| [BACK]
BULL DURHAM'S RON SHELTON PLAYS THE HOLLYWOOD GAME
By Tom McCurrie
Writer-Director (and former baseball player) Ron Shelton told it like it is at the latest edition of Writers on Writing, sponsored by the Writers Guild Foundation. Shelton threw no curveballs or sliders when rapping about his adventures in Hollywood; everything was straight down the middle: tough, unflinching and true.
Born in Whittier, California, Shelton grew up in a strict Baptist household. Shelton: "I wasn't allowed to go to movies as a kid. That's how Baptist [his family was]." Fun wasn't a priority here; the joke went around that Baptists didn't like making love standing up because people might think they were dancing. Still, when Shelton was fifteen he was suddenly allowed to go to the movies, getting his film education by seeing every flick possible, from "Dr. No" to the Norman Vincent Peale story. He didn't put any limitations on himself; he just saw all types of movies and "made [his] own discoveries."
Shelton's other interest at this time was baseball. He attended college on a sports scholarship and became a Triple A player after graduation. But even here, movies became his life. In the minors you spend eight months on the road, jumping from new town to new town, making going to the movies the only form of entertainment. And Shelton ate those movies up, catching everything from "The Wild Bunch" to "The Rules of the Game." Film soon got into his blood like a "virus" -- as Shelton says, "Somewhere along the way I just got hooked."
Of course, Shelton's move from baseball to filmmaking was helped along by one particularly career-ending pitch. Shelton: "I quit baseball because they kept throwing the low and away slider at me." Still, though he loves baseball, Shelton prefers the life of the writer-director: "The great thing about making movies and writing and directing and all facets of moviemaking is in sports you lose a step every year the older you get, and what we do you gain a step. You should get better and better at this craft [of moviemaking] where there's just no way at 40 you can run as fast as you could at 25."
After leaving the minors, Shelton came to L.A. -- during the day he painted houses "and at night [he] wrote scripts." He wrote one in the late 70s called "Dancing at a Thousand Palms," a love story about a real estate developer in the Antelope Valley. It was never made, but Shelton says "it got me an agent and it got me work." This led to his first feature credit, "Under Fire" (1983).
Shelton has achieved his greatest success making sports-themed movies: "Bull Durham" (1988), for which he won a Writers Guild Award and was nominated for an Oscar, "White Men Can't Jump" (1992) and "Tin Cup" (1996). But Shelton is partial to any material where he can "get inside the characters," especially if it contains strong "people and conflict." After all, in 2003 he directed two police-themed movies, "Dark Blue" and "Hollywood Homicide." It's just that with his real-life sports background, he naturally gravitates towards sports films. He also prefers to write and direct those movies, and not out of some "ego trip." Shelton: "I happen to love to write. I like the solitariness of it. I like the blank page. And then when you're done I like having 200 people around [the film crew] to yell at."
Unfortunately, the weak box-office performance of "Dark Blue" and "Hollywood Homicide" hasn't helped Shelton's career, at least when it comes to getting movies made. "I'm struggling in the studio system right now, frankly," Shelton admits. "The kind of movies they make, the kind of movies I want to make don't seem to be the same thing." Shelton prefers the offbeat, character-driven world of "Bull Durham" to the "programmatic," concept-driven world of most recent Hollywood releases. Character is key to Shelton: "I believe that every character in a movie, whether it's the guy who delivers the pizza and has two lines, should be distinctive enough that you could take that pizza delivery guy out of the movie and make a movie about him." This complexity shouldn't be limited to the good guys, either; Shelton believes that good scripts make "the villains as compelling as the heroes." That's because he doesn't like to spoon-feed moral choices to the audience. As Shelton explains, "I don't like movies that preach to the choir."
This obsession with complex characters and moral ambiguity makes for some fascinating movies, like 1994's "Cobb," about the extremely talented, and extremely odious, baseball giant. "Cobb" has a theme that is especially intriguing to Shelton: "Why, to this day, we make heroes out of people we otherwise despise." (Michael Jackson, anyone?) Unfortunately, complex characters and moral ambiguity are an increasingly harder sell in our formulaic age. Having made only a million dollars in the States, "Cobb" is Shelton's least successful film, but it's also the "one [he's] most proud of."
Shelton is philosophical about the current state of his career. As a writer, "you do what you have to do. A: you have to make a living and B: you have to live with yourself." The B is more important to him, because if you stay true to your vision, you will never become bitter, even if the financial rewards are slim. "I believe in every movie I've written and directed, some sailed, and some didn't. I believe in every one of them." Whether it's "Cobb" or "Bull Durham," "they are my children, except it takes a lot longer to make one."
