“Speaking hypothetically, what would happen if a Yankees fan yelled ‘Bucky Fucking Dent’ as you are in your windup to throw out the first pitch today,” I ask Matt Damon as he marinates in the anxiety of Jason Bourne screwing it up on the mound in front of a sellout crowd at Fenway Park.
He doesn’t miss a beat: “I guess I’ll be throwing at your head, Mike.”
We are at Fenway on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, in which a Red Sox-Yankees contest has turned into a celebration for the Apple TV+ release of The Instigators. That comedy has proved itself an example of a moderately priced film that can be a victory for a big streamer, armed with clever marketing that included the above Dunkin’ Donuts commercial spoof which exploded virally and helped drive the film to become one of Apple TV+’s most watched films.
On this day, Damon and Casey Affleck lived out any Boston-bred kid’s fantasy camp dream of joining the Red Sox in batting practice and aiming for the famed left field wall (Green Monstah is what Bostonian’s call it). And then taking the mound with each throwing out the first pitch simultaneously, clad in Red Sox jerseys with the film’s title on the back where a player’s name would be. And then taking to the booth to join the Bosox TV broadcasters for an inning. There, as the broadcasters doted on the stars and their movie, they practically ignored an eventful inning where one Red Sox player stunted a rally by stepping off third base and getting tagged out in the old “hidden-ball trick” that usually only works in Little League. In the bottom half of the inning, as they bantered, the Red Sox right fielder dove over the fence to rob a home run, only to drop the ball when the back of his head slammed into the seats. At least Damon and Affleck had the self awareness to end their booth stint by apologizing for ruining the broadcast.
Fenway turns in what amounts to a location cameo in the heist comedy The Instigators, and that provided a passable good excuse for two Boston boys to get into the ballpark for free. Even if, when I met them, Damon and Affleck were feeling the pressure to make a good pitch and not ending up on SportsCenter’s “Not Top 10” lowlights segment. That would be especially traumatic coming in the iconic ballpark stadium they grew up loving, and where Casey worked home games slinging sausage sandwiches right outside the ballpark, often making 100 bucks a night.
Damon is one of the nicest movie stars you’ll come across, but this Yankee fan would have been disappointed if his response had been anything less than a promise to bean me, after I triggered him with the reminder of one of many heartbreaking moments in the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, when Dent ended the Red Sox season in 1978. Once, during an interview with Damon and fellow Boston guy John Krasinski for their fracking movie Promised Land, I told them I’d run out of questions but we since we had a little time left, might they like to discuss those two great Super Bowl games between their Patriots and my Giants? The Giants won both, and the first ended the Tom Brady-led Pats quest for an undefeated season.
Damon launched into an expletive-filled diatribe about the two luckiest throws in NFL history, and we parted laughing.
On this day, I joined Damon and Affleck — who with brother Ben grew up in nearby Cambridge — and Kevin Walsh, another Boston guy who produced The Instigators with Ben, Jeff Robinov, John Graham and Allison Winter. Casey wrote the film with Chuck MacLean, and it reunited Walsh with Affleck and Damon from Manchester By the Sea, and Damon with director Doug Liman. The film is sparked by the grudging camaraderie between Damon and Affleck they’ve been honing since before their turn together in Good Will Hunting. But every now and then there is a propulsive adrenaline rush provided by Liman with the signature action and car chase scenes that could have come out of the Damon-Liman collaboration The Bourne Identity.
The Fenway Park event was part of a clever grassroots marketing campaign that included the clever Dunkin’ Donuts commercial with Damon and Affleck reprising their Instigators characters, produced on the cheap by Matt & Ben’s Artist Equity’s advertising arm and Kevin Walsh, who wrote and financed the ad. It was released online and blew up virally. Their efforts have help propel The Instigators to open at what insiders say is the highest audience penetration Apple TV+ has so far achieved.
From left: Casey Affleck, ‘The Infiltrators’ producer Kevin Walsh and his son Henry, and Matt Damon
Mike Fleming Jr./Deadline
They are in early talks with Apple execs to play those characters again in a sequel, and they are all eager for the encore. That includes Liman, who declined a chance to take part in a sequel to Road House. Even though that Jake Gyllenhaal-Conor McGregor bar brawl extravaganza was a huge hit on Amazon Prime, Liman felt duped after signing for a full theatrical release at MGM only to be blindsided by a direct-to-streaming Amazon release. After Liman expressed his disappointment in a Deadline guest column, false or misleading spin-filled stories began showing up in other outlets. I’d seen his contract for the Road House remake, which verified Liman’s claims and described backend compensation based on box office performance. Ironically, as that backroom drama played out, Liman was making The Instigators in an Apple deal that called for a straight-to-streaming release. But Liman knew that when he signed on.
