As I just mentioned below, Vin Scully, the longtime announcer of the Los Angeles Dodgers, announced yesterday that he would be coming back to broadcast next year. How long is "longtime"? It will be his 65th year. And how long is 65 years? When Scully began announcing, nobody in his neighborhood had a television! "The first time my mother and father ever saw me on television, they had to go to a restaurant," he said. Over on his website here, Mark Evanier posted a short video yesterday that a local L.A. station did of baseball announcer Vin Scully's five greatest calls. Mark makes the spot-on point that these aren't Scully's greatest calls. That when there's so much drama in the moment, it's not an announcer's greatest skill making that moment great. But rather, when a game was boring, Scully could make it majestic. He's quite right, those aren’t even close to Vin Scully’s “greatest calls.” What they are are most-likely the Greatest Moments he’s called. Two separate things. And like Mark, saying that what makes Vin Scully great is how well he calls a nothing game, I’ve similarly described what I consider a great writer: someone who is brilliant not just at his best, but also at his worst. That said, that video didn’t do Scully justice in another way, because I actually could consider the top two clips his greatest – but reversed, and for different reasons. The call of Kirk Gibson's game-winning home run in the 1988 World Series is, indeed, brilliant -- but not for the “She…is…gone!” (which is charming and wonderful). Rather, what is brilliant is what he says as Gibson rounds second base. “In a year of the improbable, the IMPOSSIBLE has happened.” Now, that is a great call, a remarkable line pulled from out of the blue. And what makes the call of Sandy Koufax's perfect game in 1965 (against, alas, the Chicago Cubs) so stunning -- and his greatest call, not second best, like the TV station had it -- is not the “Strike three! Koufax has a perfect game,” but what he says during the entire ninth inning. I’ve not only heard a tape of it, him setting up every single tense moment as if it was poetry, but I have a book of “Great Baseball Writing,” and amid all these truly great writings, there is one chapter that is nothing more than just a transcript of Vin Scully’s play-by-play of the ninth inning, without a word changed, and it reads like great literature. “There are 29,000 people in the ballpark, and a million butterflies.” Here’s the audio. THIS is why that – the whole thing, all 10 minutes, the minutiae, the details, the painting with audio for the mind’s eye, the bringing emotion through the radio into the listener -- is Scully’s greatest call. (I should note, for the historic record, that on that night, the opposing pitcher for the Chicago Cubs, Bob Hendley, only gave up ONE hit. And it didn't even factor in the sole run the Dodgers scored to win the game, 1-0. That unearned run came in another inning, thanks to a walk and unearned error. Hendley and Koufax pitched against each other five days later, and that game he won 2-1.) Keep listening afterwards when edited onto the tape is Vin Scully's explanation of why he keeps giving the time throughout the inning. The short answer is that it was simply for the pitcher himself, when he listened to it years later. Scully acknowledges that he had no idea that everyone who found that that was one of the very things that made it all so deeply dramatic. And so it is. Even half a century later, when you know exactly what happened. That's a great call.
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Well, in honor of the great Vin Scully announcing yesterday that he'll be returning to the broadcast booth for his 65th season calling Dodgers games, I thought that would be the proper time to have the Email Interview with writer-director Ron Shelton, given that he began he working career playing baseball, and moved from that to a highly-successful Hollywood career of numerous sports-themed movies, most notably baseball. As I always note as a reminder, these began life as a simple way to have fresh content on the then-new Writers Guild website. I sent a series of usually-the-same questions about writing to the writers, and they did the heavy lifting. EMAIL INTERVIEW WITH RON SHELTON Edited by Robert J. Elisberg Ron Shelton came to screenwriting from out of left field...almost literally. A minor league baseball player, he later used his experience as background for his screenplay, "Bull Durham," which he also directed. Shelton has also written and directed the films "White Men Can't Jump," "Blaze," "Cobb" and "Tin Cup." Among his other credits, he also wrote "The Best of Times" and "Under Fire." Though most of his films have centered around themes concerning sports, Shelton says that his next screenplay is not sports related at all. Though it does have a horse race in it. [Subsequent to this interview, originally done around 1998, Ron Shelton wrote and directed “Play it to the Bone” and what is probably the “non-sports” movie he was referring to, the comic detective film with Harrison Ford and Ashton Kutcher, “Hollywood Homicide.” He also wrote the comic action film, “Bad Boys II,” and wrote and directed the TV movie, “Hound Dogs.”] >>> Were there any movies, TV shows or books that first got you interested in writing?
