Mclean's Magazine

Baseball Romance

BRIAN D. JOHNSON July 1988

It is the season of lazy days at the ball park-and Hollywood nights in large, dark, air-conditioned rooms. Summer is movie season, the time when the big studios launch their pennant drives for box-office glory. The game plan: find a novel way of showing audiences something familiar. The easy route is the sequel, and the clone-heavy summer lineup includes "Crocodile" Dundee II, Caddyshack II, Arthur 2 on the Rocks, Short Circuit II, Poltergeist III and Rambo III. Among both sequels and original hits, the accent is clearly on comedy. Dundee II overtook Rambo III at the box office with a deadpan jab. But among original movies, too, the accent is clearly on comedy. And the number 2 movie last week was Big, a triumph of grown-up wit transcending a silly premise. Everywhere, stars are paired up in formula farces like buddies at a day-camp swim. Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin do double duty in Big Business. Dan Aykroyd and John Candy share a doomed vacation in The Great Outdoors. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger takes a crack at comedy as a Moscow cop in Red Heat.

But among the most recent releases, two stand out from the pack--each utterly unlike the other. One is Bull Durham, a baseball movie that puts the fun back into America's national pastime. A curve-ball comedy with a backspin of romance, it showcases the Hollywood heat of actor Kevin Costner. Not too young, not too old and not too stupid, Costner is a sex symbol whose time has come. Fielding his advances in Bull Durham is Susan Sarandon, as a baseball moll trying to have her way with men playing a boys' game. Together they are the hottest couple on the summer screen.

Humor: The other new movie turning heads is Who Framed Roger Rabbit, an extraordinary blend of live action and animation co-produced by the two superpowers of Hollywood fantasy, Walt Disney Co. and Steven Spielberg. Costarring British actor Bob Hoskins and a cartoon rabbit, the movie is not the funniest comedy of the summer, but it is the most spectacular. Technically, it ranks among the most complex films ever made. And one of the key figures behind it is Canadian animator Richard Williams.

The major studios traditionally create comedies for the summer, aimed at a broad audience. In an attempt to reach all age groups at once, it is not surprising that the issue of maturity-or lack of it-has become a central theme of the films themselves. So far this season, no movie has struck a more universal chord than Big, starring Tom Hanks as a 12year-old trapped in an adult body. Leapfrogging the generation gap, Big provides equal-opportunity entertainment for adults, teens and children.

The success of Roger Rabbit, with its $55-million budget, also depends on wide appeal-and adult nostalgia for a cartoon childhood. Yet, despite its menagerie of animated characters and its stockpile of corny gags, the movie's sophisticated references to screen classics could fly over the heads of younger viewers. Still teenagers remain a major segment of the summer movie audience. And superstar Eddie Murphy takes dead aim at the teen market in this weeks big release, Coming to America, a high camp comedy about an African prince slumming in New York City. Meanwhile, amid all the jockeying for broad box office clout, Bull Durham goes after a more specialized appeal. Funny and sexy, it is designed for adults, even though its humor celebrates the juvenile charms of baseball's never-never land.

As a rule, baseball movies have slumped at the box office. But Hollywood seems determined to reverse that trend. During the next year, Bull Durham will be followed by at least four other baseball movies. Mark Harmon (St. Elsewhere) will portray, a down and out ball player in Stealing Home, while Charlie Sheen will appear with Tom Berenger in Major League. Sheen is also the star of director John Sayles’ Eight Men Out, the story of the 1919 World Series scandal in which members of the Chicago White Sox were found guilty of fixing the outcome. "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, one of the players involved, also figures in Shoeless Joe, a movie based on Canadian writer W. P. Kinsella's award-winning novel now being shot in Iowa. Its star: Kevin Costner.

Irreverence: In the past, Hollywood has tended to take the boys of summer too seriously. The Natural (1984), starring Robert Redford as a righteous slugger with a cosmic bat, portrayed baseball as a kind of sacrament. But Bull Durham pokes irreverent fun at the game, locating its target with a heat seeking accuracy of a good off-speed pitch. The movie takes place in the minor leagues, where the mythology of the sport is played out on a human scale. The characters and the story are fictitious, but the team is a real-life outfit called Durham Bulls, a Carolina League club co-owned by one of the movie’s producers, Thom Mount.

