Today’s the 35th Anniversary of Bull Durham!

Today is the 35th anniversary of the movie Bull Durham, not just one of the great sports movies, baseball movies of all time, one of the great movies of all time.

Ron Shelton is the writer and director and he joins us on the Adam Gold Show. Happy 35th anniversary, sir. Well, you know, I'm just happy to be here. Hope I can help the ball club. I'm sure you have many favorite scenes. Did you help write all the cliches? Well, you know, the cliches are the easiest thing to dig out because I learned when I was playing from the minors, I was in double A at the time, that the interview after the game, the post-game interview did not want you to actually have an opinion.

He just wanted the cliches and once I learned that it made it very easy. Oh man, what we want, here's as somebody who does a lot of post-game interviews, what I want is for you to confirm what I think I saw. So I will ask you, was that a difficult play? And you're supposed to say yes, it was a difficult play.

That's the way the interviews generally go. How good was Kevin Costner to work with in terms of the baseball side of all of these things? Kevin's a wonderful athlete, which a lot of actors think they are, but they aren't, I promise you. Kevin actually is and he didn't, he wasn't doubled for anything. He did all his own catching. He was, you know, in practices he was throwing guys out stealing.

He hit a ball out right-handed and a ball out left-handed. We didn't exactly have the camera angles to show it, but he's the real deal and he did his own golf in tin cup and he's a good basketball player too. And by the way, he's great to work with.

I've had a great time with Kevin twice. Did you choose Kevin Costner because of his athleticism? Well, I, I've been told he was an athlete and I'd liked him in a couple of early movies, though he wasn't the lead. Silverado, you may remember, he's just fabulous in that. Another little movie called Fandango, nobody's ever seen, but people said, yeah, he played high school baseball and, and I love, I liked what I saw and we went out and practiced in the parking lot at an arcade in the valley here in LA and put some quarters on the machine and he started hitting line drives. And I said, well, that's the guy. So that's how it happened.

I mean, he did that in a scene in Bull Durham, where he and Susan Sarandon, Annie, are at a batting cage and he's hitting one hand, you know, just holding the bat one handed. I know Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, who at the time were, were a couple, they're big and they're big Mets fans. Did that also help in the movie? Well, they weren't, they weren't a couple before I cast them. They became a couple during the movie.

See what you did. Yeah. I didn't even realize they were becoming a couple until a year after the movie, you know, a couple of years later, cause I don't pay attention to anything going on. But yeah, they're both, Tim's a huge Mets fan out of his mind, Mets fan.

Yeah. And Susan, and you know, they ended up having a couple of sons and so she became a big sports fan. So yeah, it was a, it was a, and Robert Wool's a huge sport. It was a baseball group, put it that way. Ron Shelton, the writer and director of Bull Durham, celebrating a 35th anniversary today. And I know you and I have talked about this before, but how surprised were you at, uh, the success and the longevity of this movie?

Well, as you know, a year ago, my book came out about all this called the church of baseball. And I thought we were making a good movie, but the studio hated it. And, uh, we didn't know it would be well received until it opened. And, uh, we didn't know it would be well received until it would be well received until it opened in theaters and the reviews were great and the people were gone and drugs. And up until then, I thought I'd never work again.

And I thought, well, if they don't like this, they don't want to work with me because this is what I do. And, uh, um, so it was a relief when it was a hit and the reviews were so good and got Oscar nomination and all that. The longevity is just, um, kind of thrilling because you don't expect it. You're just trying to survive long enough to put it to make your next movie, you know, and, uh, the fact that it's now referenced as a classic and we're still talking about it 35 years later is, um, is pretty thrilling. It's one of those things that are timeless.

Has anybody ever approached you about a remake? Each week, we dive into the mind of the con artist, uncovering the secrets behind the biggest Ponzi schemes you've never heard about. We're not talking about Bernie Madoff or Charles Ponzi.

That's right. Those guys have been covered to death. The Ponzi playbook will focus on those fraudsters who have swindled millions from unsuspecting investors.

