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!”

A postcard from Red Wings Silver Stadium, circa 1970s.

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.

Was Rochester the last stop in your minor league career?
It was. I thought I could make it to the big leagues if I hung in there; like a lot of guys, I was really hoping I’d get traded… but you couldn’t get traded. And the Orioles were just too loaded with talent, so there was very limited opportunity to move up. Then in ‘72, the strike hit. That was the baseball strike that ended the Reserve Clause, and led to higher salaries, and led to players choosing their own teams after five years. All of that happened in 1972, and I was one of many players who simply couldn’t sit it out. If you were living hand-to-mouth, like most minor leaguers were, you had to make a choice.

What to do with the rest of your life?
People always ask how I went from baseball to the movies, but it wasn’t like I changed my life; it was an evolution. When that strike hit, I was married and had a kid, and it just seemed like it was time to start a new career. I’d been an English major in college, but my real passion was painting and sculpture. So I went to graduate school for that, and that was my dedication for the next two years. I moved to L.A., and showed some work there, and the visual arts led me into film, which is a visual art as well.

Were you a big moviegoer?
When I was playing baseball, I went almost every day. You were on the road for about nine months a season—and even when you were home, it wasn’t really your home—so guys just sat around the hotel playing cards, or watching soap operas. (That was a sequence I wanted to squeeze into Bull Durham. If I ever do another baseball movie, I want to show the guys watching soap operas!) But I couldn’t stand those shows, so I’d duck out of the hotel or the motel and go to the movies. Especially in the Southern League, or the Texas League, where it was hot and muggy—you go to the movies just to sit in the air conditioning!

And I went indiscriminately. I wasn’t a “trained” moviegoer, so I would check out just about anything: rated G, rated X, or anything in between; new movies, old movies. And I didn’t follow the critics back then, so I really approached everything with an open mind. Even if I didn’t like the movie, I liked the experience of going. And then I started to see some movies that really got under my skin.

Such as… ?
I remember back in the Texas League, I saw this De Palma movie—I can’t remember the name of it—but I thought it was very interesting, so I talked a bunch of the guys into going to see it with me again the next day… and they hated it! (laughs) They were so literal! They got angry at the characters in the movie, and angry at the movie, and angry with me for taking them to the movie!

It must have been one of De Palma’s early experimental films, Greetings (1968) or Hi, Mom! (1970).
I think it was Greetings. It was very political. There were black radicals in it.

I’ve seen them both, but I get them confused.
I do too. I don’t know if it was even that good, but there was obviously some real filmmaking going on there. You know what I mean: I’d rather watch a movie that doesn’t quite work by a guy with a strong point of view than something that just connects the dots.

Later that season, we were in Little Rock, and I saw the movie that absolutely changed me, which was Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969.) It just took my head off; I was like, “What was that?!” I went to see it several more times over the next few days. I took some guys to see it too, and they liked it because there were big shoot-outs… but they didn’t like it the way I liked it.

When did you start writing?
Like everybody else in L.A., I started writing screenplays on the side. And there weren’t any screenwriting classes in those days, or books to tell you how to do it. You just started writing.

Had you written short stories, or short pieces?
Odds and ends. I was always interested in words. I published three or four short stories in some quarterlies.

Were they sports-oriented?
Oh, no. I never dreamed I’d be stuck with the sports world! I wish I wasn’t, but I am.

So it’s a shackle for you at times?
It’s a shackle in that the only financially successful movies I’ve made have been about sports: Bull Durham, Tin Cup (1996), White Men Can’t Jump (1992). Blaze (1989) was moderately successful; at least that wasn’t about sports.

Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes in White Men Can't Jump.

Did you ever consider Ring Lardner an influence? He’s the only other fiction writer I really admire who wrote a lot about sports.
I read him a little. But I grew up in the sixties, so his writing seemed kind of old fashioned. To be a teenager back then… there were a lot more pressing things going on: the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, the whole counter culture. The writers we were reading were Richard Brautigan, and Donald Barthelme, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Those guys sure weren’t interested in sports.
Yeah, sports was out. Athletics was considered kind of a capitalist thing… and I was a jock. I believed in sports, I believed in competition; I was a ruthless, competitive athlete… but I also marched against the war, and for civil rights, and my politics were left of center. But I felt like the left was full of shit about some things, and the right was full of shit on other things, so I often felt like a man without a party. And when I started playing professional baseball in the late 60’s, that was a very conservative world.

