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The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit
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Published:
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2022
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Description
LA TIMES BESTSELLER From the award-winning screenwriter and director of cult classic Bull Durham, the extremely entertaining behind-the-scenes story of the making of the film, and an insightful primer on the art and business of moviemaking.
"This book tells you how to make a movie—the whole nine innings of it—out of nothing but sheer will.” —Tony Gilroy, writer/director of Michael Clayton and The Bourne Legacy
"The only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the church of baseball."—Annie in Bull Durham
Bull Durham, the breakthrough 1988 film about a minor league baseball team, is widely revered as the best sports movie of all time. But back in 1987, Ron Shelton was a first-time director and no one was willing to finance a movie about baseball—especially a story set in the minors. The jury was still out on Kevin Costner’s leading-man potential, while Susan Sarandon was already a has-been. There were doubts. But something miraculous happened, and The Church of Baseball attempts to capture why.
From organizing a baseball camp for the actors and rewriting key scenes while on set, to dealing with a short production schedule and overcoming the challenge of filming the sport, Shelton brings to life the making of this beloved American movie. Shelton explains the rarely revealed ins and outs of moviemaking, from a film’s inception and financing, screenwriting, casting, the nuts and bolts of directing, the postproduction process, and even through its release. But this is also a book about baseball and its singular romance in the world of sports. Shelton spent six years in the minor leagues before making this film, and his experiences resonate throughout this book.
Full of wry humor and insight, The Church of Baseball tells the remarkable story behind an iconic film.
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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
07/05/2022
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780593319789
ASIN:
B09HTFQFJP
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Ron Shelton. (2022). The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Ron Shelton. 2022. The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Ron Shelton, The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2022.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Ron Shelton. The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2022.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Date Updated:
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      • bioText: RON SHELTON's Bull Durham launched a writing-directing career that includes White Men Can't Jump, Blaze (1989), Cobb, and Tin Cup, among other films. He also directed Jordan Rides the Bus, a documentary about Michael Jordan's year in the minor leagues. A former professional baseball player, he holds degrees from Westmont College and the University of Arizona. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his family.
         
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fullDescription
LA TIMES BESTSELLER From the award-winning screenwriter and director of cult classic Bull Durham, the extremely entertaining behind-the-scenes story of the making of the film, and an insightful primer on the art and business of moviemaking.
"This book tells you how to make a movie—the whole nine innings of it—out of nothing but sheer will.” —Tony Gilroy, writer/director of Michael Clayton and The Bourne Legacy
"The only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the church of baseball."—Annie in Bull Durham
Bull Durham, the breakthrough 1988 film about a minor league baseball team, is widely revered as the best sports movie of all time. But back in 1987, Ron Shelton was a first-time director and no one was willing to finance a movie about baseball—especially a story set in the minors. The jury was still out on Kevin Costner’s leading-man potential, while Susan Sarandon was already a has-been. There were doubts. But something miraculous happened, and The Church of Baseball attempts to capture why.
From organizing a baseball camp for the actors and rewriting key scenes while on set, to dealing with a short production schedule and overcoming the challenge of filming the sport, Shelton brings to life the making of this beloved American movie. Shelton explains the rarely revealed ins and outs of moviemaking, from a film’s inception and financing, screenwriting, casting, the nuts and bolts of directing, the postproduction process, and even through its release. But this is also a book about baseball and its singular romance in the world of sports. Shelton spent six years in the minor leagues before making this film, and his experiences resonate throughout this book.
Full of wry humor and insight, The Church of Baseball tells the remarkable story behind an iconic film.
reviews
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        Starred review from March 21, 2022
        In this spectacular debut, screenwriter and director Shelton reflects on the deeply personal passion that brought his canonical sports film, 1988’s Bull Durham, to life. Rather than fall into the trappings of a tell-all about “lies, clashing egos, and bloodshed”—which he regards as routine in the making of any film—Shelton produces a work that’s humanizing and intimate. He chronicles the movie’s indelible impact: on the residents of Durham, N.C., who, even after 30 years, still credit the film for revitalizing the city; on its memorable cast—Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins—who were at that point three Hollywood newcomers Shelton tirelessly advocated for despite “deflating pushback” from Columbia Pictures; and, most of all, on his own career in filmmaking, which he recounts in vivid detail. In addition to his fascinating analyses of the script’s genesis—including play-by-plays of character development that went into every baseball sequence (“Nuke begins pitching better because he’s not thinking about pitching; he’s thinking about Annie”)—readers will revel in Shelton’s own accounts of playing baseball professionally in the minor leagues in the 1960s. As he writes, it was the “fragile and absurd... wondrous and thrilling” world he discovered there that ignited his dreams to write the film. The result is an immensely moving look into the mind behind the masterpiece.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        Starred review from July 2, 2022

