How Brown Saw the Baseball Game

Before heading out to a baseball game at a nearby ballpark, sports fan Mr. Brown drinks several highball cocktails. He arrives at the ballpark to watch the game, but has become so inebriated that the game appears to him in reverse, with the players running the bases backwards and the baseball flying back into the pitcher's hand. After the game is over, Mr. Brown is escorted home by one of his friends. When they arrive at Brown's house, they encounter his wife who becomes furious with the friend and proceeds to physically assault him, believing he is responsible for her husband's severe intoxication.[1]

Siegmund Lubin in 1913. His company produced and distributed How Brown Saw the Baseball Game.

How Brown Saw the Baseball Game was produced by Lubin Manufacturing Company,[2] a company founded by German-American film pioneer Siegmund Lubin. At the time How Brown Saw the Baseball Game was made, the company was creating and distributing up to three films a week.[3] The identities of How Brown Saw the Baseball Game's director and cast are not known.[4]

It is a silent film shot in black and white,[4] and the finished product comprised 350 feet (110 m) of film.[5] For the scenes which took place at the ballpark, the filmmakers used a form of trick photography in order to show the baseball players running backwards.[6] Siegmund Lubin filed a copyright for the film, under the alternate title How Jones Saw the Baseball Game, on October 26, 1907.[5]

How Brown Saw the Baseball Game was released into theaters by Lubin Manufacturing Company on November 16, 1907, and was still being shown as late as August 1908.[5][7] During this time, the film sometimes was presented as part of a double feature with the 1907 film Neighbors Who Borrow, a short comedy film about a man who lends nearly everything he owns to his neighbors until his wife returns home and berates him for doing so.[7][8]

Advertisements for the film touted it as "such fun", and Lubin himself promoted the film as a "screamingly funny farce".[9][10] It received a positive review in the June 1908 issue of The Moving Picture World which described the film as "truly funny" and that it proved to be "a veritable success".[11]

Modern writings have often suggested that How Brown Saw the Baseball Game was produced as Lubin Manufacturing Company's alternative to the Edwin S. Porter-directed comedy How the Office Boy Saw the Ball Game,[9] a film released by Edison Studios in 1906[12] about an office employee sneaking out of his workplace to watch a baseball game only to discover his employer in a nearby seat.[6] Lubin Manufacturing Company was known for creating films similar to competing motion pictures made by other studios. Lubin had previously created films resembling Edison Studios' releases Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Great Train Robbery.[3]

Author Jack Spears wrote in his book Hollywood: The Golden Era that How Brown Saw the Baseball Game and How the Office Boy Saw the Ball Game "used practically the same plot";[13] Rob Elderman's article "The Baseball Film: to 1920" in the journal Base Ball likewise notes the similarities of their plotlines.[6]

As of August 2015, it was unclear whether there is a surviving print of How Brown Saw the Baseball Game; it has likely become a lost film. If rediscovered, the film would be in the public domain.[4]

• How Brown Saw the Baseball Game on IMDb