Interview: Writer/Director Ron Shelton on ‘Bull Durham’ and Trash Talking in Sports
In Maker’s Dozen, we ask folks in and around the film industry 12 questions and have them ask one of us.
Ron Shelton is the writer and director of Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump, Cobb, Tin Cup, and Play It To The Bone. His new book The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham details his background as a minor league baseball player and the unlikely journey of his 1988 sports rom-com Bull Durham from conception to commercial and critical success.
We were thrilled to speak with him for Sports Month about how Susan Sarandon won her iconic role in Bull Durham, the origins of “the church of baseball,” trash talking in sports, and the actor he’s directed that he’d least like to face in a bar fight.
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
1. What is the Ron Shelton origin story?
I’m a Southern California guy. Mother from England and father from West Texas, but born and raised here. It was a lot of Baptist church in my upbringing, but also baseball and music. Bull Durham was a kind of reckoning and cathartic way of finding a shape to it, because when I quit playing baseball I didn’t watch a baseball game for many years. It’d been all I did for the first 25. In a certain way, this movie was me going back and trying to make peace with baseball.
2. In your book The Church of Baseball, you said you write to make discoveries, not connect the dots. What were some of the key discoveries you made while writing Bull Durham?
That’s a good question. I think if you have good characters to start with, the writer should start listening to them. By that I mean, if they’re good characters they’re easy to write. Often you’ll be writing this scene and these characters are talking and you’re kind of surprised where they’re leading you. Too much writing today, in movies and TV—there’s a lot that’s great but there’s more crap.
And it isn’t the writer’s fault—it’s the network and the studio and the streaming companies. They want everything outlined within an inch of its life, so there’s no discovery. I don’t like to outline much; I just like to know the broad strokes. So I think the biggest thing I learned was to listen to the characters and not tell them what to say.
3. Growing up, kids my age were in love with teen dreams from TV shows like Full House and Boy Meets World. I was in love with Susan Sarandon from Bull Durham. So, first off—thank you for that. Second of all, how did she meet and exceed your expectations for the role of Annie?
I’m glad you replaced all that other stuff with Susan and Annie Savoy. That was an upgrade for you. She was not approved by the studio to be hired, but she flew in on her own from Italy, where she was living, to audition. She just walked in the room and was in control. She knew all the lines. She knew everything. We all said, “Wow, that’s it. That’s the person.”
But she’s not on the list, and we’re like two weeks from shooting. Turned out she had gone straight from our meeting to the studio and worked her way up and down the hallway ‘til she found the offices of the president, the vice presidents, and all those decision makers, and she charmed the hell out of him and she looked like a million bucks. She got the job and two weeks later we were shooting.
4. You grew up loving the game and played in the minors. How did the concept of “the church of baseball” enter the picture?
That phrase came about because of my father, who was from Bakersfield in West Texas. He was a conservative Republican, but conservative Republicans used to be different creatures from today. He kept getting so upset with the church’s narrowness, its often racist views, its judgment, myopia, tunnel vision. And gradually he just stopped going around the time of that Eddie Mathews home run I write about in the book. One day he stormed out and said, “My church is the church of family, or the church of jazz, or the church of music…” He had this little litany as he storms through the house. I’m not sure that he said “the church of baseball” but that’s where I got the idea for it.
5. What movies were you excited to show your kids?
I’m still trying to show them. There’s some movies that, I don’t know if they’re the greatest movies, but they’re good, solid movies and they have history lessons in them that they may not be getting in middle school or high school. There are movies that I watched at 18, 19, 20 years old that somebody said, “you gotta see this movie” and I didn’t get them until I was 30 or 40. Sunset Boulevard and Billy Wilder’s stuff. Preston Sturges. My wife always was saying “you can’t show our son The Godfather.” I said, “I’m showing him The Godfather!” He’s not going to college without seeing The Godfather. It’s about human behavior and character and evil and family and all that. So that was one of our last days before he went off to college.
6. Your movie Cobb tells the story of the great Ty Cobb. What athlete or sports event would you like to see get the movie treatment?
I’m working with my partner on a particular project. We have the rights to the book Collision at Home Plate by James Reston, Jr. It’s about the lives of Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti, and the movie is really about the last two years of Giamatti leaving Yale to run baseball and Pete crashing and burning and landing on Giamatti’s lap. I love this thing. I’ve outlined it in detail. Bryan Cranston wants to play Giamatti but we haven’t found Pete Rose yet.
