Timothy Busfield, Phil Alden Robinson Reminisce – Variety



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Humphrey Bogart never said "Play again, Sam" in the classic film "Casablanca", awarded an Oscar in 1942. In fact, no one says it in the film.

And the mysterious voice of the fantastic 1989 film "Field of Dreams" does not tell Kevin Costner: "If you build it, they will come".

Released 30 years ago on April 21, 1989, "Field of Dreams" stars Kevin Costner and Amy Madigan as Ray and Annie Kinsella, a couple raising corn in a bucolic farm with a young girl, performed by Gaby Hoffman. star in "Transparent".

One evening at dusk, Ray hears a voice that says, "If you build it, it will come."

But according to the screenwriter / director of the film, Phil Alden Robinson, there is a whole group of people who insist that it's "they".

"This effect is called the Mandela effect – people who swear to have seen something that really has not happened," noted Robinson.

Or in this case, they heard something that was not said.

"There was a website dedicated to people saying," I know for sure that when the move came, he said, 'If you build it, they'll come' and Universal will change it. "

However, over the past three decades, Robinson and the studio have made fun of who said these lines in the film. "In the credits, it is written," Himself, "Robinson said," I thought it was a little funny.The person speaking was in agreement, so we decided to keep the secret. "

"He" is a baseball diamond. And finally, Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta), a member of the infamous 1919 Black Sox baseball team, goes to the cornfield with other team members and starts playing baseball. But the real reason for the baseball field is that Ray connects to the younger version of his late father John (Dwier Brown), who has also just left the field. The two parties catch up in the final, a moment tends to turn the hearts of men into adults in mush.

Based on W. Kinsella's book "Shoeless Joe", the film also stars Timothy Busfield as Annie's brother Mark, who does not see the players and asks them to sell the farm; James Earl Jones, as Terrence Mann, writer of J.R. Salinger-esque and Frank Whaley / Burt Lancaster as Moonlight Graham.

Named to three Oscars – best film, adapted scenario and for the partition of James Horner – "Field of Dreams" realized a gross global profit of 84 million dollars. The film makes Costner, who gives one of his strongest performances, an even bigger star – and he becomes an idiot.

But "Field of Dreams" is more than a baseball movie. They are fathers and sons; fathers and daughters. Love. Loss. And memories.

"For whatever reason, he got into the culture," said Robinson.

Several people involved in the film and his legacy recently spoke about the film three decades later.

Pilgrimages to Dyersville, Iowa

According to Ramon Weinberg, director of operations at Go the Distance Baseball, the company that brought the Lansing Farm where the film was shot in 2012, about 115,000 people visit the site each year.

"We have a good segment of those coming back," said Weinberg, who has seen the film at least 24 times. "But the majority are surprisingly newcomers and have been coming here for years. We have thousands of new faces. We have people from Australia, China and Japan. "

Although the main base of the film is baseball, he noted, "the moral of the story is to follow your dreams no matter what happens and to be able to repair a wrong. I can not tell you how many adult men I met cried while coming here and tell me that they cry every time they see the last scene of the movie. "

There are home visits 359 days a year and recently, fans can spend the night at home – that is, if you want to spend $ 900 for a weekend or $ 750 a week for the main season.

Weinberg said the fans started arriving at the farm a few weeks after it was released. And when people started coming to the farm, a group of local extras who appeared in the film – two of them even have talking parties – ordered 1919 Black Sox Jerseys, came out of the corn and started to interact with fans.

And Ghost Players always come out on Sunday and perform a 90-minute comedy routine from Harlem Globetrotters that involves the audience. "We usually have between 500 and 700 people every Sunday," Weinberg said.

The farm expects at least 3,000 spectators to attend the film's 30th anniversary party on June 15th.

"We're going to show the movie and have a match under fire between the Ghost Players and what we call the Iowa Dream Team, made up of celebrities at the roots of Iowa. We are going to have Dwier Brown in the team. "

Casting Burt Lancaster

Robinson originally wanted James Stewart to play "Doc" Graham, aka "Moonlight" Graham, a professional baseball player who only appeared in one game for the New York Giants in 1905 and became more late doctor. Robinson was looking for a veteran star for the role of old Graham "because the real" Doc "Graham was the star of the city."