        This book on the classic, irreverent 1988 baseball film Bull Durham reflects the perspective of one man: Shelton, the film's writer, director, and one-time minor-league infielder. It is a reflective, first-person account of how he conceived the characters and story and then managed to bring it to life as a first-time film director. Shelton takes readers through the writing of the script in detail, highlighting his aims in each scene. That's followed by his selling the script to a studio, with himself attached as a neophyte director, and then hiring a crew, casting and shooting the movie, and navigating the editing process. The entire tale is colored by his continual clashes with studio executives on the oddest things imaginable. Shelton survived the ordeal to go on to direct a number of successful movies, mostly about sports. Told purely from the creator's perspective, this book is a lively, witty master class in screenwriting and film direction, much in the cheeky spirit of Bull Durham. VERDICT Highly entertaining and informative look at a popular film classic, this book should find wide interest among film and sports buffs.--John Maxymuk

        Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        Starred review from May 1, 2022
        A filmmaker's memoir about the making of one of the best sports movies of all time. Shelton's book is not simply a jaunty recollection of his directing debut, with all its attendant breakthroughs and headaches. The author, who displays sheer, unadulterated love for his subject, also delivers a savvy, unusually informative tutorial on how to take a motion picture from the concept stage to script development, casting, production, and post-production. Shelton examines all of this in a charismatic style that decodes jargon and engages from first page to last. There's plenty of gossip (mostly generous), surprising insights, useful screenwriting strategies, and tips for would-be directors on how to combat studio meddling. Even certified film buffs who have read numerous how-to books by those in the industry will find the author's advice sound and clarity refreshing. "Making a good and successful movie is a minor miracle every time," he writes in the introduction. He goes on to prove his point several times over, chronicling a montage of maddening impediments, unexpected reversals, scheming, happy accidents, and the unpredictable alchemy that is screen chemistry. The son of a born storyteller and baseball fan, Shelton, who mined his own minor league career to create his signature film, never understood why the literary and sports worlds should be distinct. "Sports is both absurd and ordered, and full of unknown consequences," he writes. "A game means nothing and it means everything." Having seen many sports movies growing up, Shelton realized most of them got it wrong, being long on sentimentality and faux inspiration but woefully lacking in complexity. He set about demystifying a game that clings to its mysteries like pine tar to a bat only to rediscover that some of those mysteries are real--and poetic. Fans of the film will have new reasons to appreciate it--and the team that made it.

        COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        Starred review from June 1, 2022
        Shelton combines two biographies in this jaunty memoir, one detailing the making of the movie Bull Durham, which he wrote and directed, and the other tracking his own coming-of-age as a ballplayer and a filmmaker. His experiences in the minor leagues, mainly in Bluefield, West Virginia, became the meat of his Oscar-winning Bull Durham screenplay, which captured the unique, time-deferred ambience of the game, especially in the low minors ("fans, kids, cheap food, pretty girls, players who chatted with fans during the game, the leisurely pace of it all, accompanied by a tinny Hammond B-3 organ"), as well as its intrinsically verbal underpinnings ("a game built around conversation"). His reverence for the language of baseball fueled his script, reveling in the ribald expressions ("cock-high, half-assed cheese") that often achieve their own kind of earthy Joycean grandeur. And, yes, there's plenty of the inside-the-movie revelations that making-of fans crave, about the film's stars (Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins), about selling the screenplay (Shelton pitched it as "Lysistrata in the minor leagues"), and about the director's battles with the producers, who wanted to cut the now-classic "convention on the mound" scene, in which the entire infield ponders what to buy the shortstop's fianc�e for a wedding present. A marvelous book about a classic movie that is guaranteed to send fans back to the Church of Baseball to hear their favorite sermon one more time.

        COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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LA TIMES BESTSELLER From the award-winning screenwriter and director of cult classic Bull Durham, the extremely entertaining behind-the-scenes story of the making of the film, and an insightful primer on the art and business of moviemaking.
"This book tells you how to make a movie—the whole nine innings of it—out of nothing but sheer will.” —Tony Gilroy, writer/director of Michael Clayton and The Bourne Legacy
"The only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the church of baseball."—Annie in Bull Durham
Bull Durham, the breakthrough 1988 film about a minor league baseball team, is widely revered as the best sports movie of all time. But back in 1987, Ron Shelton was a first-time director and no one was willing to finance a movie about baseball—especially a story set in the minors. The jury was still out on Kevin Costner’s leading-man potential, while Susan...
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The Making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit
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