The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit - Hardcover

Shelton, Ron

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059331977X ISBN 13: 9780593319772

Verlag: Knopf, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

LA TIMES BESTSELLER • From the award-winning screenwriter and director of cult classic Bull Durham, the extremely entertaining behind-the-scenes story of the making of the film, and an insightful primer on the art and business of moviemaking.

"This book tells you how to make a movie—the whole nine innings of it—out of nothing but sheer will.” —Tony Gilroy, writer/director of Michael Clayton and The Bourne Legacy

"The only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the church of baseball."—Annie in Bull Durham

Bull Durham, the breakthrough 1988 film about a minor league baseball team, is widely revered as the best sports movie of all time. But back in 1987, Ron Shelton was a first-time director and no one was willing to finance a movie about baseball—especially a story set in the minors. The jury was still out on Kevin Costner’s leading-man potential, while Susan Sarandon was already a has-been. There were doubts. But something miraculous happened, and The Church of Baseball attempts to capture why.

From organizing a baseball camp for the actors and rewriting key scenes while on set, to dealing with a short production schedule and overcoming the challenge of filming the sport, Shelton brings to life the making of this beloved American movie. Shelton explains the rarely revealed ins and outs of moviemaking, from a film’s inception and financing, screenwriting, casting, the nuts and bolts of directing, the postproduction process, and even through its release. But this is also a book about baseball and its singular romance in the world of sports. Shelton spent six years in the minor leagues before making this film, and his experiences resonate throughout this book.

Full of wry humor and insight, The Church of Baseball tells the remarkable story behind an iconic film.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

RON SHELTON's Bull Durham launched a writing-directing career that includes White Men Can't Jump, Blaze (1989), Cobb, and Tin Cup, among other films. He also directed Jordan Rides the Bus, a documentary about Michael Jordan's year in the minor leagues. A former professional baseball player, he holds degrees from Westmont College and the University of Arizona. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his family.
 

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1

Forbidden Fruit

Bible stories were a big part of my growing up. The dramatic tales of Moses parting the Red Sea and coming down from the mountain and Jesus routing the money changers in the temple and the whole fantastic narrative still live loudly in my DNA. I took the required courses on the Old and New Testaments at the evangelical college I attended, perhaps the most rigorous classes I’ve ever taken, but by that time I was moving away from religious dogma and discovering that the universe of the secular (a pejorative word to Baptists) was infinitely more attractive. But the Bible stories still resonate.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was placed in the Garden of Eden by God as the one thing forbidden to Adam and Eve. Even as a child I felt like the game was rigged. We’re taught that we are created human and therefore flawed, so of course we’re going to eat the apple. Growing up in a family in which movies, drink, and cursing were forbidden, it was inevitable that I’d become a moviemaker who loves his cocktails and curses like a longshoreman. Clearly, it was preordained in the Book of Genesis. My parents broke the movie rule a couple of times (the rules of forbidden behavior were dictated by my father’s job at an evangelical college rather than his own private beliefs). On one occasion, he and my mother packed my brother and me in the car and drove to the drive-­in theater in Ventura to see Winchester ’73, a Western about the invention of a rifle that changed the West. Directed by Anthony Mann and starring James Stewart, the movie has become something of a classic, though I remember little as a five-­year-­old other than how cold it was in the car and that we were sneaking around on God by driving to another town to watch it. That was more exciting than the movie.

Another time in Whittier, where my mother’s parents lived and the rules were looser (they were English and not evangelical), we went to see Here Come the Nelsons, an Ozzie and Harriet feature about a girdle salesman. When you see very few movies, the details remain vivid—­the climactic scene has a dozen girdles tied together between two trees across a road and the crooks escaping in a car can’t break through the girdles. I loved it.

