baseball smack talk on my facebook = it's truly spring = love. /// http://www.zen134237.zen.co.uk/Pilot_Hell/ /// ron shelton http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/04/10/jackie-robinson-42-and-the-art-of-the-baseball-movie/ http://oldschool.tblog.com/post/1970114372 http://articles.latimes.com/2001/feb/21/sports/sp-28116 https://sites.google.com/site/bodaciouscom/Bodaciouscom/tin-cups-and-durham-bulls---an-interview-with-ron-shelton

"Another reviewer, this time in Entertainment Weekly, was no more enamoured: “Shelton has made his characters so equal, so balanced in their penny-ante dilemmas, it's hard to have much stake in the outcome. By the end, the fight means everything to them and virtually nothing to us.”[7] All of which might well explain why Shelton decided on a fresh tack. Perhaps he felt he had fully mined his field of broken dreams?" It would have been understandable. Nobody in cinema, I would argue, has done more to invest sportsmen with dignity and communicate their humanity. Before Shelton, sports movies dwelled on the massive failures and the redemptive triumphs, prodigies and tragedians. Shelton chose character over caricature and turned the spotlight downstairs, from whales to plankton. He celebrated the grime beneath the glitter; he hailed the small victories and made light of defeat; he offered us the serial incompetencies and omnipresent fears – of injury, of waning powers, of superior colleagues and rivals - that benight all sportsfolk. Bar Ty Cobb – who was considerably more villain – Shelton’s heroes are wannabes and also-rans, never-weres and nearly-men. Beyond proficient hand-eye coordination, they are rebels without much of a clue. Why? “The fringe players in life are frequently more interesting than the winners,” he told me.[8] “Those trying to reach the spotlight are more interesting. It’s a traditional element of American literature. I might write a piece about it one day. Celebrity does something to people. We haven’t addressed the sickness. If, as the old saying goes, success brings out the real person, we’re a sorry lot.” ... The appeal of baseball, the subject of two of Shelton’s films, had not waned in the least. “It’s the only game without a time limit,” he reasoned. “Therefore, in a kind of blind, American, optimistic way, you always have a chance to win. There’s something fabulously, stupidly American about it. I enjoyed playing it. It’s the slowest and fastest game all at once – and you play it every day.” Wives and girlfriends tend to sit in the wings in sports movies, as they generally do in sports, yet Shelton’s female characters – most notably Susan Sarandon’s Walt Whitman-quoting schoolteacher-groupie in Bull Durham - are as intriguing as the men: strong but nervy, fretting earth mothers and uncertain high-fliers. Did his own mother play a significant part in his own career? “I had a strong and wondrous mother, fiercely independent, generous, opinionated and well read. She died very young. Perhaps her spirit is kept alive in my movies.” ... In Tin Cup, Shelton points out, “Roy McEvoy is the Tim Robbins character at 40, still a man with a million-dollar gift in a 10-cent head. He was afraid of success.” Did Shelton draw on golfing history for the scene where McEvoy declines to lay-up at the US Open and keeps attempting to drive the water only to land in it every time? Was it, as many have suggested, Ray Ainsley, who became a national hero in 1938 when he took a record 19 at the par-four 16th in the US Open? “I only heard about that afterwards,” came the only slightly defensive reply. “I’d been trying for years to figure out how to do golf. It’s a sport you either love or hate. The question I had to answer with Roy was, how do you make his life transcend golf? Then one year I was watching the Masters on TV, and Chip Beck, who was a shot behind Bernhard Langer, could have taken a risky shot over water to catch him. He laid up, played safe, and lost. I immediately got on the phone to a buddy and told him, ‘It’s about a bloke who can’t lay up.’ Americans now chant ‘Tin Cup’ during events whenever somebody plays safe. I’m rather proud of that.”

this sporting life HALL and OATES fat city? rodin the set-up

In baseball, you can't kill the clock. You've got to give the other man his chance. That's why this is the greatest game. Earl Weaver

http://thehollywoodinterview.blogspot.com/2009/06/ron-shelton-hollywood-intervew.html JUN 1 Ron Shelton--The Hollywood Interview Writer/director Ron Shelton

