Creative Screen Writing Review

But in our own day real sporting has emptied itself of almost everything but the cash-driven cynicism of contract negotiation. This leaves to Hollywood the challenge of locating what soul remains in the nation's games and making that soul something its audience can actually give a damn about.

Ron Shelton is our unofficial auteur laureate of sports cinema. In an earlier, less mediated era, in a time characterized perhaps by less irony and more common ethical ground, Shelton might even have been a kind of Frank Capra. Capra, after all, still had a certain safety net to rely on in the '30s and '40s: there were more conventionalized rules and institutions with more subscribers and a fairly universal grammar; there was less wariness, less cynicism in our relations with one another; there was a lot less money at stake generally. The distance between the ordinary man (Capra's John Doe) and the charged language of the soul was more easily bridged.

In pictures like Mr Deeds Goes to Town and Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Capra tapped into the deep well of our sympathy for ordinary virtue. Those populist fantasies still work, not just as nostalgia for what we think were simpler times, but as wishful readings of the soul's moral thermometer. The thing Capra understood was that audiences can believe in the transformation of a community caught in the g6p of confrontation with a single worthy spirit. There's something eternal and compelling about the power of one; we adore the spectacle of unwavering and courageous goodness exposing falsity, moving mountains, shoving aside all shabby pretensions to righteousness. if we didn't know now what we didn't know then, Ron Shelton might have made Bull Durham as Mr Davis Goes to the Ballpark; but even his leading man's never-explained nickname, "Crash," suggests the end of an especially rough trade.' (1)

The community, much altered by the slippage of ritual and the passage of time, may no longer be susceptible to radical character transformation or even cohesiveness. Capra's enduring strength testifies to the undimmed appeal of the idea of community, to the extent that Hollywood gropes wistfully, unblushingly, for resurrection of the kinds of sentimental ideals that we as a national culture still believe hold the keys to some imagined former greatness. (2)

The community-so transformed that its abstract collective reconfiguration by inspired leadership is now possible only in the movies - no longer really exists outside the poetic imagination, then in Shelton's darker, resolutely unsentimental view of the actual landscape of contemporary culture, the objective itself must be different. if our common ethical framework has fragmented, the capacity and beauty of the individual human soul are not just undiminished but absolutely worth saving. And athletics might well be the most logical arena in which to stage this battle, precisely because of the common perception that of all the classes of human endeavor tainted by the vulgarity of modern life, sport has somehow fallen the farthest.

In a Shelton script, this survival of the soul is flagged by certain signatures: the canvas is small (the community can't be saved; only one soul at a time is eligible-and that soul, as in Capra, is salvageable by virtue of its fundamental decency, a type of humility that precludes grandstanding or any form of soapbox narcissism); there's a revulsion at the slick surfaces of contemporary culture but also a defiant refusal to privilege nostalgia (looking to the past will enrich you, but living in it won't save you); and the hero is less than affable (salvation is a rough trade; and not only can you not save the community, you probably can't even count on much help).

In Bull Durham Ron Shelton reinvents the contemporary American sports movie in a number of fundamental ways. For one thing, it is a movie whose central preoccupation is no longer with sports but with character. While a romantic treatment, Bull Durham boldly declines to glorify either the game or its practitioners but instead romances the scruffy little lives of three unlikely people-themselves less than extraordinary and not in the least warriors. Refusing at every point to trade in clichés, (3) Shelton's film assumes as an oven that baseball has a peculiar and innate aesthetic and builds a series of subtler, more profound observations onto that premise-arriving at conclusions lyrically, but never quite reverentially, through the acceptance of the game's charisma by the movie's leading man, who happens to be a poet. (4) Along the way, the film treats as values, in both literally and symbolically mature ways, themes as rich and complex as work and success, respect (the sense of which is closest, perhaps, to something like the Italian notion of honor), religion, poetry and the dance-at times appearing to suggest that they might all be aspects of the same thing. (5)

Finally, and maybe most provocatively, Bull Durham is a big-time sports movie whose principal character is arguably the woman through whose narrative point of view we are permitted to be spectators. Shelton's oddball construction of the meta-narrative offers not one but multiple first-person points of view. From the outset the story appears to unfold through Annie's controlling perspective; but when Crash plays ball-consistently, that is, when he is at bat-he has a habit of talking to himself and the opposing pitcher in a series of lengthy and aggrieved soliloquies (they're almost all variations on Hamlet's "How all occasions do inform against me," in fact) and we hear these, too.