That confusion and uncertainty between streamer distribution models is not dissimilar from what George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Jon Watts are going through with Apple on Wolfs. Deadline broke news that the studio pivoted from a planned wide theatrical release to a week in theaters and a bow on Apple TV+. There, it might eclipse The Instigators viewing numbers because of Pitt and Clooney. But those stars won’t do much to promote it beyond the long-planned Venice premiere last weekend.
I view these streaming service spats with talent as the result of smart executives trying to keep pace with the tectonic shifts in the movie and streaming businesses. Clooney in Venice disputed the heavenly salaries reportedly paid them in a New York Times thumping of Apple. My problem with that story is it overlooked Apple’s overall strategy: whether Killers of the Flower Moon, Napoleon or others made back their production budgets and P&A in global theatrical releases, their theater runs were meant to create cultural zeitgeist awareness missing in most straight-to-streaming films. The idea is to make them more valuable when they launch on the Apple TV+ streaming service. You could write the same article about the theatrical grosses to costs of every streamer film including Netflix, which has little interest in big P&A spends and theatrical releases. It is all about the path taken to a permanent residence on a streaming library designed to draw paying subscribers.
Apple’s Wolfs move – remember that Clooney revealed to Deadline he and Pitt took less money to make possible a theatrical release – came because of the shrapnel that studio chiefs Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg got for betting wrong that Fly Me to the Moon would work in theaters. They based that on the star power of Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum, and sky-high test screening scores that emboldened Apple and distribution partner Sony Pictures to release in theaters as summer counterprogramming. Its failure left Apple brass shy about going right back to the well on Wolfs.
But the ultimate aim for both films is to live forever in a streaming library of original content, from the series Presumed Innocent and the returning Ted Lasso, to films like Greyhound, the Tom Hanks-scripted film that Sony sold to Apple when moviegoing was particularly risky post-pandemic. Hanks, his Playtone partner Gary Goetzman, director Aaron Schneider and Apple are in preproduction on the sequel after the first WWII battleship thriller proved to be a hit for the streamer.
The media treats every streamer misstep as a pinata to swing at, except for Netflix. But I assure you that even though Rian Johnson, Ram Bergman and Daniel Craig got those precedent-setting paydays first broken by Deadline for two Netflix sequels to Knives Out, the trio wasn’t happy that Glass Onion did not start with a wide theatrical release. Most believe that with a P&A spend, that film could have grossed perhaps $600 million in global box office — enough to pay for that huge deal — before the film landed on Netflix. Netflix has another opportunity to pivot next year with the third Knives Out installment Wake Up Dead Man. Don’t dress for it. Most believe Netflix will not veer from its disciplined strategy of prioritizing its subscribers, more like Costco than a traditional studio. I think if Netflix adopted a hybrid strategy that is more inclusive of theaters, it would help the entire movie ecosystem, but who can blame Ted Sarandos for not taking that risk, and instead sticking to a strategy that made him the darling of Wall Street and the envy of other studios and streamers.
But that doesn’t mean that Apple’s Erlicht & Van Amburg, and Amazon’s Jennifer Salke, are wrong for selectively embracing the theatrical release-first detour, as risky as it can be. Imagine where the moviemaking ecosystem would be if these streamers stopped swinging for the fences? All those stories do is foment fear and encourage these people to play it safe.
For his part, Damon told Deadline that he and his Artists Equity partner Affleck (their backer, RedBird Capital’s Gerry Cardinale is one of the owners of the Red Sox) were happy enough with their Apple film that they want to do more with them, including a sequel like Hanks, Goetzman and Apple are making with Greyhound.
“That would be incredible if it happened,” Damon said. “Look, it was the greatest most fun group of people. Working with Casey and with Doug again after all those years, and Apple was just amazing the whole way. Casey and I were just talking about how great that whole rollout was, the way they handled the movie.” He had just received a missive from Apple, which doesn’t divulge its audience numbers publicly. “They said that it was number one on all of the streaming, including the TV shows. So that’s wonderful; it just means that people are liking it as much as we liked making it. So yeah, that would be wonderful if that came to pass.”
From left: Hong Chau, Casey Affleck and Matt Damon in ‘The Instigators’
Apple
He and Artists Equity partner Ben Affleck would like to make these kinds of films part of the game plan of their fledgling disruptive venture; mixing smaller budget cleverly marketed films with bigger ticket entries. It matches the sensibilities at Apple that allowed The Instigators to happen. Damon hopes it will mean these parties do more together.