Ron Shelton: From the Red Wings to Bull Durham by Jon Zelazny Editor’s note: this article first appeared at EightMillionStories.com on December 12, 2008. I’ve never been a sports fan, but I’ve long considered Bull Durham (1988) one of my favorite movies. And I’m not alone: Bravo ranked it #55 on its list of 100 Funniest Movies, the American Film Institute ranked it #97 on their similar 100 Years—100 Laughs list, and Sports Illustrated called it the #1 Greatest Sports Movie of all time. I’d always wanted to meet Ron Shelton partly because he spent a portion of his own minor league baseball career playing for my hometown team, the Rochester Red Wings. Their Silver Stadium (1929-1996) was a few blocks northwest of the Polish neighborhood where both of my parents grew up, making the Red Wings a cherished piece of the fabric of the lives of so many of my relatives. Ron Shelton and I met at an L.A. landmark, The Pacific Dining Car. RON SHELTON: I played for the Red Wings about a year and a half. I’d been a utility guy; I made the jump from A ball when one of the middle-incomers from AA got hurt in Dallas, so they sent me down there to play, then the next year I came up to triple-A in Rochester. My second season was especially great because we had a championship team; so many great guys, like Don Baylor, and Bob Grich, and the late Johnny Oates. You always have warmer memories of the seasons when you were winning! I got to see so much of America playing baseball, and I loved all those industrial, working class, eastern cities—Columbus, Ohio; Syracuse—because they were so different from where I grew up. I loved the old bars. Great old bars. As a kid from Santa Barbara, California, though, I was used to warmer weather. I’d never been in snow until I played baseball in Rochester… we had games that were snowed out! I remember one July day, it was beautiful; everybody was out working in their gardens… and that was it! It was like you got a one-day summer up there! So I realized I was a little spoiled. I lived in a boarding house a few blocks from Silver Stadium. I had an old bicycle that I bought from Herman Schneider. He’s been the head trainer for the Chicago White Sox for the past thirty years, but back then he was the Red Wings’ 20-year-old assistant trainer. I’d ride my bike to the stadium about four o’clock in the afternoon, stop at Dunkin’ Donuts or the sub/sandwich shop, and when the games got out around eleven–thirty or so, I’d work my way down to Seneca Lanes, hitting all these bars that were around the ballpark… until I could hardly ride the bike anymore! One of my favorite Rochester stories came from their announcer, Joe Cullinane. It was about a Kennedy Night. We used to have all these crazy “nights.” We had Hot Pants Night, where you got in free with short pants, and Hippie Night, when you got in free if you had a beard. So one time it was Kennedy Night, and Peter Lawford was there as the guest of honor—he was the Hollywood actor who was married to JFK’s sister. He showed up with this woman everyone assumed was his wife, so they started interviewing her… but she was just some bimbo he’d picked up at the airport! He brought her to the ballpark, and she was actually trying to answer the questions as if she was a Kennedy! They got pretty far into it before people started whispering, “That’s not her!” ... Bull Durham gives the impression that the minor leagues are packed with young guys who think they’ve got a shot at the majors, and a few older guys who are sort of on their way down. Is that accurate? It’s pretty true. In the low minors, you’re just trying to move up the ladder to the next level… and once in a while we did get a triple-A guy or a former big leaguer come down to A ball to mentor a promising young prospect—the kind of mission Crash Davis had. And when you’re in A ball, it’s like meeting some exotic guy who’s been to the Land of Milk and Honey. “Hey, tell us about it! What was it like?” The big leagues seemed so far away. So even a lowly player in the majors is like a king compared to guys in the minors? Yeah, in the sense that they’ve tasted the good life. When you get up to triple-A, though, everybody more or less has some version of major league ability. You may not be a star, but a lot of triple-A guys could be regulars in the big leagues, they’re just— Waiting for that opening? Yeah. And being the farm team for Baltimore was so tough. We had Mike Ferraro, for instance, who I believe was a four-time International League All-Star third baseman… and he was basically insurance for Brooks Robinson! This poor guy just couldn’t get into the big leagues. You’d see a lot of that. And then you’d see some weak organization, where a guy who couldn’t have made the Rochester Red Wings was now going up to the big leagues for the old Montreal Expos. You saw a lot of that too. Generally, though, the players got better the higher you went. I found it easier to hit in triple-A, because in the lower leagues, you were dealing with a lot of Nuke LaLooshes: guys who could throw 96 mph, but the first one was way over your head, the next one was on the outside corner, and the third hit the mascot in the ass! How do you hit against that? In triple-A, like in the big leagues, it’s more a battle of wits. Occasionally, you’d get overpowered, but generally you understood what they were doing, and they understood what you were doing. And, by the way, the lights are much better in triple-A than in A ball. The lights were so bad in the minors, it was scary! I think they’re better now. ... De Palma - Greetings ... Is that common among athletes? That they’ll obsess over particular plays that may have made or broken them? I only remember my failures. The ball I should have hit, the ground ball I should have fielded, the game we lost. Are those memories still vivid today? I think of myself as a complete failure as an athlete. I played for five years professionally, made it to triple-A, and then walked away. Some people might think that was a decent career, but to me… no, I failed. And athletes… whenever you talk with real athletes, they never talk about their successes, only their failures. Struges - Sullivan's Travels ... Did you ever get to meet Wilder? I imagine he would’ve loved Bull Durham. A few months after it came out, I was having dinner at a restaurant called The Imperial Gardens. A man came up and asked if I was Ron Shelton. I said yes, and he said, “Somebody would like to meet you.” So I followed him—I didn’t realize at the time it was Stanley Donen, the director—and he brought me over to his best friend, Billy Wilder. Wilder looked up and said, “Great fuckin’ picture, kid!” I said, “Mr. Wilder, that’s the best review I’ve ever had!” I had this musical transition I was trying to figure out for Blaze, so I asked him