Everything about Bull Durham totally explained
Bull Durham is a
1988 American movie about love and
baseball. It is based upon the
minor league experiences of
writer/
director Ron Shelton and depicts the players and fans of the
Durham Bulls, a
minor league baseball team in
Durham, North Carolina.
Kevin Costner stars as "Crash" Davis, a veteran catcher brought in to teach rookie pitcher Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh (
Tim Robbins) about the game in preparation for reaching the Major Leagues while baseball groupie Annie Savoy (
Susan Sarandon) romances "Nuke" but finds herself increasingly attracted to "Crash." Also featured are
Robert Wuhl and
Max Patkin, the "Clown Prince of Baseball".
Baseball movies were not considered a viable commercial prospect at the time and every studio passed except for
Orion Pictures who gave Shelton a
USD $9 million budget with many cast members accepting lower than usual salaries because of the material, an eight-week shooting schedule, and creative freedom. He cast Kevin Costner because of the actor's natural athletic ability. During filming, Costner was able to hit two home runs while the cameras were rolling.
Bull Durham was a commercial success, grossing over $50 million in
North America, well above its estimated budget, and a critical success as well.
Sports Illustrated ranked it the #1 Greatest Sports Movie of all time. In addition, the film is ranked number 55 on
Bravo's "100 Funniest Movies." It is also ranked #97 on the
American Film Institute's "
100 Years...100 Laughs" list, and #1 on
Rotten Tomatoes' list of the 53 best reviewed sports movies of all time.
Summary
Costner stars as "Crash" Davis (named after — but in no other way based after —
Lawrence "Crash" Davis, an actual player for the Durham Bulls in 1948), a veteran of countless years in the
minor leagues unwillingly sent down to the single-A (advanced) Bulls for a specific purpose: to educate hotshot rookie pitcher Ebby "Nuke" LaLoosh (Robbins, playing a character loosely based on
Steve Dalkowski) about being a major-league talent, and to control Nuke's haphazard pitching. Crash immediately begins calling Ebby by the degrading name of "Meat," and they get off to a very rocky start.
Thrown into the mix is Annie (Sarandon, the character named for the "Baseball Annies"
groupies), a life-long spiritual seeker who latched onto the "
Church of Baseball" and has, every year, taken on a prospect with the Bulls to be a lover/student. Annie flirts with Crash and Nuke but Crash walks out, noting he's too much a veteran to "try out" for anything. Before leaving he and Annie share some sparks of mutual interest inspired by a memorable speech where Crash lists the things "he believes".
Annie and Crash then work, in their own way, and with a lot of animosity from Crash, to shape Nuke into a big-league pitcher: Annie by playing mild bondage games, reading poetry to Nuke (as well as giving him his nickname) and getting the rookie to think in alternative ways; Crash by forcing Nuke to learn "not to think," by letting the catcher make the pitching calls (memorably at two points telling the batters what pitch was coming after Nuke had shaken off Crash's calls), and lecturing to Nuke about the major leagues with both the pressure in facing big league hitters that can hit Nuke's "heat" (fastballs) and the pleasure of enjoying life in "The Show" that Crash briefly lived for "the twenty-one best days of my life" and has tried desperately for years to get back to. Meanwhile, as Nuke matures, the relationship between Annie and Crash grows, until it becomes obvious that the two of them are right for each other, except for the fact that Annie's currently with Nuke.
After a rough start to Nuke's career, he becomes a dominant pitcher by mid-season, thanks to the coaching of Annie and Crash. By the end of the movie, Nuke is called up to the majors and the Bulls, now having no use for Nuke's personal mentor, release Crash. This incites jealous anger in Crash, who is frustrated by Nuke's failure to recognize all the talent he was blessed with. Nuke leaves for the big leagues, effectively ending his relationship with Annie, and Crash overcomes his initial jealously to leave Nuke with some final words of advice.
Eventually Crash, an experienced and skilled hitter, joins another team, the
Asheville Tourists, and breaks the minor league record for most career home runs, achieving a personal milestone that he's striven for. This is known to only Crash and Annie, since Crash has sworn her to secrecy earlier in the film. Crash then retires as a player and returns to Durham to begin a life with Annie. He tells her that he'll accept a baseball coaching job; foreshadowing suggests that he'll succeed both in this coaching role and in his life with Annie. Both characters end one phase of their lives and begin another. We see Nuke one last time, being interviewed as a major leaguer, where he recites some answers to questions which he practiced earlier in the movie with Crash.
Cast and characters
Production
Ron Shelton played minor league baseball for five years, starting off at second base for the
Baltimore Orioles farm system after graduating from
Westmont College in
Santa Barbara, California. He moved from the Appalachian League to California and then Texas before finally playing AAA ball for Rochester in the International League. Shelton quit when he realized that he'd never become a major league player. “I was 25. In baseball, you feel 60 if you're not in the big leagues. I didn't want to become a Crash Davis,” he said in an interview.