“What it’s about for us is to create flexibility, for all of our friends and all the people we know who are in this business,” Damon said. “The business has been disrupted, and a lot of movies we love to make and want to keep making have left the multiplex. And so it’s about finding creative ways to do it. We have a different pay structure so that our crews and the people who make the movies are really taken care of. It’s weird, Mike. Each one is different. The deal structures are changing from movie to movie, and from month to month, and each one of these streamers has different strategies. Each one of the legacy studios has different strategies. So it’s about sitting down with them and finding out, alright, what are you guys interested in making, and where does that intersect with what we want to make and our friends want to make? And then marrying those things up. It doesn’t work unless the partners that we’re working with are really happy. We’re not here to rob the bank. If we do this right, everybody wins. And so that’s really what we’re trying to do,” he said.
Affleck, who cowrote The Instigators because he wanted something light after a rough decade and a filmography full of dark performances, was more pragmatic about his sequel aspirations for The Instigators. I would imagine his glass half empty outlook was partly honed by the historical futility of his beloved Red Sox franchise.
“If it’s not a huge disaster for the people that invested in it, that’s all I’m looking for,” he said. “And in this case it was quite the opposite, and so I feel good. But my career, man. In the words of Winston Churchill, the only success that I’ve known is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. When, one way or another, a lot of people watch the work, that’s the cherry on top. And I guess if a journalist is calling to ask about the success of your movie, you can start to measure that by how high you feel after you’ve been at rock bottom. You never know, but when you get in with a group of people who have great track records, who are smart and still really care, the odds of landing either critically or commercially are very high. If someone gave me a chance to do it again, I would be thrilled because I know that I could do more with it. I want to play that character again.”
Like his Artists Equity partner Affleck and his The Instigators co-star Casey Affleck, Damon has a love for Fenway and the Red Sox that goes back to childhood, and the bond that grew with his father Kent, who passed away in 2017.
“Back in the seventies and early eighties, you could get bleacher seats for a couple bucks and you could scalp, and we used to go with my dad,” Damon recalled. “We were with him one day a week and every other weekend, and we would always walk up to the ballpark and scalp. The scalpers outside would always tell you they had better seats than they actually did. But in those days, once you were in the park, you could go on a Tuesday night, and sit wherever you wanted though sometimes an usher would ask you to show your ticket and you’d have to move. When I was a sophomore in college, we made it to the playoffs, and my roommates and I slept out on the sidewalk to get standing room tickets for the Oakland A’s game. I got two standing room tickets because Roger Clemens was going against Dave Stewart, and my dad was a pitcher. I was like, ‘Pop, I’m sleeping outside. I’m getting us two standing room tickets.’ And I did. And we went to that first game. We lost, but my dad and I were standing together.”
Though he’d have had the clout to do better than standing room only, Damon was not at the game that broke my Yankee heart. That’s when the Sox came back from being down three games to none in the 2004 AL Championship series, to end the Yankees season with a fourth straight victory that would lead to the end of Boston’s century-long dry spell when they won the World Series.
“Casey and I went together to Game Two of that series, a game we lost, and then I had to be in Geneva where I was shooting Syriana,” Damon recalled. “I watched those games on a computer, on a laptop in the middle of the night. Back then, the screen they could stream on was an inch and a half on your laptop, and the image hopped around. That’s how I watched all the games, and that comeback. The year before I was in Prague shooting The Brothers Grimm, and me and a bunch of crew members watched Aaron Boone hit the home run for the Yankees that eliminated us. Then I had to go right to work. That was terrible.”
Boone is now the Yankees manager and he was sitting in the dugout as Damon and Affleck wound up and threw their ceremonial first pitches. And the daughter of the late Tim Wakefield – the knuckleballer who gave up the Boone homer that broke the city’s heart once again – was part of Apple’s Fenway contingent for The Instigators.
Affleck also has different but equally fond Fenway memories, his involving summers slinging Italian sausage sandwiches to fans right outside the stadium.
“Where I grew up was just across the river and it was walking distance,” Affleck told me. “One of my first jobs was at Fenway Park, working just outside left field at a sausage stand. I worked every home game for almost for three years. This was way, way before I was old enough to really be working. I mean, that was like child labor, child endangerment, just everything you shouldn’t do to a child. And I loved it. I would go inside and watch the games. We’d trade a sausage and a soda to the guy at the turnstile and we’d just roll into the park and watch all the games. And then come back out before the rush of people leaving. I was a big baseball fan, always have been, and Fenway is the most special place to me.
“I started working in eighth grade and I looked like I was nine. Looking back, I’m like, who let that happen? And there were days when the guys who ran the stand, they’d go into Cask ‘N Flagon on the corner, get a few drinks, and I’d sit there waiting for my ride home. Nobody seemed to care. Those are great memories. Back then, you’d take the cash, put it in your apron, and through the night you’d just hand over wads of twenties from sausage sandwich sales. At the end of the night, they’d break us off a piece depending on how much was made. I did pretty good for an eighth grader.”
The relationship that Affleck and Damon have in the film, always picking at each other, organically developed since they were childhood neighbors in Cambridge, walking distance to Fenway.
