Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game

Pinball is banned in New York. The ban has held since the thirties; the game is counted as chance and treated as gambling. Roger Sharpe comes to the city in the seventies, writes, and plays pinball; the machines are only in places that hide them. An association applies for the ban to be lifted and a hearing is held at the city council. Sharpe is asked to prove the game takes skill. A machine is set up in the council chamber and he has to show it in a single shot. Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg direct. Mike Faist plays Sharpe. The event behind it is real; the pinball ban in New York was lifted in the middle of the seventies and the demonstration at the hearing counted in that decision. The form is unusual; the real Roger Sharpe appears in the film as narrator and keeps interrupting the dramatisation to correct it. That method is what the film is most talked about for; it mocks its own fiction. Its second strand is personal; Sharpe's relationship and the question of fatherhood are woven through the pinball story. The New York of the seventies and the machine designs are reconstructed in detail. Its limit is balance; the personal strand takes up more room than the main matter. Who it is for: viewers who like light drama based on real events and unusual narrative forms. Who it is not for: the subject is narrow, the romance familiar, and the structure divided.