‘Bull Durham’ turns 35: Revisiting the most famous mound visit in baseball movie history

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‘Bull Durham’ turns 35: Revisiting the most famous mound visit in baseball movie history

Daniel Brown
Jun 15, 2023
New York Times

The classic baseball movie “Bull Durham” celebrates its 35th anniversary on Thursday.

Can anyone think of a good gift?

“Ha! Problem solved for me. I have a closet full of candlesticks,’’ said Ron Shelton, who wrote and directed the movie that hit theaters on June 15, 1988. “Whenever somebody gets married, I don’t have to shop.”

It’s the present people have come to expect from someone behind one of the most famous scenes in sports movie history. Pitching coach Larry Hockett’s sage advice during a meeting on the mound — “candlesticks always make a nice gift” — remains one of the most-quoted lines from the cinematic love letter to the minor leagues.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_contin ... =emb_title

As it turns out, the ad-libbed line’s origin story began with a wretched audition.

Robert Wuhl, the stand-up comic and fledgling actor, walked into a Los Angeles studio office in 1987 jabbering so rabidly and unpredictably that Shelton was convinced Wuhl had taken a few greenies before the meeting.

Wuhl’s exact word torrent is lost to history, but Shelton vaguely remembers it including a whirlwind of baseball stats, how William Bendix as Babe Ruth was the worst baseball player ever on screen, and, for some reason, a deep concern over Tim McCarver’s broadcasting style. So many words. And not one line from the actual script.

“You couldn’t invent what he did in that lousy audition,” Shelton said. “It was sort of a work of art.”

Wuhl does not dispute his dubious place in casting history.

“So, yes, it was a horrible audition,” Wuhl, 71, said with a laugh during a recent phone interview with The Athletic. “Ron said, ‘That’s the worst audition I’ve ever seen.’ And the casting director supposedly apologized for bringing me in.”

Indeed, casting director Bonnie Timmerman was in the middle of her “I’m so sorry” speech when Shelton turned to her and said he wanted to hire Wuhl despite it all. There was something there.

“He knew baseball really well and Robert’s high energy is higher than anybody else,’’ Shelton recalled by phone. “Like he’s on speed — but he’s not. That’s just his normal state. And I thought, ‘Wow, there’s a huge personality here.’ … And I just felt that I could keep a lid on him a little bit and help shape it.”

As it turned out, Wuhl’s gift of gibberish paid off after 3 a.m. one night, when Crash Davis, Nuke LaLoosh and other Durham players convened on the mound in an air so cold that you can see Kevin Costner’s breath if you look hard enough.

In that scene, Wuhl’s character was the last to the mound, where Crash Davis summarized a situation that involved jammed eyelids, a cursed glove and the vexing question of a gift for the newly engaged Jimmy and Millie.

According to Page 95 of a script dated Sept. 14, 1987, this is what Hockett was supposed to say:

“Oh. I thought there was a problem.”

And that was it. The line marked the end of the scene.

But after they filmed a few takes with the lines as written, Shelton turned to Wuhl and gave him permission to play around a little. This proved wise. As it turned out, Wuhl and his wife had recently been wedding shopping.

In retrospect, it stands to reason that an improvised line from an actor who bombed his tryout is a phrase that became so memorable. Nothing else in the “Bull Durham” origin story withstands the bounds of logic, either.

For one thing, the script had racked up a stack of rejection slips as thick as the Baseball Encyclopedia. A few studios passed more than once. They did so even after Costner, who was already a rising star, agreed to play the grizzled and world-weary catcher who reluctantly mentors a bonus baby with “a million-dollar arm and a 5 cent head” (another line uttered by Wuhl).

The movie that regularly appears atop any Best Sports Movies of All-Time rankings was initially deemed unbankable. Studios had little interest in a baseball movie, especially not one from a first-time director, Shelton, whose two previous writing credits didn’t go anywhere.