The third movie I saw was in Taft, California, a tough oil town thirty-­seven miles southwest of Bakersfield. It was my father’s hometown, and my brother and I were staying with my grandparents when my grandmother took us to see a movie based on a best seller about a preacher, A Man Called Peter. This book was wildly popular in the evangelical world and had been read by everyone in every church I attended as a kid. This was also the only time my rock-­ribbed Baptist grandmother had ever been in a movie theater, though we suspected later that year she went to see Oklahoma! (they were from West Texas, and Oklahoma was close enough) but was afraid to confess it. So, my brother and I sat in the theater watching this weeper (the preacher dies) and when it was over we all sat for the second feature because it was unthinkable to pay for two movies and not sit through both. On came Ma and Pa Kettle in Waikiki. The title sequence had hula girls and my grandmother was mortified that she’d ruined us; she covered our eyes and ushered us out of the theater into the searing Taft sun. At ten years old, I had glimpsed the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the hula girls looked pretty good, even if viewed in grainy shots of a tourist luau, circa 1955.

The illicitness of the darkened theater and a deep-­red curtain drawn to reveal larger-­than-­life images accompanied by an orchestral score was overpowering. Even if the images were Ozzie and Harriet stretching girdles across a road and the good Reverend Peter Marshall expiring too young.

—

We didn’t get a television until I was twelve, and that family purchase was triggered not by the desire to see the shows everyone was talking about—­Superman and Perry Mason and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, among others—­but because of baseball. Eddie Mathews was the star third baseman of the Milwaukee Braves but, more important, he was our hometown hero from Santa Barbara—­and the Braves were in the World Series. This is more than anecdotal history; it’s the first great moral crisis I saw my parents confront. The Braves were down two games to one with the critical fourth game landing on a Sunday in Milwaukee, late morning on the West Coast. The first three games we listened to on the radio. To stay alive, the Braves had to win on Sunday, but we had to be at the First Baptist Church at the same time. After Sunday school, when we trudged upstairs in our scratchy wool slacks and clip-­on ties to the weekly interminable eleven o’clock service, where the Reverend Gus Gableman, the least charismatic Baptist preacher in history, would drone on in a deathless monotone, something happened as startling as the events that overtook Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus. My father swept us boys up and rushed us to our big dented Buick station wagon. My mother, late in pregnancy with what would be her fourth son, watched us go silently, which meant she had signed off on this intervention—­her will mattered and was respected by all of us. Something was afoot.

My father raced us home nervously, saying nothing. We understood the gravity of the moment but didn’t yet know the stakes. We were being taken out of church, and God could strike at any moment. The Rapture might be upon us and we knew that meant all Christians would be lifted into the clouds and the pagans would be left behind, eternally damned. But given my father’s sudden apostasy, would our Buick station wagon be lifted as well, or had we forfeited a life believing in Jesus for . . . we didn’t even know what. What if, God forbid, my father and mother were lifted up into the sky to meet Jesus, and my two little brothers and I, because we hadn’t yet been baptized and received Gus Gableman’s warm hand of fellowship, crashed in the driverless Buick? Maybe I could climb into the front seat and manage to slow down the car before it hit a light pole and save us from a terrible death? Maybe I’d just be postponing the inevitable because the Rapture had passed us over? Maybe a forgiving God would put skipping church on this morning in the same category of sin as seeing Winchester ’73 at the Ventura drive-­in or the girdle movie with my mom’s parents, who weren’t even Baptists? Surely God knew we had watched A Man Called Peter in Taft—­that must be worth something—­even if we saw the hula girls in the title sequence of the second feature. These were eschatological questions my father was wrestling with, and, as the oldest son, I empathized and sweated with him. Even if I didn’t know the issues, I felt them. I felt him.

My father, still silent, led us straight into the house, where a man from Ott’s department store (buy local, my parents taught) was just finishing installing a television set. Surely God would strike now. But he didn’t—­he strung us out—­and when the TV was turned on and the black-­and-­white image came into focus, it was—­we’d completely forgotten, given the spiritual crisis—­the World Series. Game Four. The installer was a man we knew; he’d had a brief minor league career that hadn’t worked out and now he was making do, and he understood the moment. He just said, “Eddie—­I know,” as he left. We watched the game in terror, aware that Eddie was having a terrible series. But after the team tied it in the bottom of the tenth, our hometown...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059331977X
• ISBN 13: 9780593319772
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar