Bull Durham

And the book Ron Shelton wrote about making it! They're both pretty fun.

By Impawards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22349503

Bull Durham (1988). Grade: B+

I’d like to share with you a typical prayer that my father led the family in, when my mother was pregnant with her fourth child.

“Lord, protect this precious baby that was conceived in sinful lust. Don't punish it for the parents’ shame with birth defects. Let it be a healthy addition to Your kingdom, amen.”

That's a strange prayer. It’s, questionably, appropriate for a warlord like Genghis Khan if his wife had been stepping out with another warlord. For us kids, it’s very... well, it was weird.

No, Mom hadn’t had a torrid affair with any local warlords. But the pregnancy was unwanted. We were pretty poor. Dad had invested in several businesses that failed, and was just beginning a cycle of mental health breakdowns that would result in longterm hospital stays during the next few decades. Since he forbade Mom from working, and we were three children already, this meant money was tight. (Dad’s then-job was “stockboy” at Toys’R’Us, which we kids thought was So Cool. Obviously for him, in his 40s, it was humiliating.)

I can understand being bummed out that the Catholic Church-approved “rhythm method” of contraception hadn't worked. But, really, “sinful lust” is a messed-up prayer to lead the family in. And suggesting the baby would have birth defects as God’s punishment. I was 13, and somewhat dubious that birth defects happened this way. My youngest brother was five, and absolutely terrified that his baby sister/brother would be cursed to suffer horrendous maladies.

(The baby was fine, and is happily married today, with children of his own. But when he got married, he took his wife’s surname, just to be rid of Dad’s.)

I mention this to give you an idea of how completely bonkers our upbringing was in terms of healthy adult sexuality. Hell, Dad would come into my room at night to inspect for sleep boners, which were Moses’s way of telling parents their sons had sinful dreams. (That’s not how a wiener or the Pentateuch or good parenting even remotely works.)

As Dad sunk further into mental illness, he grew increasingly obsessed with the sexual relations of characters in movies. He was angry with Rocky because Rocky and Adrian weren't married. There's no sex scene in the movie (thank the gods, nobody needs a Stallone sex scene), it was the concept of unwed living together that bothered Dad.

Oddly, Dad didn't seem to notice how many old movies and TV shows clearly indicate that unwed characters love some lovin'. Two characters kiss, the camera pans to a fireplace, the scene fades out. Pretty obvious. Dad wasn't bothered by those, though. Maybe he would have got it before the mental illness and fundamentalism warped his perceptions. I enjoyed rewatching those movies as an adult and realizing how, yup, the Bogart character definitely gets it on. (Lovingly in The African Queen, jerkishly in The Maltese Falcon, and busily in The Big Sleep -- everybody’s doing everybody in that one.)

By 1988, we were basically forbidden to watch anything at all. Fortunately, for me, I was old enough to take the bus anywhere, and had some spending money from various teen jobs. And Dad was too incapacitated to stop me going to movies.

And these are all reasons why I deeply loved the movie Bull Durham.

Ron Shelton was raised deeply Baptist, as he shares in 2023’s The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham. “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 cusses like a longshoreman.”

Early on, baseball got in the way of piety; hometown hero Eddie Matthews was in the World Series, and a crucial game was on Sunday. Sure enough, the family bought their first TV to watch the game, and even left church early to see it! Their favorite team won that day, and Shelton’s father became less strict about Baptist particulars.

Shelton’s father was also a fantastic storyteller, and Shelton’s college professors (at an evangelical college!) introduced him to writers like Swift, Fielding, Fitzgerald, Camus. Shelton, a basketball and baseball player, was thrilled to learn that Camus was a soccer goalie. So it was obvious to him, early on, that he wanted to do some kind of writing, himself. But first, baseball.

He signed for $500 a month with Baltimore, and played four seasons in the minors. Shelton also learned that baseball wasn’t, overall, a welcoming environment for book nerds like himself; on the team bus he’d hide his books inside nudie magazines. And when spring training was canceled in 1972 (MLB’s first strike), Shelton walked away; he had a wife and daughter to think of.

After 10 years of odd jobs and short-story writing for obscure literary journals, Shelton landed a job as a script reader (people who summarize screenplays for studio executives). It taught him that studio execs were half-dumb, and taught him what kind of scripts he wanted to write himself. After writing two critically-liked financial flops, Shelton was able to pitch his baseball script that he described as “Lysistrata in the minor leagues.” The producer knew Lysistrata and owned part of the Durham Bulls – meaning they’d have a free stadium to shoot in. And so began Bull Durham.

Shelton goes into some detail about pre-production (including seeing Eddie Matthews as a batting instructor in Durham and being too shy to meet him). There’s a funny moment about trying to land a studio deal, where he meets an exec at Paramount. “I like the script a lot,” says the exec. “It reminds me of a movie I once made called Slap Shot.” Then the exec complained that the film was a flop.

“Yeah, but it was a really good movie,” Shelton replied.

“Nobody gives a fuck.”

I really enjoyed Shelton’s description of the casting process. Studios want big names more than anything else. Shelton met Kurt Russell, and Russell had some baseball background, but he wasn’t available. Kevin Costner had been in some successful movies, and he and Shelton hit it off. Costner insisted on showing he had played in high school; he had a ball and glove in his car.