Shelton’s failed pitches included a memorable meeting with Paramount Studios executive Ned Tanen, who scoffed at “Bull Durham” because he saw no profits in its future.

Shelton described the meeting in his remarkable 2022 book, “The Church of Baseball,’’ which recounts the making of the movie.

Tanen: It reminds me of a movie I once made called Slap Shot — which was directed by the hottest director in town, George Roy Hill, and starred the biggest name in the business, Paul Newman, and it did lousy business.

Shelton: Yeah, but it was a really good movie.

Tanen: Nobody gives a f—.

Even when Orion jumped aboard to get “Bull Durham” made, the road remained uphill. The fights over casting decisions proved agonizing.

“Yeah, I mean, it’s exhilarating that it all turned out the way it did,’’ Shelton said by phone. “And we know how it ends — it ends with a great movie. But it’s just shocking that anybody would say, ‘No, Tim Robbins isn’t right for that part. That’s not going to work.’”

It might be hard to fathom anyone besides Robbins as wild pitching prospect Nuke LaLoosh, but studio executives wanted Charlie Sheen or Anthony Michael Hall instead.

And though Susan Sarandon inhabits Annie Savoy, body and soul, the studio thought she was wrong for the part of the literary baseball groupie. As Shelton wrote in his book, Sarandon “announced she didn’t care what anyone thought and was flying herself (from Italy) to Los Angeles in two days and expected to be seen.”

That audition went a tad better than Wuhl’s. According to “The Church of Baseball,” Sarandon knew she was Savoy all along and arrived “looking brilliant, hardly like someone barely off a 10-hour flight. She wore a tube dress with four-inch red-and-white horizontal stripes that announced her presence with authority. Brassy funny, physical and off book.”

By the time she stepped out of the room, there was no discussion required. Shelton and Costner looked at each other and said, “That’s Annie.”

“She got to play a character who determined her own fate and choices in the sense that she didn’t apologize for her sexual behavior,’’ Shelton said by phone. “She had her own sort of moral code and lived by it and was true to it. And (Sarandon) said, ‘Too many times women characters in movies — if they’re eccentric or out there — the writer kind of has them apologize for the behavior at the end.’ She said she didn’t apologize for anything.”

But even as the movie emerged fully formed, it faced resistance from studio executives and from preview screenings where audience members would laugh throughout and then give the movie low scores anyway. At one of the final screenings, a theater near Stanford University in Palo Alto roared with delight while the lights were out. And when the lights flickered on, the aggregated audience scores gave the movie a C grade, with only 16 percent of the audience putting the movie in the excellent category.

“To this day I can’t understand it,’’ Shelton said.

Along the way, as Shelton struggled with what to leave on the cutting room floor, one of the endangered scenes included the conference on the mound. An Orion honcho — Shelton even now will identify him only as Unnamed Executive — told him the scene was unfunny and needed to be axed.

“The meeting on the mound,’’ Shelton finally told him, “is the whole reason I wrote the movie.”

There was a method to Wuhl’s audition madness. He was not, in fact, on greenies. He was hopped up on advice from his friend and acting guru, Bruno Kirby, the actor with whom he had just worked in “Good Morning, Vietnam.”

Wuhl called Kirby for advice on how to approach the Larry Hockett character.

“I asked him ‘What’s his intent here?’” Wuhl recalled over the phone. “And Bruno, said, ‘Well it seems to me that if the manager moves up in the organization, they generally take their pitching coach with them.’”

The light went on for Wuhl. He would play Hockett as a Yes Man. As for the bouncing off the walls during his audition, Wuhl had grown up absorbing the electric hand-smacking physicality of the diamond because his father had been an accomplished ballplayer.

“So I knew all the, you know, the ‘hummm-baby’ — the chatter, you know,’’ Wuhl said, his voice picking up steam over the phone line. “‘Come on, baby, no batter, no batter, you got it, you got it, let it go.’ You know, that kind of stuff.”