Stewart refused because his agent told Robinson that he did not want to play a deceased character. "I said," Oh, God, I wish I could talk to him because I told him he was not dying. Kind of. So my next choice was Burt because Burt was a huge movie star and had also been an athlete in his youth. I thought it was important to believe that this guy could have tried his luck in the big leagues. "

The award-winning actor at the Oscars had a reputation for being difficult. And Robinson acknowledged, "He was a tough guy. He comes from another school of gestures. He always wanted to stop and come back to the camera. He had his old ones … I do not mean laps, but he had his old techniques that he would like to use. "

"Field of Dreams" ended up being Lancaster's latest film. Although barely 74 years old, "he was in poor health," Robinson said. "He was on a plateau full of young people who were in good health and who were shooting and running the baseballs." I think it really made him feel old and not the jock that he had once been. "

Nevertheless, Lancaster's performance is transcendent. And he has become friends with Busfield.

"Dude, did he?", Said Busfield about his performance, recalling his experience with the actor who died in 1994.

"Instead of staying in his caravan to phone," Busfield says, "he'll put on his 100-degree wool suit and sit on a chair on the set. I went to talk to him and he said, "I played the villain on" Vera Cruz ". I stole the photo. He told me stories. "

Lancaster, he added, "would tease. He was amusing. He was nice. These guys from the golden age – they show up, sit in the chair all day long. They do their job and they go home.

botch

Robinson has fond memories of Rod Dedeaux, USC baseball coach for 45 years, who propelled the cast with coach Don Buford in the history of baseball.

"I needed someone who could coach all of our baseball players because they looked like they could really play," Robinson said. "We organized a training camp here in Los Angeles for the actors who were chosen. And they were in Iowa to work with our players and extras. "

One day, Robinson asked Dedeaux, who has a USC baseball field named after him, why he was not playing in the major leagues.

"He became very quiet and said," Well, I did it. I played for the Brooklyn Dodgers. I was the starting referee and I played a match. I broke my back. I said, "My God, you are Moonlight Graham." And he just nodded. It's the only time I've seen it quiet all summer.

Drought fields

There was a massive drought in the summer of 1988 during production. "No one has had corn this summer," Robinson said. "The program was really built around where we thought the corn would be. Because we had a certain date to start and finish the shooting, we programmed it for the end. We shot all the scenes inside. "

And there was still no rain.

Fortunately, Lansing's farm had a small stream. "We damned the creek and we embarked in the water. We just irrigate the fields like a madman

It was maybe a little too crazy.

"The growth was so fast that in the second scene, when Kevin walks in the corn and that he hears the voice, we had to build it on apple bins," recalls Robinson.

Horner hits the good grades

It's no secret that James Horner's mesmerizing score – especially in the last five minutes of "Field of Dreams" – is one of the reasons the film is such a moving experience that seems particularly men.

"Horner's score contributes enormously to the narrative (and that's why he is third on 10 Oscar nominations)," said a film music historian and Variety contributor Jon Burlingame. "The score is mainly based on a synthesizer, and Horner's delicate piano and electronic sounds of taste give an appropriate and effective" magical "impression to the mysterious partner of Kevin Costner's baseball field and the ghosts of the Black Sox scandal. 1919. But towards the end, Horner uses a complete orchestra to help realize the emotional potential of the film. "

Busfield described the score as a "musical scale" and a note that I swear to God is like a dog whistle for men's emotions. Just when [Ray] I think: "You want to have a catch?", The music crescendos and gives off a veil. Men are moved so that they are not normally displaced. I was absolutely moved by that.

Robinson originally wanted Leonard Bernstein, who had earned an Oscar nomination for his only film score for "On the Waterfront" in 1954, to compose music.

