Jim Cryns is far from the only fan who holds Bull Durham as the best baseball movie ever made. With his book, The Church of Baseball, the Milwaukee writer explores the meaning and the making of the 1988 film that elevated Kevin Costner into Hollywood’s top ranks and incised an image of America’s pastime into the popular imagination.
Cryns gets behind the scenes and takes special interest in writer-director Ron Shelton, who had to please not only himself, his producer and Orion Pictures but the insurance company guaranteeing the money. There are some dishy pages. Shelton threatened to kill a co-producer who told Susan Sarandon that she looked terrible. Shelton never took a film or screenwriting class but educated himself at movie theaters about classic Hollywood and European art house. Cryns discerns a touch of Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy in Shelton’s work.
“Ron liked baseball because it was a great game, physical and profane and without a clock,” Cryns writes. The Church of Baseball is also an appreciation of the game itself, its slowness in the face of a world increasingly in a hurry, and especially the “romance and appeal” of the minor leagues. They are “like a big community picnic where a baseball game breaks out”—the for the fun of it counterpart to the majors. The Church of Baseball is a fun, well informed read for any fan of the game.