Subscribe to the Ponzi playbook, wherever you get your podcasts. Well, we, yeah. And a long time ago I came up with a storyline that might work. And then I kind of bailed on it because, you know, at the end of the month, if you start, if you do a, uh, not a remake, if you do a sequel, what do you, what happened to Annie and crash?

You have to say they, they fell apart and then everybody'd be pissed off at me. So I couldn't break up the romance. Um, and you can't remake it. Obviously we've talked about, is there a way to do a TV series, um, that captures this world, but, you know, I mean, everybody's 70 and 50 years old for real now. So, uh, you'd have to do a minor league story that sort of has the flavor of Bull Durham.

I that's probably the way you do it. Ron Shelton, the writer and director of Bull Durham, 35th anniversary is today. Uh, you know, the, uh, the remake of white guys can't jump is, I guess, either out in theaters and my son wanted to see it. I'm like, nope, you're not going to watch it.

You're going to watch the original, uh, because the originals are almost always so much better. Uh, maybe, uh, bull, uh, maybe a crash as a manager in Visalia. Well, if he still lives after 35 years, he's not a very good manager. Uh, I think I had an idea that he would have had to been 20 years younger, that he was, that, you know, Durham has gone from being the end of the trail to the, to the, you know, the gateway to the big leagues. Cause now it's AAA and he ends up in a AAA manager and is, and now suddenly Durham, instead of the gateway to oblivion is now possibly the gateway to the big leagues. And, and, and Annie had, it hadn't worked and she'd gone off and was a professor in Paris at the Sorbonne.

And she comes back as a guest lecturer at Duke and nuke is nuke washed up in Venezuela, trying to learn a knuckleball. And anyway, somehow they all ended up in Durham again, but it was, it was far-fetched, but that was, I never wrote it. I just dreamed it up. How much of, how much of the scenes, cause you had so many talented people involved, how much of the scenes were ad-libbed in some way, shape or form?

Oh, not almost nothing that lived. I mean, Robert's line about candlesticks. He came up with, uh, once in a while, somebody come up with a line that we tried, but if you read the script, it's pretty much all there. Ron Shelton is joining us here. Um, before I let you go, why did you choose and you and again, this is probably the third or fourth time we've talked.

I don't know if I've asked you this question. Why did you choose the Durham bulls as the, essentially the team? Well, my producer on this is from Durham and I'm in LA producer and he owns a small piece of them, but he didn't say you had to shoot it in Durham. I traveled all over the Sally league and the Caroline league before I wrote the script, um, to see if the minor leagues had changed since I played in them and they hadn't. Um, and I fell in love with the Durham ballpark because it was surrounded by neighborhoods where people can walk to the games and tobacco warehouses that were now empty because the back of his dying and the whole town at that time was boarded up.

If you recall, I mean, Raleigh Durham area is unrecognizable from 35 years ago. I mean, it was run down and I thought this was a perfect minor league, you know, um, location. And, uh, so because I could shoot a ballpark without having to do anything to it, except the lights were so bad.

We, we, you couldn't shoot film on it. We had to improve the lighting just to be able to get a reading on the light meter, but that's why I love the look and feel of the town. Um, and, and, and, and, and it is a great, it is a great town and the old Durham athletic park, which I've had the opportunity to, uh, to play several, uh, either old time baseball games or softball games on, uh, is still, still being used. North Carolina central, uh, calls that its home field. And obviously Durham bulls athletic park is, uh, is an absolute jam in downtown Durham.

Ron Shelton, happy 35th anniversary. Thank you very much for carving out some time today. Very good. You know, we shot at Mitchell's Tavern in Raleigh too. So that is, that is right.

A place that I have been to, uh, they, they, they fixed the window in the, uh, in the back door. That's good. I appreciate that. Thank you. Take care, Ron Shelton, the writer and director of bold Durham, happy 35th anniversary anniversary to, uh, to all of us.