Maniac Magee (film)

Maniac Magee
Distributed by	Nickelodeon
Directed by	Bob Clark
Produced by	Michael Nolin Jack Zurla Mark Zaslove
Written by	Jerry Spinelli Michael Nolin Jack Zurla Mark Zaslove
Starring	Michael Angarano Orlando Brown Kyla Pratt
Music by	Jim Lathan
Cinematography	Marshall Adams
Budget	none
Country	United States
Language	English
Release date	2003 (2003)

Maniac Magee is a 2003 television film made for the Nickelodeon network, based on the book about 12-year-old Jeffrey Lionel "Maniac" Magee, an orphaned runaway with many extraordinary and athletic talents, who arrives in a town divided with racial conflict.

Cast

• Michael Angarano as Jeffrey Lionel "Maniac Magee" Magee
• Kyla Pratt as Amanda Beale
• Orlando Brown as Mars Bar Thompson
• Rip Torn as George McNab
• Jada Pinkett Smith as the Narrator
• Melissa Bickerton as Dottie Freeze

Plot

Main article: Maniac Magee

The movie opens up with 12-year-old Jeffrey Lionel "Maniac" Magee is an orphan ; he can run extremely fast on railroad tracks, and comes to soothe tensions in his town of Two Mills. Two Mills is divided between the black and white people by Hector Street: blacks on East End, whites on West End. The racial tensions there, are very strong. Maniac is very confused by racial biases; to him, the people are simply people, heterogeneous but having much in common, such as kindness and cruelty.

Jeffrey's parents were killed by a drunk driver when his father had told him that he would show him his infamous "stopball". Later he has a funeral for his parents, a couple tells Jeffery to "come with them". Maniac taught himself to fly. While he was flying, though, he fell to the ground and paralyzed his wings. Then, learns how to run.

After one year of running, Jeffrey arrives in Two Mills. There, he quickly befriends numerous people on both sides of the unofficial segregation. Among them are a contemporary family of his, an African-American girl named Amanda Beale, with whose family for several seasons; James Down, known as "Hands", a football player who was vastly impressed by Jeffrey's own speed, dexterity, and agility; and the Samaritan family of Valerie Pickwell. In addition, Jeffrey proceeds to outdo a gang of bullies, sit on the doorstep of a mysterious, reclusive, and notoriously ill-tempered neighbor called Finsterwald, untie Cobbles' Knot, and stand up honestly to a black boy nicknamed Mars Bar, who covers up his own fears by frightening all other children.

Later, Jeffrey is startled into the realization of his own difference from the African-Americans with whom he lives with. As a result, he flees the town and hides in the buffalo enclosure of the local zoo. The buffaloes, a mother and a calf, accept Jeffrey freely. One day, he is room of a gymnasium, creating a nearly utopian life of interdependence and mutual learning. Jeffrey learns that Grayson was once a Minor League baseball player, forced to retire after a spectacular failure that came in the wake of a sequence of victories. Grayson, in turn, learns to read, a skill he had neglected through childhood. After Christmas, Grayson dies in his sleep.

Jeffrey, heartbroken, flees to Valley Forge and there waits to die. He is prevented from dying by two runaway boys, Piper and Russell McNab, whom he bribes into going home. While they are eating at a pizza-vendor's site in Two Mills, the boys' elder brother John appears. John is an extremely tall bully who was humiliated in a baseball game by Jeffrey, beating him. For returning the younger duo, John forgives Jeffrey and takes him home. In the McNab house, Jeffrey sees gluttony, squalor, racial prejudice, sloth, and ill-feeling in many ways. He attempts to correct the status quo by bribing the youngest McNabs into good behavior and by bringing a guest to Piper's birthday party—that guest being "Mars Bar" Thompson, the East End's harshest black kid. The introduction of Mars Bar to the McNabs seems to end in disaster, but teaches Jeffrey a valuable lesson about his friend's character.

Due to struggles that result from his unique social position—that of a homeless integrator—Jeffrey leaves the McNabs and roams all over the town, sleeping where he might and running at his own great pace through the streets in the early morning. At similar times, Mars Bar also goes running; when he meets Jeffrey, they run parallel, acknowledging one another in looks but not words.

When Jeffery comes back to East End, he sees that Mr. McNab blows up the head of the founder of East and West Ends, and the line that separated the towns disappears.

The movie closes with a group of kids finding out their friend is a daughter of Maniac Magee and they have a son named Maniac Jr., and that Amanda married Magee. The final scene shows older Magee throwing the ball to Jr., and he swings the ball with it smoking in the air.

Differences from the book

• Some of the book is cut including when Mars Bar has a conversation with Maniac

• In the book, it ends with Amanda retrieving Jeffery and telling him to be a permanent resident of the Beale family.

• In the book, Earl Grayson is a big part and character. In the movie, there is no part or appearance of Grayson.

• In the book they speak about Maniac Magee being allergic to pizza. In the movie, in no way do they mention this concept.

• In the book, Jeffery is taken to his Aunt Dot and Uncle Dan. In the movie, he is not.

Trivia

According to a magizine in April 1994, Disney and Paramount Pictures had greenlit a screenplay of Magee with Elijah Wood tabbed to play Jeffrey. Obviously, this theatrical release never came to be, and the script sat on a shelf for 8½ years.

External links

• Maniac Magee (film) at the Internet Movie Database