From the Boston Globe:
The lovely Ione Skye (“Say Anything . . .”) and the lovelier KaDee Strickland (“Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid”) have been signed to star opposite Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon in “Fever Pitch,” a movie about rabid Red Sox fans, according to yesterday’s Hollywood Reporter.
Fever Pitch, the Nick Hornby book, is a great novel, and if it had to be transplanted to an American context (which is flirting with disaster, movie-wise), the Sox are probably the right team to do it with. Like the Arsenal, Hornby’s team, the Sox are a well-supported, good team with resources that aren’t a sports dynasty. The one thing: the Arsenal win the (1989) championship at the end of the book. Since the movie goes into production for 2005, the Sox could make it easy for the screenwriters…
Actually, I met Nick Hornby once, at a book signing in New York for How to be Good. Nice bloke. After the signing, we exchanged one or two sentences while my friend in the publishing industry passed him some books for him to read. Came away with a signed copy of High Fidelity, which I prize. At the reading, someone in the audience asked him about the Arsenal on behalf of her boyfriend, and he had that look like he was expecting that question but wanted to move on from being forced to talk about the Arsenal to this person who didn’t really seem to want to know about the team and just wanted to ask a kooky question. I guess once you write an autobiographical book on your obsessive fandom, you can’t really shy away from questions about said fandom.