As narrative features, the different structures of the characters' voice-overs are interesting because they're related to the overall story as the speakers are, according to temperament: Annie's voice-over is like Huck Fin's, a true act of public speaking whose design is generously expository and directed outward from the self toward a listening audience for the edification of others. But Crash's is just a self-serving gripe, an interior monologue that is not really speech as much as verbalized grunting, almost prelingual; and while we are privileged to the extent that we're inside the speaker's thoughts, that insight doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know. Annie speaks to us of reading poetry to others and seeking God for herself, Crash is all but inarticulate with respect to anything but the acting out of the poetry in his own lived existence.

Tellingly, Crash's first big speech begins, like Annie's opening monologue, with "I believe:’ (6)

Crash stops, and speaks with both aloofness and passion:

The litany itself is more than rhetorical: it has the direct, forceful grammar and vocabulary-and the sharp, swinging cadences-of poetry. So when Crash walks out on Annie's provocative proposition of liaison a few lines further on, dismissing both her and his youthful competition-the very firebrand pitcher he is himself supposed to be nurturing-with the line "I'm not interested in a woman who's interested in that boy," we're aware that Shelton has established the polarities of his principal metaphor. After all, Nuke is simply uninteresting and the script, which is philosophically clearly biased toward Crash, leaves no doubt as to this conclusion.

As the ironies pile up, we find among them Shelton's clear-eyed recognition of the privileged status of the figure of the successful modern athlete-he's dull, immature, and soulless; and he absolutely represents the faceless corporate monolith of contemporary sport. (8) And while Shelton is tough minded and unsentimental, he's no fool: to the extent that Crash is his image of the soul of the game, his admiration is tempered by his sorrowful acknowledgment that soul will never matter. Crash even has to cater to Nuke's empty-headedness by preparing him to give moronic press interviews once he's a success.

INT. THE BUS - DAY LARRY, DEKE, TOMMY AND MICKEY as the Supremes, singing -Stop in the Name of Love' at the front of the bus.

NUKE: I love winning, Crash, you hear me? I love it. Teach me everything.

CRASH:It's time you started working on your interviews.

NUKE:What do I gotta do?

CRASH: Learn your clichés. Study them. Know them. They're your friends.

Crash hands Nuke a small pad and pen.

Crash: Write this down. (beat) “We gotta play em one day at a time”

NUKE: Boring.

CRASH: Of course. That's the point. (beat) 'I'm just happy to be here and hope I can help the ball club.'

NUKE: Jesus.

CRASH: Write, write-“I just wanta give it my best shot and, Good Lord willing, things'll work out.'

NUKE STARTS WRITING them down.

NUKE:“... Good Lord willing, things'll work out.'

CRASH: Yap. So hows Annie?

Nuke looks up from his clichés, startled.

NUKE: She's getting steamed 'cause I'm still re-channeling my sexual energy ... maybe I should cave in and sleep with her once just to calm her down. What’ya think?

Nuke nods seriously, listening to the master.

If it's fair to suggest that Nuke isn't much more than a symbol and a plot engine, then the movie becomes on the one hand a critique of the inhumane, win-at-all-costs ethic of modem athletics and on the other an insightful but also generously romantic study of the authentic human qualities, the nobilities and meanness, of two beautiful losers.

Let's say that the classical Capra hero is some sort of reluctant warrior for the virtues of community. He's also characteristically shy and hesitant to call attention to call attention to himself. He’ll take necessary action and dismiss it with an aw shucks.

And let's say that the classical antihero of '70s American film is a reluctant warrior for himself; he's shy, too, but it's because his attitude to the community can be pretty much summed up as contemptuous. He'll take necessary action, but it's typically self-serving and antagonistic to those around him. People flock to him to lynch him.

In Bull Durham we have the ironic hero. He's a loser with dignity and a pragmatic, uninflected jokiness about his own worth. Crash Davis announces his arrival in barely professional ball this way: "I'm the player to be named later." This knight in soiled armor is characteristically bright, talented, dedicated to something no one else understands or gives a damn about, but he's reluctant to act at all-not a warrior of any stripe. He's both deeply cynical and profoundly idealistic; and in him there is no real conflict between the two. People don't even know he exists and wouldn't care if they did.