“It’s 43 years of dysfunction,” Damon joked about their chemistry. “I love him so much. He drives me up the wall. He’s been like a little brother to me my whole life, and I’m so proud of him. That was one of the big reasons I wanted to do the movie. We hadn’t really worked opposite each other in a long time, and that was the big joy for me doing The Instigators.”
Most actors might lament stepping out of a part that becomes a career role for someone else. That happened on Manchester By The Sea, where Damon exited as star but remained producer, and Affleck turned in a staggering performance that won him the Best Actor Oscar.
“Casey and I had done Kenny Lonergan’s play together in London in 2002,” Damon said. “John Krasinski and I commissioned Kenny to write Manchester and I was supposed to do it but I had to leave because of my schedule [on the Ridley Scott-directed The Martian]. I literally said, the only actor I’ll give this up to, because this is the best part I’ve seen in over a decade, is Casey. I knew exactly what he would do with it, how great an actor he is. But I also knew how great he is with Kenny and with Kenny’s dialogue, and I knew exactly what he was going to do. So no, I’m really proud that I was able to be a producer on that, and the world got to see him in it. It is a masterful performance, and the film is a perfect combination of great writing, great directing, and great acting.”
Casey is surely grateful, but maybe his instinct for needling Damon comes from the fact he cannot forget that it was he who got his To Die For director Gus Van Sant to read Matt and Ben’s Good Will Hunting script, which made the movie happen and launched Matt and Ben to Oscars and stardom. After Van Sant said yes, Matt and Ben then invited Casey to audition for the fourth carpool pal in that movie (Yellowstone’s Cole Hauser was the other). But Casey is quick to point out that while Matt was always close with his brother Ben, he left young Casey feeling ignored.
“Matt lived a couple blocks away from me, but he was a lot older, still is a lot older,” Affleck said. “He looked even older, and so we didn’t really hang out until when kids get high school and college age and age doesn’t matter quite as much. But he was always just a different group than I was. He was sitting in the back of the bus. I was sitting in the front of the bus and he was with the cool older kids and I was with the cool younger kids.”
After he and Damon got to take batting practice earlier that day in an empty Fenway, Affleck wasn’t charitable toward his The Instigators co-star about how their hitting measured up. In his mind, Damon was no match when mighty Casey came to bat. At least that’s the version Affleck is going with even though neither put any dents in the “Green Monstah,” the way you hear it if you are hanging out with these two.
“It depends on how much fact checking you’re going to do on me, Mike,” he said. “I think I got a hold of a couple and put ’em close to the warning track. Definitely some doubles in there. I put some in the gap, but I don’t think I hit any off the [Green Monster] wall. Definitely Matt didn’t, although he surprised me. He looked pretty good, old as he is. He had a good stance, a good swing. I was kind of impressed.”
Damon acknowledged he didn’t dent The Monster, but he offered an excuse that Casey might believe validates the incessant age jokes: “I couldn’t even see the ball, I didn’t have my glasses. I hadn’t taken batting practice there in 20 years. Last time, I was hitting them off the wall. I just assumed that would happen again because I’m actually more fit than I was when I did it the last time. But I couldn’t even see the ball. So I was lucky I was even making contact. I hit a couple good line drives, but nothing to write home about.”
Then the rivalry between them brought them to the pitcher’s mound, where they would throw simultaneously to two different catchers.
“I’ve been throwing a baseball since I was like three, but because I’ve been throwing a baseball since I was three, I recently had surgery on my elbow,” Casey said. “I knew that I really shouldn’t throw a ball or shouldn’t throw it hard, but I just couldn’t let Matt out-throw me and I couldn’t let him do it on his own. I had to be up there. I was holding back a little bit, but I wasn’t too worried about getting across the plate.”
Damon felt the pressure more, even though he’d done this before.
“When I threw from that mound 20 years ago, I didn’t even think about it,” Damon said. “I didn’t warm up. I just went out there and did it. Maybe because my whole family was there and because Casey was there and we were ribbing each other a lot, I thought about it more this time. I was actually thinking about throwing while I was throwing, which I’ve never done before. The only way I could have messed it up is actually thinking about throwing mechanics. But if you go back and look at the video, I definitely threw a strike, and my pitch came in quicker than Casey’s. So I feel good about that.”
As it turned out, Damon wasn’t distracted by any loud invocation of Bucky Fucking Dent. I kept my mouth shut. I was holding my 2½-year-old grandson Luca, a Boston lad clad in the Red Sox hat and bright red David Ortiz jersey I’d bought him for the occasion. Maybe the prospect of throwing around Luca to hit me would have given them pause. And they seem like swell guys. But who can know for sure, when two hardcore Red Sox-loving Yankee-haters, armed with baseballs, have to relive what Bucky Dent did to Red Sox Nation?