Writer's Note: Shelton’s first produced script was the gritty foreign correspondent drama "Under Fire" (1983), directed by Roger Spottiswoode. He then wrote "The Best of Times" (1986), also directed by Spottiswoode, which stars Robin Williams and Kurt Russell as former small town high school football players who decide to reassemble their old team and replay the big game they lost fifteen years ago.

What inspired The Best of Times?
In the early 1980’s, California had cut way back on school funding. My high school, Santa Barbara—which has a very strong sports tradition: Sam Cunningham, Randall Cunningham, Eddie Mathews, Keith Wilkes, and Al Geiberger all went there—anyway, their athletics budget was drastically slashed. So they were coming up with ideas to raise money, like, literally, bake sales, and then they tried something that seemed ridiculous, but turned out to be wildly successful: Santa Barbara and our biggest rival, San Marcos, got all these guys together who hadn’t played for ten, fifteen years—

They actually did that? Trained up their old teams to replay a classic rivalry?
It wasn’t quite as dramatic as in the movie. The amazing thing was that it sold out! Something like twelve thousand people came to see it; they filled the local college stadium. For a few years it was really successful, but then I think some guys started getting hurt.

So the story had nothing to do with your professional career.
It was an anecdote I heard about my high school. I thought the universal in it was that everybody has a moment in their life they’d like to replay, sports or otherwise.


Trailer for The Best of Times.

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.

Was Preston Sturges an influence on The Best of Times? I wondered because Robin Williams kind of reminded me of Eddie Bracken in those two pictures they did.
No. I was pretty late in discovering Sturges. I knew Sullivan’s Travels (1941), but not any of his others. Actually, it was after Bull Durham that people started talking to me about him. That’s when I started studying him. The other thing was, you couldn’t get his films on video or DVD for a long time, because there were legal problems. Now I’ve seen them all. I wrote a blurb for his autobiography that was recently discovered. His family has given me an award, and I know his son Tom.

Though I wouldn’t describe Bull Durham as Sturges-like. I put it more in the realm of Billy Wilder.
I was a big Billy Wilder fan. I liked Billy Wilder and Sam Peckinpah!

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.

Another theme you explore in a lot of your pictures is the difficulty of relations between macho men and their wives or girlfriends. It’s like what Michael Mann does with cops; you do with athletes. You both depict men who function best in very masculine atmospheres. And then they have to step out of it and deal with women.
I hadn’t thought of that as a theme. I have to step back and analyze that… I think my male worlds are also filled with very strong women. From Rosie Perez, to Susan Sarandon, even Dr. Molly in Tin Cup.

Kevin Costner in Tin Cup.

Was that an issue you ever dealt with personally?
I grew up in a very male-oriented family. I had a very powerful, loving, and generous mother, but I was the oldest of four boys—I couldn’t figure out how to talk to girls until I was about 35! After I had daughters! But I’ve always worked easily and closely with women; I have many close women friends, and I have a great marriage, but… yeah, as a kid, I was a bit bewildered by it. I do think men grow up at a different rate than women. But I’m also not one to idealize women. Women know things men don’t know, and men know things women don’t know. At the end of the day though, in White Men Can’t Jump, the two men—one white, one black—despite all their arguments, and trying to hustle each other—they still communicate better with each other than either of them can with women.

A lot of themes you explore in The Best of Times come back—stronger, and with more clarity—in Bull Durham. It’s almost like reading a rough draft.
I suppose that’s true. There are some things I would have done differently from Roger. Mostly, when you have a script that’s working, directing is like conducting music. You want to get the accents right, and the beats right, and not oversell the wrong things, and comedy is a very delicate thing. There was a whole epilogue to The Best of Times that got left out. Roger and I had a big fight about it. The way it ends now, at the stadium, it’s about football. And I argued the story is not about football. It’s about growing up.