For the Nuke Laloosh character, the studio suggested Anthony Michael Hall.¹ He showed up to meet Shelton twice, brought an entourage, and hadn’t read the script either time. Shelton wanted Charlie Sheen, but he was committed to Eight Men Out. Tim Robbins was far from a hot name, but he read well with Costner, so that was that. The same went for Susan Sarandon. And Robert Wuhl, high on something, gave what the casting director called “the worst audition I’d ever seen,” and Shelton agreed – but he liked the guy.

(The role of the Durham announcer went to Garland Bunting, a federal undercover agent who infiltrated and busted moonshiners for a living. Shelton saw him on TV promoting a book about his life and loved his voice. Bunting wasn’t worried about moonshiners seeing him on screen and realizing he wasn’t who he claimed, because “those kinda fellas don’t watch those kinda shows.”)

Costner’s support of Shelton helped keep Shelton from being fired all through Bull Durham’s production; studio execs didn’t like what they were seeing. They kept wanting Shelton to replace Robbins. They fired the cinematographer because they didn’t like the shots on the team bus (which were/are fine!). Shelton writes “I’d learn in later movies that this is part of the drill – fighting the fights that shouldn’t need fighting.” At one point, he got a call from a studio executive saying they were going to replace Costner and restart shooting everything with Kurt Russell. It was Russell, prank-calling.

A final problem was they had painted part of the Bulls’ ballpark for photography reasons, and needed to paint it back for the baseball season – but they’d run out of money. Luckily, some vandals broke in at night, drove vehicles in, and tore up the grass. Insurance covered re-sodding, and re-painting the ballpark as well. Shelton found out, years later, that one of the film’s producers had organized the break-in. Insurance fraud! But it worked.

Test audiences were up & down about the movie; test audiences usually are. (Grab ten random people and see if they all like the same things!) But the scene that studios really hated is one of my favorites:²

(Wuhl’s response about candlesticks was completely ad-libbed; he does have experience as a stand-up comic. This bit about being from New Jersey is pretty good.)

Generally, I don’t like Hollywood “making of” books; they tend to be either really worshipful of the film being discussed, or really insider-gossipy (dishing dirt to prove how “in the know” the author is). The Church Of Baseball mostly avoids those traps; and the stories about annoying/dumb studio execs won’t ever go out of date. I could have maybe done without quite so much detail about how Shelton wrote the script. It’s informative, if you want to learn how to write like Ron Shelton – and that’s certainly not the worst thing in the world.

How’s the movie hold up after 35+ years? Pretty well. It’s not quite the ground-breaker that it was in 1988. (For one thing, the cussing sounds pretty tame, now.) At the time, an irreverent attitude in a realistic sports movie was really new. Sports movies were either outright comedies, or triumph-of-the-underdog dramas like Rocky and Hoosiers. There’s still (far too) many of those being made, but there’s more room now for sports movies/TV shows that are a little off-kilter.

Oddly (with one exception), the relaxed sexual attitudes in Bull Durham feel fresh again. Shelton was intentionally going against AIDS-era fearfulness and Reaganite fundamentalism. Well, the latter isn’t exactly back (it never leaves us), but it’s added a new wrinkle. The whole rise of online “influencers” who sell hyper-macho attitudes (and teenagers are very vulnerable to this poison crap). Among those attitudes is the foul idea that women have “body counts,” that men should sleep around and women be “pure.”

Not in Bull Durham.³ Take the scene shown above. The Durham Bulls have a team groupie, Millie, who falls for practically any ballplayer she meets. They also have a team preacher, Jimmie, a player who invokes the Bible before & after games. (It’s a sweetly played part by William O’Leary; Shelton wanted the character to have “quiet dignity.”) Millie and Jimmie get engaged, and some of the players start making wisecracks. Costner’s character, the most veteran player around, tells them to knock it the hell off.

There’s one scene that’s just too 1988; the big softcore sex scene at the end. (Spoiler: the two main characters end up together in a romantic comedy. I just ruined all movies!) The whole thing makes you feel embarrassed for Costner and Sarandon and whomever was on set that day. There’s candles on the edge of a bathtub, how erotic? How dumb. It makes me think of something Jamie Lee Curtis said about movies where people passionately kiss in the rain; they should go inside where it’s warmer.

Besides, you don’t need that naked silliness, because Shelton gives us a terrific morning after. Sarandon, in a T-shirt, looks at Costner over a cereal breakfast and says “damn, are you beautiful.” He is, and so’s she, and it’s sexy as hell.

If you like the movie, you might like the book. And if you don’t like the movie, I’ll forgive you. Just don’t lead your family in weird prayers and we’ll be fine.

1. Who would later play a Yankees pitcher in the HBO movie 61*. Quite well, he's a talented guy.

2. Yes, the synch's off. I'm sorry, I didn't do the clip. If you noticed it, you're a true movie geek and I immediately like you, unless you're a jerk.

3. There’s a nice essay kind of about this by Chris Vognar, on the Criterion website. Especially check out their cover artwork for the disc, too, it’s great!