LOS ANGELES — There’s a scene in “42” in which Jackie Robinson, the first black player in Major League Baseball, endures intolerably cruel racial slurs from the Philadelphia Phillies’ manager.

It’s early in the 1947 season. Each time the Brooklyn Dodgers’ first baseman comes up to bat, manager Ben Chapman emerges from the dugout, stands on the field and taunts him with increasingly personal and vitriolic attacks. It’s a visible struggle, but No. 42 maintains his composure before a crowd of thousands.

As a viewer, it’s uncomfortable to watch — although as writer-director Brian Helgeland points out, “if anything, the language we have in that scene was cleaned up from what it was.”

Such hatred may seem archaic, an ugly episode in our nation’s history that we’d rather forget. But remembering Robinson’s accomplishments is more important than ever, say people involved with “42” and baseball historians alike. And because he was such an inspiring cultural figure, it’s more important than ever to get his story right.

Helgeland, an Oscar winner for his “L.A. Confidential” screenplay who previously directed “Payback” and “A Knight’s Tale,” said he felt “an enormous amount of pressure” to be faithful to Robinson’s story, both because of his significance and because his life had been written about so extensively.

Helgeland began working on the film two years ago, with the blessing of Robinson’s widow, Rachel, because he felt Robinson “deserves a great, big movie.” Robinson himself starred in the 1950 biography “The Jackie Robinson Story.”

“People would say to me, ‘You’re making another Jackie Robinson movie?’ and I’d say, ‘What was the other one you saw?”’ Helgeland said. “(Racism is) always going to be a relevant thing. It’s not a thing that’s ever going to be eradicated. Society has to stay on guard about it and not get complacent about it.”

Baseball historian Howard Bryant, author and senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN the Magazine, points out that Major League Baseball has been slow to diversify and still has a long way to go. In 2012, 8.8. percent of players were black, with only two black managers and two black general managers, according to the annual report by Richard Lapchick’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports at the University of Central Florida.

“These stories are more important than ever as we throw around very loaded, misleading terms such as post-racial. I think it’s even more important in something like Jackie Robinson’s case because it wasn’t that long ago,” Bryant said.

“The four most important teams in baseball history — the Red Sox, Yankees, Cardinals and Dodgers — in terms of history, in terms of success, none of them has ever had a black manager, Bryant said. “We’re not just talking about race. We’re not just talking about baseball. It’s an example of how far we’ve come and how far we need to go. There is this feeling that on April 15, 1947, everything was fine. It was just a start.”