At least some of his extra energy on audition day can be attributed to a jam-packed waiting room where Wuhl was surrounded by other wanna-be Hocketts.

“I almost had my ego getting involved here because they kept us waiting two hours after our appointment times,” Wuhl said. “And I was kind of pissed off.”

Such well-directed angst proved perfect for the meeting on the mound scene. In writing the script, Shelton took inspiration from something he’d heard from Goose Gossage, the Hall of Fame reliever best known for his days with the New York Yankees. Gossage once told Shelton that catcher Thurman Munson would come to the mound and give the opposite of a pep talk.

“Thurman Munson would come out there and tell him he’s the worst pitcher he’d ever seen and start laughing at him,” Shelton said. “It would be so funny and irreverent that Goose would relax. And I wanted to show that part of the game, too. So the meeting at the mound was just my way of saying, ‘What you think is going on is not what’s going on.’”

Even so, it took Wuhl to ratchet things up a notch. The mound scene was almost doomed before it started. Because they were behind on production, producers suggested they cut the mound visit and not even film it. Shelton fought back, a pattern that would play out many times.

So they soldiered on with a few hundred extras in the stands. Shelton’s only direction to the actors was to play it real — don’t reach for laughs.

Once they shot the scripted version, the director turned to Wuhl and said, “OK, Robert, one for you.”

And this was the result:

[THE MOUND — Larry Joins the convention.]

LARRY

What the hell is going on out here?

CRASH

Nuke’s scared because his eyelids are jammed and his old man’s here, we need a live rooster to take the curse off José’s glove, and nobody knows what to get Jimmy and Millie for their wedding present — there’s a whole lot of excrement we’re trying to deal with.

LARRY

OK, well, uh … candlesticks always make a nice gift, and uh, maybe you could find out where she’s registered and maybe a place-setting or maybe a silverware pattern.

(Beat)

OK, let’s get two! Here we go!

It’s that last part — what screenwriters call the release line — that really sells it, Wuhl said. Still, the actor thought he was just riffing to get a laugh at the end of a long day.

“I never expected it to be in the movie ever,” he said. “Because I’ve worked with a lot of directors who have said, ‘Yeah, it’s funny. Yeah, it’s in character. It works. But you know, it’s not my vision. I didn’t write it.’ Ron is not that way. Thank God. Ron always said, ‘I’m very happy to take credit for your genius.’”

The back story is that just a few days before that shoot, a dear friend of Wuhl’s announced he was getting married. “And I asked my wife what to give her for a wedding present,’’ he said. “And she replied, ‘Candlesticks always make a nice gift or find out where she’s registered and maybe a silverware pattern.’”

(Hey, maybe he should take credit for her genius.)

Wuhl realized he might be on to something when the crew gathered to watch the dailies — the playback of whatever was filmed the previous night.

“We’d come back to the hotel and you’d have a beverage or whatever you were doing or smoking,” Wuhl said. “And you would go back and watch the dailies. Now, remember, (the mound visit) had been the last shot of the day, so most of the cast and crew hadn’t seen it.

“So when this came up as the last shot — and we did one take — what makes it work is how Costner and the others are so into this thing, that they don’t even see the cue, you know? And so it exploded in the room, I mean, exploded among all the people watching dailies.”

Thirty-five years later, the line is still getting laughs. It’s an enduring moment from a movie that was in danger of never being made and uttered by an actor who no one in their right mind should have hired.

“The casting director thought I was nuts,’’ Shelton said. “Then she saw the movie and she said ‘Boy, you were right about Robert. He was great.’”

OK, let’s get two!

[Ricordanza]

Shelton described the meeting in his remarkable 2022 book, “The Church of Baseball,’’ which recounts the making of the movie.

A timely post--I'm reading this book right now! A good book for baseball fans, movie fans, or anyone who likes a well-written (true) story.