“The director has to listen and accept and fight back—it’s a curious behavioral contortion to have all your nerve endings open for discovery while you circle the wagons to defend your vision.”
“And while it can’t be explained by film science, the simple truth underlying all great onscreen chemistry is this: two characters must occupy different emotional and physical spaces.”
“But after the team tied it in the bottom of the tenth, our hometown hero hit a towering two-run homer to win the game. A great weight lifted up out of the room, my father looked around, his shoulders lightened, and we started going to church less and less. The seed for the Church of Baseball was planted.”
“Around this time it was becoming clear that I was living in two different worlds—the intellectual (or at least academic) world and the sports world—but it made no sense to me that they were distinct. They were dependent, connected, they fed off each other. At least I thought so.”
“Camus said he got tired of debating Roman Catholic seminary students because he wanted them to convince him that their Judeo-Christian ontology was the only path forward, but he usually ended up convincing them of his bleaker view. Besides, if I could’ve added a footnote to his words, I would have said that it’s more life-giving to be in the midst of a game stopping shots on goal and then going out for some beers to relive the game with your colleagues.”
“I began to think that Camus and Beckett were labeled “absurdists” not in spite of loving sports, but because of it. Sports is both absurd and ordered, and full of unknown consequences. A game means nothing and it means everything.”
“I’d played enough sports by then that I felt sports films got it all wrong. Their attempts to be inspirational felt cloying and false. When you actually play the game, there is little that is inspirational going on. It’s a competition; it’s physical; it’s a chance to test yourself.”
“A baseball life is fragile and absurd. It’s also wondrous and thrilling. It also produces expressions like “cock-high, half-assed cheese,” which means, of course, “weak heat in the zone.”
“The ensuing discussions about the quality of the movie we’d just seen were without nuance. Reactions were binary—“The movie was a piece of crap and I hated it” or “Great fuckin’ flick.” Thumbs-up or thumbs-down and no discussion in between. Never was heard “I need some time to sit with this awhile” or “I have complicated and perhaps contradictory feelings about this that I need to sort out.”
“There’s a kind of film education in going indiscriminately to movies, whatever the rating, whatever the reviews. Rio Lobo to Russ Meyer to Alain Resnais, they were all a way to get from one o’clock in the afternoon to the ballpark. Settling into a cool, dark theater was already a reward. I had no expectations. I was a generous audience.”
“Scenes in a screenplay need a turn, a moment when the scene suddenly isn’t about what it was about up until that moment. A scene shouldn’t be about the same thing at its end as it was at the beginning. The scenes we remember in movies are those that turn and sometimes turn more than once and keep revealing themselves.”
“I have a private rule that writer’s block cannot be acknowledged. When I’m stuck, I keep writing even if it all hits the trash can for a while. I write to make discoveries, not to connect the dots.”
“Superior athletes are cut a lot of slack by management and media. If Ty Cobb hit .267 lifetime he’d have been in jail. Instead, he hit .367 and was in the first group inducted into the Hall of Fame. Appalling behavior is explained away and forgiven endlessly—if you’re a winner.”
“Another reason I resist detailed outlines before beginning to write is that they don’t allow for dramatic sequences to appear just because they feel right. Scenes that make no sense in a linear construct, that seem to come out of nowhere, and yet are the perfect tonal shift as the story unfolds, cannot be imagined beforehand.”
“The biggest mistake a sports movie can make is to have too much sports in it. A movie can’t compete with television showing sports action, but it can and must reveal all the moments that television can’t touch.”
“The road leads back to Sam Peckinpah again. In reference to his Westerns, he said: “I love clichés because clichés establish an immediate connection with the audience. Clichés reside in the collective unconscious. And what is a film? A film is just a collection of clichés. The work of the director is to love the cliché, adopt the cliché, and then work against it. You have to remake the cliché in a way that nobody has ever made it before. That is the work of the director.” Peckinpah knew it was also the work of the writer.”
“In the dramatic terms of watching a baseball game, these moments are boring. As a player, the boring moments are fully engaging—you better catch the damn pop-up in foul territory or you’re back on a bus headed home.”
“The world is made for those who aren’t cursed with self-awareness.”
“It has been said that a movie is like a hot-air balloon carrying a basket full of narrative information and it’s necessary to start throwing the cargo overboard until the balloon takes off. I like that metaphor—but Annie’s monologue? The most important scene in the movie? The revelation that leads to the reckoning? Gone, and nobody cared!”
“Studios have been known to pull movies from their scheduled release dates and postpone them, sometimes in-definitely, or shovel them into the “straight to video” bin. But why were people laughing and where did the spontaneous applause come from? The notes said the movie was paced too slowly and was too long. Too fucking long? The running time was one hour, forty-four minutes, plus end credits. Hadn’t they seen Berlin Alexanderplatz, for crissakes? Fassbinder released his fifteen-hour masterpiece in two seven-and-a-half-hour screenings—and there aren’t a lot of laughs. Did NRG run numbers on Fassbinder? Genius or not, how did he play in Palo Alto?”
“The more highly educated the crowd, the more severely critical will be its analysis. Even—maybe especially—when the movie-watching experience is good. It’s a mistake to hand a pen and paper to professionals with multiple degrees and ask them to critique their experience. There seems to be a built-in expectation that the brain should overrule the heart, that the left side of the brain must dictate what the right side of the brain just processed—even when it contradicts that experience. The note cards were legible, neatly written, and expressed their critique in absurd detail compared to those of more working-class crowds, which tend to be of the thumbs-up, thumbs-down variety. In the heartland of emerging Silicon Valley—high-tech, the venture-capital center of the nation, with Stanford and all its tentacles of research—the audience had to deny its experience. What I thought of was: All I want is your reaction, not your fucking self-conscious notes.”
“We remember our failures and our losses. Why that is so is something I’ll probably never understand, which makes it something to write about. It also makes it ripe for humor.”
“My interest in baseball isn’t analytical, romantic, or even patriotic. I like the game—it’s nuanced and difficult and physical—but it has an appealing vulgarity, an earthiness, and I’ve never quite understood the excessive lyrical prose that grows out of it. I’ve never understood the sentimentality it seems to inspire.”
“Perhaps Bull Durham has resonated all these years because it is about loving something more than it loves you back. It’s about reckoning. It’s about loss. It’s about men at work, trying to survive in the remote outposts of their chosen profession. It’s also about the women they fall for, and who fall for them. It cannot be dismissed that it’s also about the joy of playing a game for a living. It’s about team and connections and risk and reward. It’s about hitting the mascot with a fastball just because you want to, it’s about running and jumping and sliding around in the mud, it’s about interminable bus rides with a bunch of guys who are as lost as you are, and feeling lucky you’re on that bus. It’s romantic, and it’s supposed to be funny, and despite what most fans of the movie say, it is also about baseball.”