But that’s another sports movie I’d like to get made because it’s really about two very different guys who are brilliant in their own way. One’s never read a book, never read an article. He is the id and the least reflective man ever. And Giamatti is the president of Yale, Latin scholar, Italian Renaissance scholar, Dante scholar, beautiful writer, great speaker, and a baseball fan who has romanticized baseball, and leaves Yale to run baseball. Everybody’s going, “What are you doing, Bart?” He says, “I think it’s a step up for me.” And the first thing that happens is the Pete Rose scandal of betting on baseball. It’s almost like a courtroom thriller: people flipping on Pete and not flipping on him, while he’s at the dog track with hookers and mobsters. While he’s chasing Ty Cobb’s record, by the way!
7. Trash talking in sports: overrated or underrated?
Depends who’s doing it. The fans don’t get to really hear it. We’re hearing second-hand reports of it. I know that everybody says Larry Bird was as good a trash talker as there was. I know Jordan did it. I think that’s part of sports. There are great athletes who don’t need to do it, but there are athletes that need to do it to be great.
8. I saw a picture the other day of Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins’ son and couldn’t help but think, “Shelton’s responsible for that kid.” What’s another interesting or surprising legacy of Bull Durham?
The movie has been credited by many, many people—not me—for saving the minor leagues. When I made that movie, minor league parts were rickety places with bad lights. Now they’re fabulous stadiums. When I made it I was just trying to not get fired. I had no idea we’d be having this conversation all this time later.
9. You are also, in many ways, responsible for the great Woody Harrelson’s movie stardom. Aside from White Men Can’t Jump and Play It To The Bone, what is your favorite role of his?
Well, Woody is the most versatile actor in America and yet he can’t get a movie financed if it’s just him on the poster. It’s just bizarre. If you can play Larry Flynt to the soldier in The Messenger reporting to military families that their son has been killed to the just ridiculous comedies… It’s his range that blows me away. He’s something else.
“When I made ‘Bull Durham’ I was just trying to not get fired. I had no idea we’d be having this conversation all this time later.”
10. You’ve worked with some iconic leading men—Paul Newman, Tim Robbins, Kevin Costner, Nick Nolte, Wesley Snipes. Which would you least like to face in a bar fight?
Tommy Lee Jones. I love the man, but his hand from being a horseman and rancher can crush a small car. I would take most of them on. I’m not bragging, I’m just saying actors are actors. Wesley is a martial arts black belt in everything, so I would probably avoid him. Harrison’s not athletic. Paul Newman was about 137 pounds. He’s a tiny guy, a great guy. Nick could be a handful, but he wouldn’t be focused on what was at hand.
11. I’m a songwriter and so often a song idea starts with a title. So I have to ask: What came first in White Men Can’t Jump, the script or the title?
The title. I played pickup ball three days a week and I got fascinated with how entertaining the arguments were, and how democratic the playground was in the sense that it could get very intense, but when there was a dispute everything would stop, arguing would get loud, and it would invariably turn into yo mama jokes or some insult about something physical about you. A lot of times the arguments would get a little bit racially tinged, but generally with humor and jokes and everybody laughing.
And I had this idea: white men can’t jump, which was not an expression. People think it existed. It did not exist before that movie. I asked four women, different ages and ethnicities and backgrounds, and they all said they loved the title. I said, “OK, I’m gonna run with it.” I wrote 37 pages in one day, something that nobody should ever try. I’ve never done it again. I had no plan—I just wrote it and then ran out of gas. I sent it to the head of the studio, Joe Roth, who was a basketball fan. He said, “I’m gonna make it. Finish it.”
12. What are you hopeful for?
Getting movies made and television shows made. Same thing as 40 years ago. It’s just trickier now with the corporate takeover of the business. Business is melting down. Every studio, network, and streamer has corporate management, which doesn’t believe in relationships with the filmmakers and the directors and the writers and the producers and the actors. We could be in the hat business or the shovel business.
It used to be relationships with studio heads. You could nurture things, and you could break bread if you win or break bread if you lose. That doesn’t exist now—it’s just layers of bureaucracy as if you’re dealing with Microsoft and never getting to Bill Gates or whoever runs the place now. So the business is not a great place to work for most of us, but it’s where I work and what I do every day trying to get movies made.
+1. What’s your question for us?
Do you want to direct?
(Kevin:) Kind of, yes. I’m approaching 40 and I’ve always had it in my mind that maybe in my 40s is when I would dip my toes in that pool, start with a short film. Maybe do a music video for one of my songs just to get the feel and language down. But yeah, it just sounds really hard to go through those steps, especially when you have two little ones running around.
(Ron:) Yeah. The good news is it doesn’t cost much to make something like it used to. The bad news is finding shelf space, you know, in the corporate ownership of the shelf space. But you can make things with an iPhone. That’s the enticing thing.