Well, holy be to the gods of film, an actual real live unit publicist... one brave enough to come forward. See, they ain't all cowards! This one wanted to clarify some information about BASEketball, and set about contacting us geeks with what the deal is. Too cool, and thanks a lot...

I am the unit publicist on "BASEketball" and wanted to briefly comment on the material you've recently posted on the film.

Just so you know, the movie was *always* intended to be R-rated from the time it went into production. In point of fact, the studio never asked that anything be toned down and completely respected the filmmakers' intentions from Day One. Also, to show the filmmakers' own frame of mind on this, they didn't even shoot "TV versions" of scenes...nor were asked to by the studio

-- the movie is what it is, R-rated, and to soften it would have been a different film. It is, always was, and will remain R-rated...and an "all-out assault on decency, humor and sports."

A couple of comments about the reviews --

1) The "Squeak" character that got praised is played by a guy named Dian Bachar (pronounced Dee-un Ba-har), a college buddy of Matt and Trey.

2) There is no "Tommy Lasorda scene" in existence. I think there was a mention of it in a very, very early draft of the script, but it got written out long ago during pre-production and was never filmed. Another sequence was written in, in its place.

3) Yes, Jenny McCarthy hooks up with Robert Vaughn because she plans to sell him the team she expects to inherit. If that wasn't clear, keep in mind that this was just the first test screening, and they're still editing the movie, finetuning everything to make it all (hopefully) even better and funnier.

Incidentally, just for information's sake, Matt and Trey were both hired to star in the film *before* "South Park" was even on the air. David Zucker knew their independent film work, loved it and even had hired them to work on a couple of his own small, independent projects. The "BASEketball" filmmakers convinced Universal to let them hire these completely unknown actors, and to their credit, the studio said yes. It turned out to be a pretty fair decision, because about a month later "South Park" went on the air...

Robert Elisberg