If we have an ear for nuance, in fact, we might even detect in Shelton's protagonist a blueprint for masculinity in our day. The alternative model is indeed a man among men: Crash is a catcher-and catchers, not fleet shortstops, are the undeniably manly ballplayers, the Mack trucks of the game. He's a long-ball hitter whose response to the neglect of his fans is proud silence-when he sets the minor league homerun record he keeps it to himself But he's also in touch, in all apparent sincerity, with his feminine side. Secure in his slugger/poet identity, Crash disdains to indulge in embarrassed, self-conscious humor when he catches Nuke wearing Annie's garter for luck (panties in the script); instead he instructs the rookie (who's very embarrassed) in putting it on properly: "The rose goes in the front, big guy" (in the script the line is "Very hot"). Crash is relaxed enough to take the sensualist's pleasure in painting Annie's toenails as part of a harmless-looking bondage ritual (in the script he allows her, in the same vein, to apply makeup to his face). Within his very ease of manner in such contexts we might find an antidote to Hollywood's take on normative male sexuality, which in athletic settings especially tends toward the promotion of a very rigid, narrowly circumscribed masculine sexual response, having mostly to do with the male orgasm at all costs.

What's typical of an American sports movie, in fact, is the suggestion that climax is really the only dynamic the boys require women for at all-that for all other, intermediary forms of pleasure the company of males is actually preferred. Of course there may even be some truth in this model, and the corollary conclusion that sport is a type of closet homosexuality is pretty clich6d by now. What's noteworthy in the present context, however, is that Shelton simply is not interested in addressing his subject through axiomatic, two dimensional character stereotypes. The bigger game he's after is much closer to authentic character delineation and its interactions with the found world: he really seems to be trying to generate, through the pleasingly resonant darkness of Hollywood fable, a naturalistically convoluted web of human failings and desires that might produce in the end something like useful perspective on the modern gender wars.

So Shelton's ironic protagonist is neither hero nor antihero-he's an antidote. He's not especially rebellious (that would take too much energy); he's just resistant. He is perfectly willing to live in the universe as he finds it-again, probably, in part because crusading is exhausting, and he's no workaholic. So, whether it's sloth or a principled sense that everyone has the right to be left alone, the loser/hero is in general not inclined to try to change either the world or himself. And this produces a vague but defiantly anachronistic, slightly chaotic, out-of-step dimension in the character: while Bull Durham's resolute lack of sentimentality evokes the past as a meaningful and vital existence within the present, history is never glamorized through nostalgia. Shelton's male role model, though in many ways traditionally masculine, is knowledgeable, possibly even educable, about women.

And he's passionately devoted to his craft-here lie the origins of the poetic streak Crash is an artist, but never a brawler. Especially in the earlier script, we see him practicing the home-run swing in an oft-repeated motif: the attention to craft has more to do with grace than with power.

EXT. DOWNTOWN DURHAM-NIGHT

THE OLD BLACK MAN is tossing wadded up balls of paper at Crash, who takes beautiful, fluid swings with the rolled up newspaper. Batting practice. CLOSE ON CRASH’S EYES - Studying the “pitches”, with intense concentration, endlessly working on his game.

So Crash, who seems generally unhappy, has grown accustomed to the price to be paid for living a life of principle, for his very fish-out-of waterness, for the anomaly of his own security and his poetic rather than athletic temperament

In a corrupt, competitive universe, itself shallow to the core. He's aware that he can no more shake off his own values than he can impose them on his colleagues, and at the end of the day he knows-and so does she-that his epitaph would read, in Annie's line: "This world wasn't made for those cursed with self-consciousness." (The line is included near the end of the film but not in the script.)

This sports story, then, told-ironically enough-by a woman, is about a self-conscious poet loner who values things like hard work, discipline, the lyrical quality of ordinary living, and the eternal democracy of simple, civil respect over the potency and ego-play of professional sports. (9)

NUKE: How come you don't like me?

Nuke looks at his left arm, rubs his shoulder curiously.

It's precisely this callowness in Nuke that angers Crash most visibly-the pitcher's very lack of any comprehension, beyond sheer dollar value, of his own worth.

Crash might be a power hitter, but that self aware trait in him, the stain of the poet, is a serious hindrance. Without big-time drive, he appears destined to perpetual minor league status. Left to himself, in fact, he seems with his bad habits (more obvious in the script, in which he frequents brothels) headed for self-abnegation, if not outright self-destruction. The poetry of his existence-that is the worldview that sustains him in his own crassness-is the very thing that keeps him a prisoner in that identical darkness.

In telling but generally implicit ways the delineation of male and female characters in Bull Durham plays out deeply etched cultural stereotypes. Men are active in the public arena while women watch-and occasionally comment. Crash plays baseball while Annie is relegated to the stands. (10) Crash, as we argued earlier, is a poet while Annie teaches poetry. The disparity between their characters, while perhaps symptomatic of our culture, is not presented in a critical context (11).

