Patricia Layman Bazelon was, arguably, the finest-ever photographer of Buffalo's industrial landscape before her death, at 61, in 1995. She could make an abandoned oxygen furnace at Bethlehem Steel look like a post-apocalyptic sculpture by Henry Moore.
She was also one of my dearest friends. That's why I took her to see "Bull Durham," which I had just reviewed in 1988 and joyfully called "the Great American Baseball Movie."
I meant every celebratory word of it, too, despite "Pride of the Yankees," "The Natural" and "Bang the Drum Slowly." "Bull Durham" is a sexy, funny, offhandedly literate delight in every way. It always entertains; it never really panders.
And I knew at the time that it was the last movie my friend Pat would ever see by herself or with her other friends.
Pat was English and still sounded it. She still had her completely unaffected, early life accent – which all her friends loved – despite a few successful decades spent on this side of the pond.
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She had spent many years in New York's advertising world. And I knew that a woman who had won a Clio for a commercial featuring Louise Lasser and who hired once-struggling comic Dick Cavett to impart Nebraska-cum-Yale drolleries in radio commercials could love all manner of tropes and flourishes in the sneakily literate "Bull Durham."
The famous one, for instance, where a sudden convention of baseball players descends on the pitcher's mound to discuss what's on their minds. Catcher Crash Davis sums it up thusly: "(Pitcher) Nuke's scared because his eyelids are jammed and his old man's here. ... We need a live rooster to take the curse off Jose's glove and nobody seems to know what to get Millie and Jimmy for their wedding present."
Whereupon, manic comic actor Robert Wuhl, playing coach Larry, shows up at the mound conference to say, "Candlesticks always make a nice gift or you can find out where she's registered or a place setting or a silverware pattern might be nice. (Beat). OK, let's get two."
When the movie was over, Pat – who was, most assuredly, no baseball fan – was beaming. "It's so American!" was her verdict. That was the key, you see. You really had to know her to know that she had an elegant and very sophisticated taste for American incongruity and even, on occasion, the more evolved forms of American raunch.
That's the thing about "Bull Durham." From the first moment I saw it, I felt that you could stack it up against the frosty resistance of any moviegoer and watch it win them over. It was, I felt from day one, an irresistible movie.
And, at long last, it has now 34 years later turned into a completely irresistible book by its writer/director Ron Shelton: "The Church of Baseball: The Making of 'Bull Durham': Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings and a Hit" (Knopf, 241 pages, $30). This, in its winningly casual way, is one of the great books about moviemaking. In fact, if Sidney Lumet's "Making Movies" is the definitive look at making late-20th century movies, "The Church of Baseball" is the most disarming book that I know of about writing a movie script.
Those looking for a book about baseball won't be disappointed. But those looking for a classic text about moviemaking will be tickled pink.
This should surprise no one. Shelton isn't just a wildly talented fellow, he's an utterly singular one – a veteran of seven years in the Baltimore Orioles farm system with a couple of turns for the Rochester Red Wings in his baseball resume; a guy who can pitch Aristophanes' "Lysistrata" to a usually literate studio executive for a romantic comedy set in the world of baseball and, by now, a thoroughly creditable track record making some of the most winning sports movies America has ever seen.
That last is more than a little controversial. I am a long-term shameless Ron Shelton partisan and have been since I first laid eyes on "Bull Durham," a movie whose fan base is so wide that it's almost universal. (It resembles the non-comic "The Natural" in that way.)
That, however, is not necessarily true of Shelton's other big movies: "White Men Can't Jump," "Tin Cup" (along with "Blaze" and "Cobb" and "Hollywood Homicide").
I've interviewed Shelton a few times and I'm always sympathetic. What he tries to do is never easy. I have a thoroughly intractable nephew who will never forgive me for recommending that the world should see "Tin Cup," so I've always tried to mollify him by claiming to be bewitched by Rene Russo. That's partially true, I suppose, but "Tin Cup" is about a wonderfully subversive Sheltonian subject that is not only life in the minor leagues of sports but is, in fact, about the radical subject of those who lose because a self-destructive streak is the dominant strain in their lives.
That is the glory of Shelton's sports movies. They're not about winning and losing. Nor are they about living and dying. They're about the soulful drama of finding contentment in the minors.
The irony of Shelton's movies is that his tales of losers are irresistible winners. They're weirdly reassuring. They understand genus Americanus, the large mass of people whose mirror's-eye-view is of the middle but is nevertheless not mediocre.
It's as if "Fast Eddie" Felson of Robert Rossen's "The Hustler" never had his ultimate pool table triumph over Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason) and his spiritual triumph over Bert Gordon (George C. Scott), but at the crucial point in his tale, suddenly learned from his broken self-image that the world was irretrievably comic, not tragic.
And so here, finally, is Shelton's major literary debut, the irresistible "The Church of Baseball," a near blow-by-blow account of how a pivotal American movie got written and then made.
It is sneakily but shamelessly literate, and funny and jammed, stem to stern, with Shelton's insider expertise about baseball AND Hollywood, a delightful anecdotal combo if ever there was one.
In Shelton's world, the enlightened strivers keep hogging all the narrative forms when their real place is probably seen by the "winners" as out in the jury pool.
Shelton's other movies may not be unanimous favorites out there but, hallelujah, his best movie has sprouted a perfectly apt companion piece.
It's a book that can take the curse off Jose's glove, open Nuke's eyes and might even suffice as a perfect wedding gift for Jimmy and Millie.
It is, as my old friend Pat would say, very American.