It seems like a rather brutally edited movie anyway.
We did have to take a character out because of length, but in defense of the director, he was really badly treated by the studio and the producer. You cannot believe what they put him through. Some producer on another matter got in this lawsuit with the head of Universal, and they took it out on this movie, and on Roger. Then they did the worst campaign, and… it was a very unpleasant experience.

Another work The Best of Times reminds me of is John Updike’s Rabbit series. Have you read those?
Yeah, I read the first one in college, and as they came out. I haven’t read the last piece yet. The novella. I thought it was great, though, someone of his caliber actually writing about an athlete, because nobody else did. And still, almost nobody does.

Robin Williams and Kurt Russell in The Best of Times.

Yeah, it’s kind of The Lord of the Rings of faded athlete sagas. I met Updike’s agent one time, and asked if anyone’s talked about filming them. He said there’d been some approaches, people vaguely circulating, but nothing ever—
They did the first one, Rabbit, Run (1970). With James Caan.

Yeah, and Carrie Snodgress. I’ve never seen it. It’s really obscure.
I saw it when it came out.

You’re the only person I know who’s seen it. His agent hadn’t even seen it!
It was a zillion years ago, but I remember thinking it didn’t really work as a movie.

It’s not one of the stronger books. The one I used to daydream about adapting was Rabbit is Rich, the one with the wife swapping. Then when Ang Lee did The Ice Storm (1997)… y’know, there it was. How could you do any better? It’s a great film, it looks beautiful, and it nails that Updike vibe better than anything I’ve ever seen… but god, it’s such a bummer! You’d never want to sit through it again. So that killed my Rabbit dream. Anyway, the only point I was going to make here was that if any producers try to get those going, you should be on their list. You’d be great for it.
With a series like that, the question is where does the movie begin and end? It’s interesting what you said about The Ice Storm. I hadn’t realized it, but you’re right: there’s Updike, right there.

Tim Robbins and Kevin Costner in Bull Durham.

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.

Susan Sarandon and Kevin Costner in Bull Durham.

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!

Kevin Costner as "Crash" Davis in Bull Durham.

I like how you compared him to a Western hero. I never thought of that. I’m a big Anthony Mann fan, and Crash is like one of his classic drifter/loner heroes.
Yeah, Anthony Mann’s great. Even closer for me though is Bill Holden in The Wild Bunch. Y’know, where did that guy come from?

Let’s talk about Annie. The thing I like about her is that she’s so much more—so much richer a character—than just the team floozy. I mean, her sense of herself is incredible. Where did her point of view come from?
Part of it is my hating how women had been portrayed in sports movies, and from my love and respect for women. I’m not threatened by women. I knew women who… well, I didn’t know any woman who was just like Annie; she’s kind of a composite.

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.

Susan Sarandon as Annie in Bull Durham.

“Male fantasy” is the last term I’d think of for Annie.
It’s stupid! If anything, she’s a female fantasy! Every woman wants to be like her!

I relate to her very personally. When I was in my twenties, I spent four years with a much older woman, and, y’know, it was the greatest thing. To be with someone who’s a guide, who knows the world...
Every young man should have that.

I read on the internet that Nuke LaLoosh was based on a real player named Steve Dalkowski.
These things on the internet can be so far out of proportion. Steve Dalkowski was a legendary minor league thrower who played for twelve or so years for the Baltimore organization, but everywhere I went in the minor leagues, people would tell stories about him. Ted Williams said he was the hardest thrower he ever saw.

But you actually knew him?
Yeah, but other than the fact that he had a God-gifted arm, and a bit of a five cent head, there’s no relation between him and Nuke. Dalkowski had a drinking problem, and it took him twelve years to get to triple-A because he was so wild. He’d average something like fourteen strikeouts and fourteen walks a game. I’m not making that up; his numbers were beyond belief! Cal Ripken, Sr. was his catcher.


So he finally got to triple-A in Rochester, and they roomed him with this mature, older guy, Joe Altobelli, who was kind of like his Crash Davis. Joe was my manager for three years, and he would always tell me “Dalko” stories. So I thought about that: a wild, out of control young guy, who’s matched with… y’know, that’s all I really used for Bull Durham.

