Ron Shelton made his directing debut with his original script, a story close to his heart. Shelton played minor league ball for five years after college but quit when he realized that, at 25, he would likely never make it to the big leagues. "I didn't want to become a Crash Davis," he told Newsweek shortly after the film's release.
Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) is an aging ball player who has been bouncing around the minors for a dozen years and is sent down to a single-A team in Durham, NC, to mentor a hotshot but wildly erratic young pitcher (Tim Robbins, in a breakthrough performance). Complications arise in the form of Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), a passionate devotee in the "Church of Baseball" who each year takes a new young player under her wings as a student and lover. Although Annie and Crash butt heads often, a combination of her spiritual and sexual training and his skills and long experience eventually turn the young man into a world-class player, leaving his tutors behind to find their own loving connection.
A quick synopsis doesn't do justice to the wit, warmth and surprising turns of Shelton's Oscar-nominated script, which won awards from the Writers Guild and four major film critic associations. Earlier in his career, he had written a screenplay about minor league baseball that bore little resemblance to this story beyond centering on a pitcher and a catcher. He decided to take a new approach - having a woman with a deep but quirky connection to the sport tell the story. Shelton dictated Annie's now classic opening credits monologue (in which she declares, apropos of Hanks, that "there's no guilt in baseball") into a tape recorder while driving around North Carolina. After returning to Los Angeles, Shelton wrote the script in 12 weeks.
Unfortunately, that fresh female angle couldn't have helped much in the arduous process of getting studio backing, already a risky proposition in executives' eyes at a time when baseball movies were not considered commercially viable. The funding quest was further complicated by Shelton's insistence on directing it himself. With only two writing and second-unit directing jobs to his credit, Shelton had to settle for his only offer, an eight-week shooting schedule and a paltry $9 million budget that required his cast members to work for lower salaries. But he did secure his most important requirement - creative control.
Shelton had to fight the studio again over their demand that he hire then popular teen movie star Anthony Michael Hall for the role Robbins played, and he threatened to quit to get his way. There were no reported objections to his other two principal cast members. Costner had recently broken into stardom with roles in The Untouchables (1987) and No Way Out (1987). Shelton chose him for his natural athletic ability. Sarandon was already well known for The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), her Academy Award-nominated performance in Atlantic City (1980) and the fantasy comedy The Witches of Eastwick (1987), among many other roles.
Production took place at various locations in North Carolina, including the city of Durham, home of a real team called the Bulls. Because filming took place during the cooler off-season months, some shots of the field required paint to make the brown grass green, and you can occasionally see the players' breath.
The film was the 18th highest grossing of its release year and eventually earned more than five times its budget at the box office. It was also very favorably reviewed, with New Yorker critic Pauline Kael saying it had "the kind of dizzying off-center literacy that Preston Sturges' pictures had. It's a satirical celebration of our native jauntiness and wit."
Shelton stuck with his natural affinity for sports movies with a run of pictures over the years: White Men Can't Jump (1992, basketball); Cobb (1994, baseball again); another collaboration with Costner, Tin Cup (1996), a story about golf that appeared to try to recapture some of Bull Durham's magic; Play It to the Bone (1999, boxing); and Just Getting Started (2017), which involved golf again.
Costner returned to the diamond for his next role in Field of Dreams (1989), a film as sentimental as Bull Durham was sharp, and again in For Love of the Game (1999). He had a cameo role in Shelton's boxing movie and found himself at the NFL in Draft Day (2014). He even entered the fray of Formula One racing as the voice of the dog Enzo in The Art of Racing in the Rain (2019).
Sarandon and Costner may have ended up together in the movie, but in real life, she and Robbins began a relationship of more than 20 years after they met on this production. Highly outspoken activists who had raised many objections to the 2001 Iraq War, the two found themselves embroiled in controversy after Dale Petroskey, then president of the Baseball Hall of Fame, canceled the 15th anniversary celebration of the film at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown because he was convinced the stars would use it as a platform for their anti-war views instead of talking about the movie and baseball. The decision caused quite a stir nationwide. Robbins pointed out that a year earlier White House press secretary Ari Fleischer had been invited to the institution to give his "perspective on life in the White House and the current political scene, which of course includes the war on terrorism." "Where was the discussion about baseball?" Robbins told the New York Times. In the end, Petroskey sheepishly admitted his error, but the celebration never happened.
Director: Ron Shelton
Producers: David V. Lester (executive), Mark Burg and Thom Mount
Screenplay: Ron Shelton
Cinematography: Bobby Byrne
Editing: Robert Leighton, Adam Weiss
Art Direction: David Lubin
Production Design: Armin Ganz
Music: Michael Convertino
Cast: Kevin Costner (Crash Davis), Susan Sarandon (Annie Savoy), Tim Robbins (Ebby "Nuke" LaLoosh), Trey Wilson (Skip), Robert Wuhl (Larry)
By Rob Nixon
