Stealing Home Information

Stealing Home is a 1988 movie, starring Mark Harmon, Jodie Foster, Jonathan Silverman, and Harold Ramis. The film is directed by Steven Kampmann and William Porter.

Plot summary

Billy Wyatt (Harmon) was once a very talented high school baseball player and minor-league prospect. Now in his 30s, doing poorly financially and socially, he receives a telephone call from his mother revealing that Katie Chandler (Foster), his former child-sitter -- and later, in his teens, his first love -- has committed suicide.

This immediately elicits wonderful and painful memories of the times Billy spent with her, as well as of his own childhood, especially with his father Sam Wyatt (John Shea) with whom he had a very affectionate relationship, and with best friend Alan Appleby (Silverman), with whom he had a great friendship full of adventure, challenge and more.

The memories become the story, going back to Billy's pre-teen time with Katie as his child-sitter (Katie was in her late teens at the time), and with his father; then to his teens, both before and after his father died in a car accident. Billy and Katie shared a brief time of love together and Katie was immensely helpful to him after his father died. She then moved out of the country to be with a man she loved, which was the last time he saw her.

Billy, in the present, struggles to know what to do with Katie's ashes. He searches his memories for answers, and finds Alan Appleby after many years of having lost touch. They embark on new adventures as adults until the answer finally comes to Billy. He remembers Katie spoke of something long ago from her own early childhood: a horse in Atlantic City, forced to run full speed down the boardwalk and off the edge into the water. Remembering that she wished on that day that she could fly to a faraway land to find happiness, Billy spreads her ashes into the air off the edge of that same pier. Afterward, he rekindles old relationships and returns to a life of baseball by joining a minor league baseball team.

Cast

• Mark Harmon as Billy Wyatt
• Jodie Foster as Katie Chandler
• Harold Ramis as Alan Appleby
• Blair Brown as Ginny Wyatt
• Jonathan Silverman as Teenage Alan Appleby
• William McNamara as Teenage Billy Wyatt
• Richard Jenkins as Hank Chandler
• John Shea as Sam Wyatt
• Christine Jones as Grace Chandler
• Ted Ross as Bud Scott
• Helen Hunt as Hope Wyatt

Locations

The film plot is set in the Philadelphia area and the New Jersey shore. The filming occurred in many locations:

• The house that Billy grows up in is located in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, where exterior scenes were shot;
• The interiors of Billy's childhood home were filmed in a house located in Springfield, Pennsylvania;
• The scenes in Bob's Diner were filmed at Ridge Avenue in Roxborough;
• Alan Appleby's sporting goods store was located on Germantown Avenue in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania;
• Carlton Academy is actually Chestnut Hill Academy;
• The opening scene and closing scene were shot at Fiscalini Field in San Bernardino, CA. The team he was shown playing for in the movie was the name of the actual team that played there at the time, The San Bernardino Spirit.

Reception

The film received negative reviews around the time of its release. In her review for the New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "The era is simply established as a dreamily idyllic past, thanks to sand dunes at twilight, waves that crash in the distance, shiny red convertibles without seat belts and a musical score that may make you want to weep, for all the wrong reasons". Rita Kempley, in her review for the Washington Post described the film as a "pale comedy-drama by mediocrities Steven Kampmann and Will Aldis. Admittedly a pastiche of their memories, the movie bespeaks the dust of '60s yearbooks and greeting card sentiment. Of course, that stuff can be touching (Summer of '42) or quirky (Gregory's Girl), but here only allergy sufferers will leave with soggy Kleenex". In his one-star review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert wrote, "I detested Stealing Home so much, from beginning to end, that I left the screening wondering if any movie could possibly be that bad". The movie currently holds a 22% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

When asked recently about the film, Mark Harmon said, "That was about a bunch of actors loving a script, going there and burning it on both ends for five weeks just to get it done. That was a fun one to make. I hear a lot about that role. People really found that movie on video".