It’s amazing how you make it believable that both of these guys could be involved with the same woman. If that wasn’t convincing, the whole thing would fall apart.
And I really had to fight to cast Tim Robbins. The studio really, really, really didn’t want him. I had to threaten to quit...

Who did they want?
Anthony Michael Hall.

Hmm… I don’t think you’d buy that. Him and Susan Sarandon. He was very young then, wasn’t he?
He was twenty. But it was just so wrong. Tim has gravitas. Even when he’s playing the goofball, you know there’s something there. But Nuke was based on so many guys. All these guys who had a gift, but never knew what to do with it. Or didn’t know they had a gift, or eventually figured it out, but by then it was too late.

Though Bull Durham suggests Nuke is going to be okay.
Right, which you know from the scene where he’s doing that interview in the big leagues, and he’s kind of winging it, repeating the clichés, and trying to pick her up—you know he’s getting it.
I think part of the picture’s greatness is that it has that hopefulness for all of them. You never take the negative route. You show it’s there, but… Isn’t that the American dream? Hope and promise? We can’t promise you’ll get there, but…

Here’s a question from my wife, Jenn. She loves Annie’s shrine. What was the inspiration there? Who designed it?
I’ve always had little shrines, unconsciously, for this and that. Maybe less the older I get, but it was just a natural… when my friends saw it, they said, “Oh, Ron, it looks like your house!” Actually, my wife Lolita and I just set up a Dia de los Muertos shrine last week. We took a corner of a room and set up pictures and candles for our lost friends, and relatives, and animals. The kids all participated. I think its High Church. Because in the Protestant faith, you didn’t have shrines, so… I like them.

Something that hits me every time I watch Bull Durham is how very early on—maybe it’s five minutes in—you introduce Nuke screwing Millie in the locker room. It’s a shock, because you’re not expecting something so crude to immediately follow Annie’s very romantic voice-over. Did the studio ever try to get you to tone that down?
No. They knew this was going to be an R-rated movie. And that’s the scene that tells you this isn’t going to be like other movies; that one of the guys we’re going to be rooting for has his pants around his ankles, he’s bare-assed, and he’s supposed to be out on the mound! And by the end of the first act, he’s tied up, and a vibrator comes out—

That first scene prepares you for that. Having seen that, now you know anything could happen—
And it wouldn’t work unless you see both of them are stark naked.

Aside from Bull Durham, the only other sports movie I really love is Slap Shot (1977), which also happens to be about a minor league team. Do you think there’s greater drama in the minors because the players aren’t superstars?
Yeah, I think people trying to get into the spotlight are much more interesting than people in the spotlight. That’s why I think Tin Cup is a really well conceived and executed movie, because it’s about a guy who’s trying to get there. And when he gets there, he doesn’t know how to stay there. I think stories about movie stars or great athletes are almost always boring.

Yeah, because it’s hard to make people relate to that. Or it just becomes a total fantasy. So how come we don’t see more movies about the minor leagues?
I think the financiers don’t understand… y’know, it’s why movies like The Wild Bunch are hard to get made. “What? It’s about fat guys chasing bad guys?” Yeah, and at the end of the day, you’re going to care about all of ‘em! That’s just the limits of the simplistic, simple-minded, reductive world of trying to sell ideas in the marketplace. “You mean Roy McAvoy isn’t going to win the U.S. Open?” No, he’s going to shoot a 13 on the last hole. “Kevin Costner doesn’t make it to the big leagues?” No, but he gets the girl. “Rosie Perez is really gonna skate away?” Yes! And every time, the audiences were so happy that Rosie skated away! Audiences can smell these things out.

That brings me to my next point: you’ve always been very good at avoiding the sports movie cliché of the climactic “big game.”
Oh, I’ve had a couple “big games,” but you don’t get it all. If you win the game, you’re gonna lose the girl, I guarantee you that!

Do you get studio executives asking you that? “But Ron-- where’s the big game?”
Always! They always do!

(laughter)

Are you a rock ‘n roll guy?
Not really. I grew up with jazz, R&B, and gospel music.

Which is what you use in your films. The songs in your soundtracks often harken to earlier times.
I got into Elvis about six years ago. I was way late in discovering rock ‘n roll… and then it was mostly stuff like Chuck Berry.