He went back to school and earned in M.F.A. in sculpture at the
University of Arizona before moving to
Los Angeles to join the city’s art scene. However, he felt more kinship in telling stories than creating performance art.
Bull Durham was the first screenplay he ever wrote with a first draft in 1979 that was originally entitled,
The Player To Be Named Later. All that remains from this version is a single anecdote.
Producer
Thom Mount (who is part owner of the real Durham Bulls) hired Pete Bock, a former semi-pro baseball player who now runs his own baseball management company, as a consultant on the film. Bock recruited more than a dozen minor-league players, ran a tryout camp to recruit an additional 40 to 50 players from lesser ranks, hired several minor-league umpires and conducted two-a-day workouts and practice games with Tim Robbins pitching and Kevin Costner catching. Bock made sure the actors look and acted like ballplayers and that the real players acted convincingly in front of the cameras. He said, “the director would say, 'This is the shot we want. What we need is the left fielder throwing a one-hopper to the plate. Then we need a good collision at the plate.' I'd select the players I know could do the job, and then we'd go out and get it done”.
The scene in the pool hall where Nuke tells Crash that he's going to "the Show" was originally shot in a black whorehouse with Costner's character playing "
Unchained Melody" on the piano to a 60-year-old hooker while drunk. Nuke came in and the two men fought in an alley with several black hookers cheering Crash on. Costner remembers, "The pool hall was somehow thought to be a better experience for the audience, because we didn't want to see with him with a black woman, I guess. But it was perfectly in line with who he was."
Reception
Bull Durham debuted on
June 15,
1988 and grossed $5 million in 1,238 theaters on its opening weekend. It went on to gross a total of $50.8 million in
North America, well above its estimated $9 million budget.
The film was well-received critically. It currently has a rating of 100% on
Rotten Tomatoes (100% for their "Cream of the Crop" designation).
Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 73 out of 100, based on 16 reviews. In
David Ansen’s review for
Newsweek magazine, he wrote that the film “works equally as a love story, a baseball fable and a comedy, while ignoring the clichés of each genre.”
Roger Ebert praised Susan Sarandon's performance in his review for the
Chicago Sun-Times: "I don't know who else they could have hired to play Annie Savoy, the Sarandon character who pledges her heart and her body to one player a season, but I doubt if the character would have worked without Sarandon's wonderful performance." In his review for
Sports Illustrated, Steve Wulf wrote, "It's a good movie and a damn good baseball movie".
Legacy
Bull Durham became a minor hit when released, and is now considered one of the best sports movies. It became a major career moment for the lead cast members. Costner especially would later play baseball players and fans in other movies, including
Field of Dreams and
For Love of the Game.
Most of all, it revived interest in minor league baseball, which had been stagnating in small-town areas for decades, to where minor league teams achieve decent attendance and are even subject to relocation/bidding wars between communities. The Durham Bulls team itself in real-life has become one of the most famous minor-league teams in the United States (topped only by the
Birmingham Barons during the year
Michael Jordan tried baseball). A new Durham Bulls franchise plays at the Triple-A level (players who are one call away from "The Show") status, complete with a larger
stadium built in the 1990s to accommodate the growing crowds and the shift to AAA as a minor league affiliate to the
Tampa Bay Rays (during the film's time period, the Bulls were with the
Atlanta Braves). The former Bulls franchise featured in the movie is now the
Myrtle Beach Pelicans.
In 2003,
Sports Illustrated ranked
Bull Durham as the "Greatest Sports Movie". In addition, the film is ranked number 55 on
Bravo's "100 Funniest Movies." It is also ranked #97 on the
American Film Institute's "
100 Years...100 Laughs" list, and #1 on
Rotten Tomatoes' Top Sports Movies. list of the 53 best reviewed sports movies of all time.
Entertainment Weekly ranked
Bull Durham as the fifth best DVD of their Top 30 Sports Movies on DVD.
For years, Ron Shelton has contemplated making a sequel and remarked, "I couldn't figure out in the few years right after it came out, what do you do? Nuke's in the big leagues, Crash is managing in Visalia. Is Annie going to go to Visalia? I've been to Visalia. That will test a relationship . . . It wasn't a simple fable to continue with - not that we don't talk about continuing it, now that everyone's in their 60s". A Special Edition DVD was released on
April 2,
2002 and included the Shelton commentary track from the previous edition, a new commentary by Kevin Costner and Tim Robbins, a
Between The Lines: The Making Of Bull Durham featurette, a
Sports Wrap featurette, and a Costner profile. A "Collector's Edition" DVD celebrating the film's 20th anniversary was released on
March 18,
2008 and features the two commentaries from the previous edition, a
Greatest Show On Dirt featurette, a
Diamonds In The Rough featurette that explores minor league baseball,
The Making Of Bull Durham featurette, and Costner profile from the previous edition.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Bull Durham'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://bull_durham.totallyexplained.com">Bull Durham Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
