The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham
by Ron Shelton (Knopf, $30)
Bull Durham, before it became recognized as one of the all-time great sports movies, was “an unusual movie in every respect,” said Elizabeth Nelson in The Wall Street Journal. It was a film about baseball that featured no climactic game. It was a story about a love triangle in which the female romantic lead was past 40. And its screenplay, created by a journeyman writer who wanted to direct for the first time, didn’t even include a traditional third act. But 34 years later, that writer, Ron Shelton, has produced “a droll, sometimes dolorous account” of how he overcame the odds to create a 1988 comedy-drama that’s now a recognized classic. As we know without his saying so, the film’s essential premise was brilliant and its stars’ chemistry “off the charts.”
Importantly, “there’s no treacle in Bull Durham, or in Shelton’s book,” said Chris Vognar in USA Today. He does open by revisiting his own brief career in baseball’s minor leagues, which never got him to the majors. “But he did observe and listen,” and he recognized both the flaws and fears of his fellow players and the nobility in their dogged pursuit of a dream most would never achieve. Somehow, he turned such observations into an idiosyncratic love story and overcame various studio objections to cast Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins as his leads. His “soup to nuts” account of how the film got made “strips away the romance of moviemaking.” No business should run the way Hollywood does.
“The Church of Baseball may present itself as solely for a small intersection of readers: Bull Durham fans, sports fans, writers, and film nerds,” said Malavika Praseed in the Chicago Review of Books. But while you almost have to be interested in moviemaking to enjoy the second half, the book is so multifaceted that it makes an enjoyable casual read for almost anyone. Shelton’s detailed account of building a screenplay based on his baseball experiences is “unbelievably rich.” It also “affirms a truth that we all know but often neglect: that sports are art and it insults us all to build a wall between the two.”