Sex: Although set in the present. Bull Durham has a timeless sense of whimsy, as if the characters were happily marooned in a bygone era. At the heart of the film is Annie (Sarandon). A free spirit who worships at what she calls "the Church of Baseball." An ardent Bulls' fan, she recruits a new lover from the team roster each spring and grooms him for success both on the field and in bed. "I never slept with a guy who didn't have the best season of his career," she says. As the movie's narrator, Annie personifies the movie's quirky humor and reveals the script's self-conscious wit. It is a delicious role, all long legs and clever lines, and it fits the 41-year-old Sarandon like a well worn glove.

Vying for Annie's affection are rookie pitcher Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) and veteran catcher Crash Davis (Costner), who has been assigned to teach LaLoosh some self-control. While, Davis plays hard-to-get, LaLoosh is an easy catch. Annie discovers that he makes love, the way he pitches-"all over the place"-but she remains stubbornly faithful. "Despite my rejection of most Judeo-Christian ethics," she explains, "I am, within the framework of a baseball season, monogamous."

With its sliders and sinkers and split fingered fastballs, baseball is a bottomless metaphor for sex. And Bull Durham milks it for all it is worth. It mocks the burlesque rituals on the mound, the bluffing and strutting, the absurd superstitions about win streaks that come and go like love affairs. As a woman playing a girl's game, with her cool Carolina drawl, Sarandon is as seductive as Southern Comfort on ice. In Bull Durham, she gives her best performance since her portrayal of an alluring croupier in 1980's Atlantic City. But Costner is the designated sex symbol, the quietly smoldering presence. In a movie full of literate non-sense, he keeps the store down to earth. It works because Costner is believable as a ball player and a ]over.

Tease: Bull Durham is a deliberate, slow exercise in comic foreplay teased to the bottom of the ninth inning, when the romantic relief promised in the movie's publicity pitch finally arrives. And the chemistry between Costner and Sarandon is worth the wait. Playfully erotic, their love scene is enhanced by a long slithering saxophone solo more explicit than the camera shows. With the serendipitous rhythm of cool jazz on a hot summers’ nigh, the movie-like baseball-takes it’s own sweet time.

A SIZZLING BOY OF SUMMER

The American leading man was becoming an endangered species. Where was the next Gary Cooper or Steve McQueen, the matinee idol who could sound smart and look tough at the same time? Paul Newman and Robert Redford were getting old. And audiences were left to choose between absurd extremes. The mastodon men-Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger-cornered the market on beef, but they cannot be trusted with more than a line of dialogue at a time. At the other extreme are the pretty-boy graduates of Hollywood’s Brat Pack. Audiences looking for a male sex symbol have had to resort to an Australian joker in a crocodile-skin vest. Then along came Kevin Costner.

Presence:Costner is hot. Physically, he has the sort of screen presence that makes married women forget they have husbands. Yet, unlike so many of his well-sculpted colleagues, he can act. At the ripe young age of 33, Costner has emerged from Hollywood’s horizon like a rising fastball. Last year, he stepped into the big time with starring roles in two thrillers-as a naively, honest detective in The Untouchables and as a duplicitous naval officer in No Tiny Out. In the current romantic comedy Bull Durham, he portrays a self-possessed catcher who gives lessons in baseball and sexual ethics.

Integrity Now, he is in Iowa, filming Shoeless Joe, another movie linked to America's national pastime, but based on a novel by Canadian author W. P. Kinsella. After spending time on the set in Iowa, Kinsella told MacLean’s- "Costner has a tremendous presence about him. He engages you with his eyes. Whether he's in front of the camera or not, he can control any scene that he's in without realizing it. It's not something that he has worked at-he seems to have been born with it.

Costner has all that is required of a major star. Besides the good looks and the obvious talent, he has the air of casual integrity that is the hallmark of a down-home American hero. A throwback to a lost age of Hollywood idealism, he is often compared to Gary Cooper. Untouchables director Brian De Palma said that "his innate purity" made him ideal for the white-knight role of Eliot Ness. Added De Palma, in a remark typical of the hyperbole that Costner attracts: "Kevin doesn't have a phony bone in his body.”

Chicago crime fighter or minor-league catcher, Costner tends to portray men with strong beliefs. In an early scene of Bull Durham, his character, Crash Davis, explains his creed to baseball moll Annie (Susan Sarandon) in straightforward terms "I believe in the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I belie there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. And I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days."

Now that is a leading man. The speech is intentionally comic, and it works. Only because Costner delivers his overwritten lines with dead serious conviction. It is the same sort of conviction that made Ness look almost gullibly honest in The Untouchables and that fooled audiences into believing the naval officer in No Way Out was a loyal American.

