As I mention in the Conversation, when I went to Yankee Fantasy Camp in 2009, I found out the coach of my team would be Ron Shelton. How cool was that? But when I asked him about Bull Durham, he told me he wasn’t that Ron Shelton. I hope my disappointment wasn’t too evident.
Readers of this blog know my fondness for movies. Couple that with books and it’s a perfect storm. Sadly, aside from Richard Sandomir’s The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper, and the Making of a Classic, I can’t think of another “making of” pairing. (Here’s my Conversation with Sandomir.) So when I heard about The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit, it was a given that I would try to get the Ron Shelton for a BC.
UPDATE: I have since recalled that another baseball film received such treatment in The Making of Major League: A Juuuust a Bit Inside Look at the Classic Baseball Comedy, by Jonathan Knight in 2015. In addition, Dwier Brown — who played Ray Kinsella’s father in the final scenes — published If You Build It…: A book about Fathers, Fate and Field of Dreams in 2014. Wouldn’t you love to see one for the original Bad News Bears?
In addition to Bull Durham, which always appears on the lists of best baseball movies, Shelton wrote the screenplay for Cobb (1994), which was not received as well.
An aside, which will be the basis of a future entry: Shelton’s Tin Cup was on recently and I did a little digging into his credits. I found out he was also the executive producer for Spaceman, ostensibly a bio-pic of the pitcher Bill Lee, post-MLB career. I’ll watch anything about baseball, but this one had the bonus of taking place in Montreal, my ancestral home.
is available on Amazon.com,
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