now Fast And Furious series director Justin Lin has already acquired the adaptation rights. Centering on the Portland Mavericks, the only independent team in America when Bing Russell founded the club in 1973, Bastards chronicles the “unprecedented success” of an organization predicted to fail miserably. The Mavericks signed actor Kurt Russell—son of the team's founder—as a player, employed future film director Todd Field (In The Bedroom) as a batboy, “hired the first female GM in baseball, and inspired one of America’s beloved bubble gums (Big League Chew).”

Lin beat out major studios like Columbia, Fox Searchlight, and DreamWorks to purchase the rights for his own production company, with Field in negotiations to write and direct the narrative adaptation. Kurt Russell will also be involved in some creative capacity. There’s no word on whether the documentary itself will get a wider release, but with a remake in the production pipeline, it now seems much more likely.