Goof:But behind Costner's image of straight-arrow integrity, there is a hint of the goof, the boyish rascal who likes to take chances. That side was most visible in the 1985 western Silverado, in which he played a volatile, gun-twirling rake with a silly grin who wore his cowboy hat sideways.

Six feet, 170 lb., he is an athletic actor. He insists on doing as many of his own stunts as producers will allow. For Silverado, he rode bare back. For Bull Durham's baseball scenes, he did all his own throwing, catching and sliding. In No Way Out formed a scene where he performed where he runs into a moving car, bounces off the hood and lands on the road-all without a stunt man. And in The Untouchables, he flirted with danger six inches from the edge of a rooftop 120 feet above the ground on a windy day in Chicago. Recalled De Palma: "He's incredibly agile, which is very rare in a contemporary movie star. He moves like a dancer."

Passion: Off camera, Costner's real life seems to mirror the rugged image that he projects on- screen. Hobbies include baseball, basketball, golf, volleyball, running, skiing, swimming, hunting and fishing. He once built his own canoe. And before succeeding as an actor, he worked as a carpenter. He rides a four-wheel-drive Bronco around the suburban hills outside Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, Cindy-his college sweetheart-and their three, children. "You know, Kevin has worked with his hands," said Hollywood screenwriter Steve Tesich. "You know he has been in sports by the way he walks, the way his body moves, the way he can relax. You know there is a wonderful appreciation of women that is not lecherous or neurotic.

Born in a Los Angeles suburb, Costner is the son of a blue-collar worker who started out climbing telephone poles for the Edison Co. and rose to the executive ranks. As a youngster, Costner was shy and had a passion for baseball. He says now that he "probably, had only one date in my- entire high-school life." While studying marketing at California State University, he married Cindy, a student who worked summers playing Snow White at Disneyland. After graduating, he worked for a marketing firm, then resigned after six weeks to devote himself to acting.

Serious: His first efforts met with frustration. He starred in 1985's Vietnam-era drama Fandango, but it flopped. And when he landed what looked like a pivotal role in 1983's The Big Chilll-the suicide victim whose death reunites the other characters-all his scenes were cut from the picture. But then Big Chill director Lawrence Kasdan gave Costner the extroverted cowboy role in Silverado. And after his dramatic double play in The Untouchables and No Way Out, American theatre owners in 1987 voted him "Star of Tomorrow." Critics suddenly proclaimed him the first serious American actor to become a matinee idol since Harrison Ford. Before The Untouchables, "Kevin wasn't famous," said its producer Art Linson. "So what we did was surround him with people who were. In fact, Costner's name was billed above Robert de Niro and Sean Connery.

Steamy:With fame came notoriety. Costner is still answering questions about No Way Out's steam, love scene, in which he undresses actress Sean Young in the back of a moving limousine. But he was nervous filming the telling Young, "Now everybody’s going to see how I kiss.” Young, who is shooting a film in Vancouver this week, said “I think he is a little embarrassed by all this sex symbol. It is necessary evil. But outside his work, his life is really centered around his family.”

When asked how his wife reacted to the love scenes with Sarandon in Bull Durham, Costner said: “She can hear these comments about what an interesting onscreen couple we make, but eventually she says bull to that. Her own response is that she and I are an interesting couple ourselves. However, Costner candidly admitted that he couldn’t deal with it. Not if it was similar to the way Susan and I rassle around on the screen.”

Natural: Honesty seems to be seems to Costner’s stock-in-trade. Being believable onscreen, he says, means “trying to be as honorable to the character as you can.” He works hard ad it, does his homework, and pesters directors with questions. Costner hesitates to talk about the secrets of his craft, his “medicine”, as he calls it. But he relies heavily on intuition. “I know I can act,” he said. “It’s the only thing besides baseball that I understand "It's the only thing besides baseball that I understand very deeply. Everything about it-the camera, the angle, pace, motion, character has always come naturally to me."

Like a natural athlete, Costner relies scene, on skills that he doe., not stop to analyze. "I have high survival instincts," he said. "I can see something coming, feel the temperature, see movements, shifts in people. Those feelers are always out." Now that he has proven himself as an actor, Costner says that he wonders if he could have become a major league ball player instead. As it is, he will have to settle for being a movie star, the fairy-tale prince who reawakens the romance of Hollywood with a brave kiss and a swing of the bat.