For a particular generation, there may be no movie that better encapsulates childhood than The Sandlot. Of course, when you're a kid a lot of your time is taken up wanting to do more grown-up stuff. Such was the case with the cast of The Sandlot, who revealed recently during a 25th-anniversary retrospective that one of the most memorable things that happened as part of making the movie was when they all snuck into a showing of Basic Instinct together, thanks to the older brother of one of the cast members. According to Marty York who played Yeah-Yeah...
Tom Guiry's brother, Tom Guiry who plays Smalls, said, 'Hey, I'm gonna sneak you guys into a film.' And he snuck us into Basic Instinct after we were done filming.
Even if you've never actually seen Basic Instinct, there's a good chance you're familiar with it by reputation. It's a very steamy thriller best known for an interrogation scene that includes Sharon Stone proving to the entire audience that she's not wearing underwear. In addition to that, she spends a large portion of the film having sex. It's far from surprising why a bunch of 12-year-old boys would be interested in seeing the film, even if the actual plot about the hunt for a serial killer probably didn't interest them much.
One has to wonder just how it easy it was to sneak a half dozen kids who were obviously not 17 into a movie all at once. Perhaps the local theater didn't really worry about film ratings all that much back in the early 1990s.
Even without the excessive sex and nudity, the film is quite violent and very rated-R. It would be years before these kids would be allowed to see such a film in a theater normally. For that reason, it's not surprising that even 25 years later the cast remembers getting snuck into the movie by the older brother of one of their co-stars. Victor DiMattia, who played Timmy, pointed out to ESPN that, since they were all kids, this was a pretty significant experience for them.
It was a big moment for a 12-year-old.
The Sandlot is about a group of friends who go through a significant part of their adolescence together. It seems that the filming of the movie was something of a case of life imitating art. Getting up to no good is something that all kids do from time to time, and sneaking into an R-rated movie certainly qualifies. The fact that they weren't supposed to be there may have had as much, if not more, to do with why this was a memorable experience than the movie itself.