Still, you can't ignore A, either, which is why Shelton doesn't hesitate to take rewrite jobs on less "personal" material (i.e., scripts he doesn't direct). He may prefer the offbeat, but he also likes to eat. He freely admits he co-wrote "Bad Boys 2" because he "needed the paycheck." (Such honesty in Hollywood deserves an Academy Award!) But even if he does something more formula for the money, he still gives the project his all. "If they hire me to fix something, I give it everything I can to fix it," whether it perfectly suits his personal vision or not.
Shelton is usually hired by the studios because he's "the guy to make the characters work. Bring in Shelton to do some character work here, we can't get an actor!" So how does he make his characters work? The trick is to get inside a character's head by using what you can from real life. "Most characters, as every writer will tell you, are compilations of a lot of people you know," Shelton says. If that doesn't work, using yourself for inspiration may help. Writing a script called "Tropicana" in the mid-80s, Shelton couldn't get a handle on a character until he gave him a bad back and asthma, maladies Shelton himself suffered at the time!
But how does Shelton deal with being rewritten? "If I'm a hired gun I expect to be rewritten. Bob Towne is rewritten. Everybody's rewritten. If they pay you to do a job they want you to do, that's part of the Hollywood system. That's why I write movies that I direct." Writers need to understand there are different kinds of jobs in Hollywood: "One is, this one's my view of the world or nothing. And this one is, how do you want me to save the patient? And if I can save this organ and another doctor can save another, fine." All Shelton wants to know is, "How much? When? What do you want? Do I have to go see it [when it's finished]? (Shelton still hasn't seen "Bad Boys 2.") There's still honor in that work, by the way."
Still, Shelton gets annoyed when it comes to reviews of scripts he wrote but didn't direct. "You read a bad review, a good review, scripts get honored, dishonored, and nobody's read [the script]!" All they see is the final result on screen, not what the script was like before the director got his hands on it. Of course, Shelton admits that "if I was writing five reviews a week I wouldn't be able to read [the scripts], either." But critics need to consider scripts "like a piece of music. Is the music being judged or the interpretation of the music being judged?" Is the script being judged or the way it was directed (or poorly directed) being judged? Shelton: "The terrible, wonderful thing about screenwriting is there's only one chance to hear the music," in the version a particular director commits to film at that time. "Great pieces of music have been poorly played twenty times before somebody figured out how to do it." Unfortunately, "in a movie, you get one shot at it." Shelton still asserts "The Great White Hype" (1996) "hasn't been directed, the movie I wrote, it's unrelated to what I wrote." That's why though writing for others is honorable, it's not as satisfying to Shelton as writing for movies he directs: "I work just as hard on each, [but] one of them has my heart and soul involved, the other one has my brain involved."
One thing especially close to Shelton's heart and soul is dialogue. "I love to hear people talk," and Shelton proved it in "White Men," which had 1300 lines of dialogue when an average movie at that time had 650 lines. How does Shelton come up with those memorable, pithy lines? Shelton: "I write structural ideas on cocktail napkins, but I don't write lines and dialogue [that way], they come in the writing. When you're really on a roll, and other writers have said this, it is as if [the characters] are talking to you. I wrote the first 37 pages of ?White Men Can't Jump' in the first day."
Shelton also thinks dialogue has gotten a bum rap from today's commercial/music video-trained directors. "There's been so much crap written about movies are all visual images," Shelton says, "but since when is talk dead? I think we can go back there [to the razor-sharp, dialogue-driven movies of Hawks and Wilder] with a vengeance, screenwriters, and audiences would eat it up." In the end, "I think we need to go back there. There's gotta be a day where nobody goes to a car crash movie." No matter how pretty the visuals, "we will keep returning to the human voice. Because theatre, plays, Shakespeare, Homer, the Bible, it's all about people talking. And the old canard that action defines character is only partly true. Hamlet wasn't doing a whole lot when he said ?To Be or Not To Be.' It was after that that he got active."
Shelton's favorite line of those he's written is from "Bull Durham," when Crash Davis says: "We play this game [baseball] out of fear and arrogance." That's because it reminds Shelton of the Hollywood Game. "You have to be arrogant enough to feel that your stories and movies matter to anybody. And you live in constant fear in this business, in this world. We all have deep insecurities and fears. What do you do about it?" Shelton believes he has the answer: "I think we have to embrace our own insecurities and fears as...artists do...and move forward with them" by writing that script, making that movie, and eventually turning those demons into art.
Responses, comments and general two-cents worth can be E-mailed to [email protected].
(Note: For all those who missed my past reviews, they're now archived on Hollywoodlitsales.com. Just click the link on the main page and it'll take you to the Inner Sanctum. Love them or Hate them at your leisure!)
A graduate of USC's School of Cinema-Television, Tom McCurrie has worked as a development executive and a story analyst. He is currently a screenwriter living in Los Angeles.
|
