![]() “Field of Dreams” writer/director Phil Alden Robinson with actors Dwier Brown (John Kinsella) and Kevin Costner (Ray Kinsella). There was an 8,000-seat stadium in the works adjacent to the diamond where the likes of Jackson and Mel Ott emerged from the cornfields to play beneath - as Moonlight Graham said - “a sky so blue it would hurt your eyes just to look at it.” Louis Cardinals, a showdown at the Dyersville, Iowa, stadium where baseball fantasy was filmed. That’s if they can keep this season going at all.Īmong the recent wave of cancelations was the “Field of Dreams” game, scheduled to be played this week between the Chicago White Sox and St. Even in the best-case scenario, this year will offer the fewest games played since the major leagues were born with the American League joining the National League in 1901, back when Shoeless Joe Jackson was a wee boy. There are doubleheaders with seven-inning abominations just to reach the critical mass of a season. 11, 2001, that postponed games.īut never has baseball been reduced to whatever this is, a scattered rubble of a summer in which the schedule is written daily in pencil. There have been other periodic interruptions, including notable strikes in 1972 and ’81, an earthquake in 1989 that wreaked havoc on the World Series, a lockout in 1994 that canceled the World Series and the terrorist attacks on Sept. But baseball has marked the time.īaseball, Ray, may have finally met its match.īecause of the coronavirus pandemic, this year marked the first April without a major-league game in 137 years. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball.Īmerica has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. The pandemic puts nearly every line of the speech in peril. It’s a testament, as Mann says, to a game that “reminds us of all that once was good, and could be again.”Īnd now COVID-19 threatens to ruin that, too. The Terrance Mann speech is an ode to the enduring, unstoppable, mystical powers of baseball. The ensuing performance resulted in a cinematic moment that echoes still, a mesmerizing 222-word solo that remains as “heartfelt” (like film critic Roger Ebert called it) or painfully cloying (like Gene Siskel suggested) as it did when the film hit theaters in May 1989. “Phil, I think this has to be done really straight,” Jones told Robinson. Jones reasoned that there was no way the world-wise but reclusive author would command the spotlight, especially with all those great ballplayers standing in the cornfield behind him. Jones explained to Robinson, who also directed the film, that doing it “big” would run contrary to the Terence Mann character. ![]() It had been a long, humid summer in Iowa and the treat at the end was going to be watching James Earl Jones open up and just belting out this speech.” “And then on the day of the filming, he came over and said, ‘I don’t want to preach this.’ And my heart just sank. “I imagined he’d just let it rip and orate it,” Robinson said by phone last week. And as they prepared to shoot the famous monologue for “Field of Dreams,” Robinson envisioned a soaring baseball sermon, a full-volume spectacle in which Jones would reach a crescendo loud enough to be heard in Nebraska. Robinson had seen Jones on Broadway, in “Fences,” with that stirring basso profundo voice, in one of the most remarkable performances he had ever seen. ![]() Phil Alden Robinson, who wrote the screenplay, could practically hear Jones’ voice even before the cameras rolled. Of course, the words appealed directly to the actor. ![]()
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