how he intercut those scenes in Some Like It Hot (1959) between the yacht and the hotel, and we chatted about that. My favorite moment in The Best of Times is Kurt Russell’s monologue about his glory days. It’s very moving. He knows he’s got this legacy behind him, and he enjoys it on a certain level, but he doesn’t buy into it. Because he’s moved on. He’s a fully evolved adult male. And he was the champion. Robin Williams, who was terrible at football, is the one who’s obsessed with reliving it. Because the true athlete is prepared for life. I run into people in education all the time who say the greatest administrators they knew, or the greatest college presidents, were former athletes. I do believe athletics prepares you for everything. ... The Ice Storm, Ang Lee Was Bull Durham already in the works when you were making The Best of Times? Was there an overlap between those projects? I wrote a very early script about minor league baseball; the only thing it had in common with Bull Durham was that it was about a pitcher and a catcher… because they have a kind of synergistic relationship. You can’t make a movie about a left fielder and a first baseman! Then I decided to see if a woman could tell the story. I dictated that opening monologue on a little micro-recorder while I was driving around North Carolina. My first marriage was on the rocks, and I was wondering if the minor leagues had changed. Because the majors had changed a lot. I’m not a sports guy. Can you briefly explain how? Big money got into baseball. Which I’m all for, on a certain level. Then the television deals started, it got very corporate, players began making insane amounts of money, and they became… well, baseball players had always been the sportswriters’ favorites. They were available, they were funny… they’re still funny. But they became very aloof. “Talk to my agent.” “Talk to my rep.” They became a bunch of jerks. And it was the 1980’s. Y’know, pre-steroids, but cocaine was everywhere. It just got very… Big money corrupted it. It really did. I tinkered with doing something about the early days of stock car racing, and the story’s the same: in the old days, the racers were these daredevils and obsessed loners, but as NASCAR solidified, and big money came in, the sport got very corporate, and… Exactly. I’ve been working on a piece about the European side of that. Anyway, I went back to the minor leagues, and found it hadn’t changed a bit. When I got back to L.A., I listened to that monologue again a few weeks later, and just started typing. I named the woman Annie because baseball groupies were called Annies, and I had this matchbook from the Savoy bar, so she became Annie Savoy, and I wrote the whole script, without any notes or outline. It took about twelve weeks, and that was it; that’s the only draft that exists. I guess it was in there, just waiting to get out somehow. I want to talk about the main characters. Three very strong characters… all in the same movie! For me, Crash Davis was a guy who loved something more than it loved him. We all have something like that, whether it’s a thing, a profession, a person, a family, or whatever. And, but for the grace of God, he could have had more than a 21-day major league career. He had talent. You don’t hit 247 home runs in the minors if you don’t. Like Mike Ferraro in Rochester. I also thought of Crash as a classic American cowboy: he goes from town to town—he’s a hired gun. He has no past, he has no future; all he really has is today. And it beats working at Sears. It beats working at Sears. And he really does love what he does, and he’s good at it. But it’s passed him by. The guys you knew in his position; were they as… well, something I find very moving about Crash is his resigned sadness. But he’s stoic about it. Do most guys bear it that well? I imagine some of them are just broken by it. Some are. But most of them have some of those qualities he has. That attitude of “I’m gonna quit this fucking game! What time do we play tomorrow?” That love of the game really does finally carry them through. The interesting thing about the guys I played with in triple-A is that most of them—well, one of them is dead; I think he was shot in a nightclub—but everybody else went on to be successful in their lives. Some in baseball; some in sales, or education, or— If you have that caliber of character, you’re going to be fine? If you can make it to triple-A, and last awhile, you’re strong, you’re focused, you’re disciplined, you can deal with loss, you can deal with disappointment. But, yeah, there is a sadness about Crash. That’s why he gets Annie! Was there anyone who stood out in your memory as you were conceiving her? When I was playing A-ball in Stockton, California, a few of us had babies, and there was this woman who used to babysit. Her nickname was Froggy, but she didn’t look like a frog; she was very attractive, and yet the wives were completely unthreatened by her. She was with this really good-looking catcher, but she didn’t sleep around. She was very classy, and… you could just tell there was a lot going on there. I thought a woman guide, this High Priestess, could lead us into a man’s world, and shine a light on it. And she would be very sensual, and sexual, yet she’d live by her own rigorous moral code. It seemed like a character we hadn’t seen before. I once did the “Fresh Air” radio show with Terry Gross, and she asked, “Isn’t Annie a male fantasy?” I said, “When I was growing up, a male fantasy was a bimbo who forked over sexually, bent to the man’s will, never challenged him, had no thought of her own, no worldview of her own… and in the third act, they either apologized for their behavior, or found Jesus. So since I invented a woman who’s smart and determined, has a worldview, takes no guff from anybody, sets her own rules, and apologizes for nothing, will you at least give me credit for raising the level of male fantasy?” She kind of backed off. Steve Dalkowski Joe Altobelli ... That's another thing I wanted to ask: many of your best stories - Bull Durham, Blaze, Cobb—all have deep roots in the south. Do you have ties there? My father’s side was from the south. They were all Texas dirt farmers; very poor. They split to come out here to work in the oil fields in Bakersfield, and in the cotton fields. My mother’s side drifted out as well; pretty desperately poor. And I spent time with my grandparents and other relatives. All Southern Baptists, with other traits of the deep south: everyone was a storyteller; very verbal, very musical, very conservative. And that peculiar kind of racism, where if I brought three black friends to my grandparents’ house for dinner, they wouldn’t notice they were black, but if Martin Luther King came on TV, they got upset. That strange southern dichotomy.