What was it about Ty Cobb that made you want to make Cobb (1994)?
He was a fascinating guy. A brilliant, brilliant athlete—

But before your time, right? You never saw him play?
No. He was a guy we always heard about. And when I was fifteen years old, I took the money I made mowing lawns and bought my first hardcover book: Ty Cobb: My Life in Baseball, by Al Stump. I knew who Al Stump was because he was living in Santa Barbara at that time, even though he was a national figure—the highest-paid sportswriter in America. My dad used to point him out to me around town.

So I read the book, and even at age fifteen I felt, “Something’s not right here.” Because Cobb was portrayed as… kind of a tough guy, who’s an athlete, but… Anyway, many years later, Stump published an essay in the magazine True called “The Last Days of Ty Cobb,” which was the true story of that car ride they took down the mountain. So I looked up Al Stump, thirty years after I bought that first book. He wasn’t in great health. He told me, “For thirty years I’ve been writing a real biography, trying to get that other piece of shit out of my head.” I asked him what happened. He said, “I spent the last year of Ty Cobb’s life with him, but my publisher gave him final editorial control over it!” So Stump spent the rest of his life writing the definitive, actual, Samuel Johnson-type version. He finished it just before his death, right around the time the movie came out.

I loved the idea that this guy’s trying to tell Cobb’s story, and trying to come to terms with what Cobb meant to him. He’s like the narrator in The Great Gatsby, or Marlowe in Heart of Darkness. So it isn’t so much about Cobb, it’s about Al, and all of us. Why do we need these guys to be… y’know, why can’t we allow them just to be great ballplayers? All those kinds of questions… which nobody gives a fuck about, because nobody went to see the movie!

When I did all the interviews for it, the critics asked, “Was Cobb really that bad?” Actually, he was much worse… but you wouldn’t have believed everything! I couldn’t show him beating the shit out of his old lady. But he was also brilliant intellectually—with his stock trading, and serving on the board of directors of Coca-Cola and Ford, and all that. Most ballplayers of his time were fourth grade dropouts!

I just saw it this weekend. What I really wondered was what Al Stump actually liked about Cobb, or loved about him? What did you like or love about him?
Oh, a lot. He did have his demons. His mother was unfaithful to his father, and his mother’s lover killed his father. He’d held his father up in his mind as this great man, then found out at age seventeen that he really wasn’t; that it was all a lie he’d bought into. Cobb played hurt, he played with pain, he played against the gods; he willed himself to fame in a way that was inspiring. I’m not saying he was heroic; he was very troubled.

Robert Wuhl and Tommy Lee Jones in Cobb.

When the press covered the film, some of them said, “With all the TV coverage in sports, and all the press attention today, no celebrity could get away with behaving like that.” Really? It couldn’t happen today? I said, “Who’s the biggest musical star in the world? Is he a child molester?” Of course it’s happening today! And people back then knew Cobb was a prick; he’d killed two or three people! But he hit .367! If he’d hit .267, he’d have been in jail, but .367? He’s in the Hall of Fame, and he’s rich.

Roger Kahn, who wrote the The Boys of Summer, loved the movie. We had lunch one time, and he said, “You know, what happened to Al Stump happened to me too.” He’d written this biography of Pete Rose, and he got pretty much all the way through it, dug up all this dirt on Pete Rose, and then learned from his editor that Pete Rose had final cut!

That newsreel at the beginning says people thought Cobb had psychotic eyes as a child, but you don’t come back to it. Was there something seriously wrong with him?
He terrified a lot of people. Was he a clinical sociopath, or was it just this deep rage, coming from that tiny southern town… ?

Lolita Davidovich in Blaze.

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.

Do you feel a kinship with other southern writers? Can you hang with Larry McMurtry?
Yeah, sure. I don’t know him, but I am going next Thursday to the Faulkner Festival, as I always do. This year I’m talking about “The Influence of Gatsby and the Great American Dream on American Film.” Everybody else there is pretty literary, and I’m the film guy. Some years they cover the classics; sometimes they’ll do Walker Percy, another year it’ll be a Tennessee Williams scholar, but it’s always really interesting.

Very cool. I’m glad to hear you’re respected in that quarter.
I have to go there or Vegas to get any respect!