The character of the "ironic loser," explored fully in the persona of Crash Davis, is merely echoed in Annie. For Crash, the "ironic loser" playing out his career by working his way down a series of minor league teams is rearticulated into the "ironic hero" at the end of the film when he breaks the record for homeruns hit in the minor leagues. His success is ironic because no one, except he and Annie, realizes the record has been broken, which, given the manic devotion rabid baseball fans show for statistics, strains the savvy viewer's credulity. We know further that Crash has a backup plan-to be a major league manager.

Annie's dreams are more diffuse. In fact, the script opens with an acknowledgment of her relentless search for meaning and for herself, a search temporarily stalled at "the Church of Baseball." And her search has been exhaustive:

A WALL COVERED WITH BASEBALL PICTURES behind a small table covered with objects and lit candles. A baseball, an old baseball card, a broken bat, a rosin bag, a jar of pine tar, a peacock feather, a silk shawl, a picture of Isadora Duncan. Clearly, the arrangement is-A SHRINE - And it glows with the candles like some religious altar. We hear a woman’s voice in a North Carolina accent.

Annie:(V.O.) I believe in the Church of Baseball. (beat) I've tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones. I've worshiped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan...

Later, Annie explains further in a scene far different from that presented in the film.

ANNIE AND CRASH SIT IN THE CORNER of the empty bar.

In life, as in baseball, Annie is relegated to the stands. Although it appears as if Annie chooses the one player she will "hook up" with each season, even she realizes that she gets what seems like "a bad trade."

ANNIE POSES IN FRONT OF THE MIRROR She smoothes her dress along her hips. And puts on a flashy pair of sunglasses. Stylish and slightly mad.

It's not surprising, really, that the flamboyance she provides at the ballpark and local bars offers her more excitement than her day job ever will. Notably, all reference to the professional part of Annie's life is tossed off in one line, lost in the midst of talk about baseball and sex and offering unmistakable clues about how this woman defines herself

What is it , finally, that causes Annie to reinvent herself once again by story's end as a woman ready to be whatever her man needs her to be? Is it love? Is it the recognition that she was never really part of baseball anyway-that her attempts to "coach" were part of her act? (13) As she ages, does she need the stability of a steady escort even to allow her entree into the "Church of Baseball?" Or does it matter why? After all, Annie is at story's end just where she was in the beginning, relegated to the periphery of the playing field. She holds a ticket but can't be part of the game. She is ready to "be" whatever her man wants her to be. (14) But, after all this, who is she?

From time to time Crash seems to perceive, albeit dimly, that he really could profit by a little outside assistance: he may not confess to it, but his bearing toward Annie is largely the demeanor of need. If the game is a poem, Annie-who reads poetry-seems to recognize it as such. In the film (though not in the script) she applies Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" to Crash with a nice delicacy: "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

At this point Crash has left her, but he'll be back. He doesn't know it yet; but the necessary complementarity of the poet and his audience is beginning to rouse him from his torpor. Having set his silent home run record and quit the game, he needs a fallback position. Annie's alternative perspective to the shaky, unfinished rhyme of his personal void is subtly bound up in the intricacy of the dance they discover they can perform together. At their initial encounter Crash flatly says: "I don't dance." By the picture's end, she has shown him how.

It's interesting as well to note that the script has them sitting on her sofa at the fade in the static posture of Benjamin and Elaine at the close of The Graduate. But in the film the dissolve is shot through their dance and over the heroic image of another great catcher, the late Thurman Munson. The implication seems to be that the poem Of Crash's life need not be over if only he will entrust a part of it to the poetry instructor. After all, one reading of his notion that he might get a managing post next season is that he can't think of anything else to do. Crash, limited by his experience, together with Annie, innocent of the direct discouragement of that experience and more receptive to new experience, would clearly benefit in Shelton's view from a pooling of perspectives. In Crash, the projection of a tentative future isn't so much a dream as a failure of imagination. He might be a poet, but he can't visualize the last verse by himself

Annie not only teaches Crash to dance, she makes him want to. After all, in the usual cliché, it takes two-she would know Yeats's famous question: "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" Since she isn't in the poem, she might even know the answer. And since this isn't really a straight romantic comedy, the startling disappearance of dialogue and the visual emptiness of the picture's closing sequences-just before the two leads reunite-imply both the sheer pragmatic desirability of their relationship in league against a dark and demanding real-life landscape and the tenuousness of the relationship itself: that is, that this outcome, too, is just one more spot of Wordsworthian time.

NOTES