Screening DeLillo

After breaking out of his characteristic hyper-realist mode with the disappointing Cosmopolis and The Body Artist, Don DeLillo's trying something new again. This time, he's written the screenplay of a film, Game 6, which stars Michael Keaton and Robert Downey Jr, and is directed by Michael Hoffman (whose earlier credits include One Fine Day.) Game 6 deals with a playwright ducking the opening of his first-night show to attend the historic1986 World Series baseball game and was screened recently at the Provincetown International Film Festival.

DeLillo has written about baseball before, of course -- notably in the breathless and exciting prologue to his mammoth Underworld, dealing with the 1951 Giants-Dodgers game.

Bernard Malamud's The Natural, also about baseball, was made into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford and Glenn Close. And then there's The Great American Novel, the only Philip Roth novel one has yet to read.

Now, if only one could figure out which end of the diamond is which.