I was handed some promotional baseball cards during Monday night’s dinner for Chapman and MacLain Way‘s The Battered Bastards of Baseball, “a wonderfully spirited documentary about a scrappy-ass, mid ’70s minor-league Portland baseball team called the Mavericks…that was owned and managed by character actor Bing Russell, the father of Kurt Russell.” One of the cards featured Russell, who was a designated Mavericks hitter and a kind of consulting co-manager. I asked him to autograph the card. I told Russell that I had attended and reported on a 1980 Manhattan press event for John Carpenter‘s Escape From New York, in which Russell played Snake Plissken. We all enjoyed a semi-drunken yacht party followed by a trip out to Liberty Island to watch Carpenter shoot a scene. Guess who one of the publicists was on behalf of the film? Indiewire’s Anne Thompson. “That was a really great time,” Russell said.