John Grisham goes it alone

Marcia Tanner lives just a few blocks from where the Little League World Series is played, so she’s familiar with bright lights and high drama.

She got a different type of Little League drama on Thursday night.

Three years after John Grisham filmed “Mickey” on the Little League Baseball complex in South Williamsport, Tanner finally got to see the finished product, starring Harry Connick Jr., on the big screen. A standing-room-only crowd watched a special screening one day before it officially opened just down the road from Williamsport, where Little League was founded.

“I loved it,” Tanner said. “It was a really good movie.”

But the industry hasn’t been as kind to “Mickey,” which never did land a distributor. Instead, Grisham and director Hugh Wilson (“The First Wives Club,” “Guarding Tess”) are slowly distributing the $6-million film on their own, hoping to build a national audience.

“We got tired of talking to distributors and studios,” Grisham said in a telephone interview. “That went on for a couple years -- it was a pretty frustrating experience -- and we finally made the decision several months ago that we’d made the movie totally independent of Hollywood and we could also distribute it that way.”

Studios either weren’t interested in the film or made offers that didn’t make financial sense for him and Wilson, Grisham has said.

“Mickey” opened April 30 in 42 theaters in North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia, states where the Little League season is well under way. Its box-office gross of $75,235 ranked 45th over the weekend, but its per-screen average of $1,793 was better than 11 of the top 20 films during that same period.

This weekend it adds 37 locations in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and additional screens in Texas, and next week it moves into five more markets in Arkansas, the District of Columbia and Florida.

It’s a small opening for a movie by Grisham -- the man who wrote the bestselling books that were turned into “The Firm,” which grossed more than $150 million in theaters, plus “A Time to Kill” and “The Pelican Brief,” each of which raked in $100 million at the box office.

But with “Mickey,” Grisham wrote the script and produced the movie. Connick plays Tripp Spence, a bereaved father who takes his 13-year-old son, played by newcomer Shawn Salinas, into hiding in Las Vegas to avoid a tax fraud investigation he knows will land him in prison. With a new identity as Mickey Ryan, the boy, a star pitcher back in Virginia, is officially 12 years old again and eligible for one more Little League season.

Of course, this is John Grisham, so there’s more than a little intrigue, including a Cuban conspiracy and a congressional investigation.

But the biggest twist is one that even 9-year-old Matt Krezmer could appreciate.

“It’s like the World Series a few years ago when the player was 14 and he frauded that he was 12,” said Matt, who plays Little League in nearby Montoursville.

Matt was referring to Danny Almonte, the 14-year-old Bronx pitching sensation at the 2001 Little League World Series -- the very series where some of the shots in “Mickey” were filmed.

It looks like the film will be a hit at home. More than 1,000 people from the Williamsport area were extras, and Little League spokesman Lance Van Auken said the organization has fielded hundreds of calls from people wondering when they can see the movie.

Whether it can build an audience outside of Little League’s hometown is another question.

Ian Mohr, a New York-based film writer for the Hollywood Reporter, said that by focusing first on Little Leaguers and their families -- just as “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” was first marketed to Greek Americans -- Grisham and Wilson might have a good game plan.

“Another film that’s interesting to look at in this case is ‘Bend It Like Beckham,’ which did much better than anyone expected. And the way they launched that film was they began by screening it for girls’ soccer teams and their families,” Mohr said. “I think that what Grisham and [Wilson] are trying to do is ... get a core audience interested and then try and get the film to cross over from there.”