Watch the newly released film, Fantasyland.
Before the 2004 baseball season, Sam Walker was a happily married, tie‐wearing sportswriter leading a responsible and well‐rounded life. But by the time that season was over, he had spent tens of thousands of dollars, traveled 19,000 miles, missed 3 weddings and a funeral, and ignored a raging fire in a neighbor’s apartment. He’d become a caffeine‐addled insomniac with back spasms, willing to ignore family, work and anything else that might distract him from his one, increasingly elusive goal: winning his fantasy‐baseball league. Inspired by Walker’s best‐selling book of the same name, FANTASYLAND is a documentary feature film about the bizarre and fascinating world of fantasy baseball, wherein an estimated 15 million Americans (approximately 5% of the nation’s population) actively play or have played fantasy baseball. In FANTASYLAND, we’ll meet some of these people ‐ the fans, fanatics, experts and amateurs, who battle it out every baseball season (and beyond). As in Sam Walker’s book, FANTASYLAND will document an “amateur” fantasy baseball player’s first season participating in Tout Wars, the ultimate fantasy baseball league, where the self‐appointed gurus of the sport reside. However, unlike Sam Walker, the film’s lead character will not be a sports professional with media credentials and industry contacts; he’ll be an ordinary fantasy baseball player, who is thrown into the lion’s den of Tout Wars and forced to compete with the experts.