http://americanfilm.afi.com/issue/2013/5/archives#.UyYys61dVWo

The greatest thing we have going for us after preparation is intuition. ... The rehearsal process is where Shelton defines his fairly freewheeling mode of operation. "You've got to start with behavior," he says. "I don't agree with the school of directors who tell you where to stand and how to behave or who to set up shots for lighting. The camera does not exist in my mind until the behavior is right." This attitude grated against the instinct of twice-Oscared cinematographer Haskell Wexler throughout the shoot. "We have different philosophies," was Wexler's brusque analysis. "He relates to the camera as a necessary evil." "The camera," Shelton insists, "must be motivated by behavior, and not the other way around. Once the behavior is right, we can pretty much figure out what the blocking is so on the day of shooting, we can make new discoveries, we can let go, we can breathe and try new things, because we're coming in with a foundation and an intention. That's the key: knowing the intention in the scene." ... "It's funny," adds editor Robert Leighton, who cut "Bull Durham" as well as all of Rob Reiner's movies, "Ron doesn't seem to have the rigid desire to maintain the specifics of his script. It's always the flavor and warmth of the intent which remains strongest in his mind."

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/richard_deitsch/06/01/shelton.qa/#ixzz2wBFw9G49 http://www.salon.com/1999/09/23/shelton/

I think the sport is so different in person than on television. On television you cannot appreciate how hard they hit, the punishment they take. Any one of their punches would break one of our ribs; and the response they have is to hit back! The concentration of these guys, who are almost without question uneducated (high school education is first-class for a fighter), is something we can all aspire to. And the conditioning. The Tour de France is one thing — boxers have that and get hit and know they’re risking brain damage. ... By the way, I’m with Lolita’s character on this: I’d like to see God manifest; I’d also like to see a UFO. I just need something — will you show me? What does it look like? I’m open, I just have to see it. When Woody sees Christ in a diner parking lot and he leaves by the time Lolita and Antonio get there, it’s Lolita who says, “Maybe he’s hiding.”

http://grantland.com/features/an-oral-history-ron-shelton-basketball-comedy-white-men-jump/ http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1995-02-20/features/1995051031_1_ty-cobb-blaze-starr-shelton

"It's so much different for a professional baseball player than for a fan. The fan may hate the Yankees, but the player doesn't, because he may be on the Yankees next year. No, what the player hates is management. What he's concerned about are immediate small, daily things, nothing grand. His batting average, his contract, girlfriend or wife, his health and the pain he's probably playing in. That's about it." It was that reality that so infused "Bull Durham" and elevated it beyond any other baseball film ever made. And it was that reality that he brought to the story of the furious and unrepentant ballplayer who never met a pitcher he couldn't hit or a man he could like. "I am very interested," says Shelton, "in people who are brilliant in one area and dysfunctional in others. He [Ty Cobb] was such a set of contradictions he was fascinating."

casting:

Mayes, who has appeared in episodes of “Cold Case,” “Medium” and “Bones,” will play a sexy rookie pitcher whose love interest is a young woman (Laura Bell Bundy) attempting a career as a country singer but is currently a bartender. Shelton, of course, is in his element with all things sports. His resume as a writer-director includes “Bull Durham,” “White Men Can’t Jump” and “Tin Cup.” Others already cast include Chris Butler and Ryan Doom. “Hound Dogs” centers on a fictional Nashville team whose players and general manager have plenty of personal issues to contend with off the field.

http://variety.com/2011/tv/news/mayes-cast-in-hound-dogs-1118032402/