"In fact, we made an offer to Bernstein and his agent who were making fun of us and told us," Lenny is booked for the next five years. "So, I thought," Well, who d & # 39; other? "

He has always admired that Horner "has found interesting ways to convey feelings. When I showed it to James, he cried seeing the movie. It was the first time we showed the film to a person who was not part of it. "

The filmmaker found it exciting to work with the deceased composer. "I think the first three quarters of the film were written in the studio," Robinson said. "He called it painting where he had written themes, then went into a small studio with just a keyboard and some synthesizers, as well as two flutists and percussionists. He has just built it layer by layer in the studio. The end was a full orchestra session.

Actor turned author

Dwier Brown, who plays Ray Kinsella's late father, John, admitted that for 25 years, he was "embarrassed that people were making so much noise for me about" Field of Dreams "just because I had such a small role. "

He waited all this year for Costner or Jones to write a book about this experience. When that did not happen, Brown decided to get his hands on a pencil and wrote, "If you build it …", he travels the country to appear on various baseball fields.

"Like Ray Kinsella in the movie, I had a bit of a hard skin when I was a teenager with my dad," Brown said, adding that his own father had died just before starting the movie. "In a funny way, I consider this as my little penance. I would like to talk to other people about their father and talk to them about mine. It's a good way to keep my father's memory alive with me. I take the glove that he wore and that I wore when I was little. There is something very beautiful about it. It's just an actor and a stranger talking, but it's really amazing to see how much you can connect, because those memories are much longer. "

Magic time

This last scene between Costner and Brown was filmed several days at dusk – the magic time in the film industry – because cinematographers John Lindley and Robinson noticed how amazing light was at that time in the film industry. Iowa campaign.

"At the end of the day, we would delete a configuration or two of a scene at dusk," said Lindley. "Phil turned a lot of things around at dusk. I think that has had a great effect. "

And there were no special effects in the film. "Phil and I had met visual effects companies – very upscale companies with very accomplished people who presented their ideas on how the players would be represented – there might be a flash or they could be brilliant . Phil was the one who said over and over again, "No, I do not want anything of that." In the end, they simply dissolved on the ground. It could not be simpler than that.

Center champion shaved up close

Writer Jeff Silverman was editor-in-chief for entertainment at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner when his good friend Robinson asked him to be part of the ghost players of "Field of Dreams".

Both were friends and Silverman had read the script while Robinson was writing. "The script was fabulous."

Silverman had to cut his hair and the long beard of his shoulder for his role as a ghost player who catches the ball of the young Moonlight Graham.

Getting the ball was difficult, especially because they wanted him to stay focused. Finally, they pulled out a machine that would spit bullets. However, the bullets initially entered the field and on his hands, so they lowered the machine.

"It put me in the line of sight of [machine], "he noted." I'm wearing that old uniform that had been used in "Eight Men Out" and the shoes that Rob Lowe had worn in a movie about football, which were about four sizes too big for me. The glove is a former glove. There is no padding. There is no strap.

Silverman realized that the balloon was screaming at him. So, he had to make a quick decision – does he stoop or raise his hand to catch the ball and eventually break it?

He broke his hand. To make things even more painful, "they had to keep turning again and again, in other ways and from different angles. My hand underneath has become more and more red and more and more black. I had to go to the doctor. "

Silverman spent a great week playing baseball, having dinner with James Earl Jones several times and spending time with the rest of the cast. And he always sees the film about six or seven times a year because he knows that it will help him deal with his residual check. "I made a small fortune from this movie," said Silverman laughing.

What's in a name?

The original name of "Field of Dreams" was actually "Shoeless Joe", the name of the book on which it was based. That is until Universal Chef Tom Pollock reminds Robinson that the title was not well tested. "Potential viewers thought the movie was talking about a homeless person or thought Kevin was a homeless person," Robinson noted.

Universal has tested other titles and opted for "Field of Dreams".

"I said, oh my god, it sounds like a deodorant," he remembered. "I hated the title."

He begged Pollock to test it once more as a "Field of Dreams" hoping the scores would go down. But in fact, they went up. He had to inform Kinsella of the name change.

Ironically, losing "Shoeless Joe" did not displease Kinsella. "It was not even my title," Kinsella told Robinson. "It was the title of the publisher." "What was your title?" Robinson asked. He said, "Dream Field!"

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