RS: As a kid I read the Robt. Louis Stevenson novels over and over. I especially loved "Kidnapped". Also the Oz books, all of them. We didn't get a television until I was 12, and it was fairly closely monitored. But I remember liking "Have Gun, Will Travel" with Richard Boone, a lot, and I watched a lot of the old westerns on the afternoon movie. I loved words, and playing with words, and so in high school was into W.S. Gilbert and Lewis Carroll, mostly because their poems and songs were fun to memorize. In college I began reading Jonathan Swift, 18th century English writers, and 20th century American. Especially Fitzgerald. But the first movie that just nailed me, and stuck in my craw, was "The Wild Bunch" which I saw in Little Rock, Ark., while playing pro baseball in the Texas League. I've been going back to see that film ever since. So I'm not sure among all that what it was exactly that got me started writing, but I did come from a long-winded family with West Texas roots. My grandfather was an oilfields worker from outside Lubbock, and the whole lot of them could sit on the porch spinning yarns about almost anything, and often almost nothing. So there is a storytelling influence in my background, somehow reinforced through films and books. Also, as a rock-ribbed Baptist as a kid, we read the Old and New Testaments many times. >>> When you write, how do you generally work? (Is there a specific time you prefer to write?) RS: As a writer I'm rigorous in my discipline, working from 9 A.M. until about 2 everyday, then walking away from the script regardless of how I'm doing. Hemmingway said "always quit when you have an idea" and I believe he was right. I always come back fresh the next day. I want to get back to it. I think this is also an athletic approach--one doesn't work out until one drops, because then you can't work out for days. Because of this discipline, I tend to write very fast. "Bull Durham" took about 10 weeks (one draft is the shooting draft), "White Men Can't Jump" took less (one draft again), "Tin Cup" was even quicker. >>> Are you a good procrastinator? RS: I don't believe in procrastination or writers block. On tough days, you write anyway. On easy days, you do the same. Anybody can write when the muse descends--the trick is to write just as well when the muse says "fuck off". >>> Do you have any specific kind of music playing or prefer silence? RS: I always play music when I write, usually music that is part of the screenplay. I played Edith Piaf and Bob Wills during "Bull Durham," Randy Newman and Southern gospel music as well as Loretta Lynn and Les Paul and Mary Ford during "Blaze." "White Men Can't Jump" I played James Brown and George Clinton. "Cobb" I played Mahler and Louis Prima. On "Tin Cup" I played border music, Tejano stuff. On the current script I'm playing everything from Flaco Jimenez to Tom Jones to Mel Torme. Lots of ballads. >>> What sort of characters interest you? RS: I'm more interested in characters who are outsiders, fringe players because I identify with them. I don't feel part of Hollywood. I don't know who my colleagues are, except for the guys at the bar. >>> Most of your screenplays have been original stories. For your script of "Cobb," however, what were the special challenges not only starting from an already-existing book, but also writing something based on a real person? Cobb was not really an adaptation, though technically it was based on existent material. It was the story of the writer and his relationship to his subject, the immortal Ty Cobb. I believe that a storyteller has the right to invent material, even so-called historical material--and the hypocrisy comes when the storyteller says the narrative is "true", when in fact it is a dramatically realized point of view, inspired and informed by certain historical material. The movie "Cobb" was, in fact, my version of Al Stump's version of Ty Cobb's version of Ty Cobb. >>> How do you work through parts of a script where you hit a roadblock in the story? Do you have any specific tricks to help, or just tough it out? RS: As I've said many times, I don't believe in writer's block. You just keep writing. You never walk away. You may throw out material, but you never walk away from the typewriter. You write every day. Some days are easy and some days are torture, but you treat them all the same. In this regard, as I said before, writing is an athletic endeavor requiring great discipline. There are no excuses for not doing it, it you call yourself a writer. You may call it "toughing it out", but I just think that it's part of the normal process. >>> What is your best experience as a writer? RS: The most memorable experience I've had as a writer was probably the first 37 pages of "White Men Can't Jump" which were written in a few hours, without planning or outlining. They never changed and what you see in the final picture were written in one non-stop session. (That was a day I didn't walk away at 2 in the afternoon.) Other than that, writing is just plain work--but it's work that I love. >>> Was there any particular writer who acted as a sort of mentor to you? RS: I did not really have a mentor. I started late, sold my first script at the age of 35, directed at 42. I just examined and continue to re-examine the craft of screenwriting, the engineering of it, the structural demands, the freedom, the restrictions. It is quite a wonderful form of writing and it's too bad too many good scripts get butchered, but they do. >>> Why do you write? RS: I write because I like to tell stories. It's my way of trying to make sense out of mayhem. Under the Good Things to Know link at the top of this website, I note the Katz of the Day blog by my friend Mike Katz. He currently has a couple of whimsical pieces on his site that are near and dear to my heart -- about attending Northwestern University. Central to the first part, which you can find here, are his tales of going to the Wildcats' woeful football games. "Late in the game," he writes about a ballgame that, thanks to trickery, Northwestern lost -- not surprisingly -- though surprisingly to an underdog, (To be clear, it's not surprising that they lost to an underdog...but that there was a team that was an underdog to Northwestern. "Miami scored the winning touchdown on a lateral to a halfback who passed the ball back to their quarterback, unguarded in the end zone. It was the first that I can remember of a disturbing trend, our academically renowned boys falling for a sucker play." (I should mention, incidentally, the little-known fact that before the school was known as the Wildcats, their nickname was -- honest -- the Fighting Methodists. When I went there, a small group humorously suggested that the school returned to that name. It went nowhere, although a non-binding referendum to change the name to the Purple Haze was actually put to a vote. The football coach at the time publicly stated that he would never send his team out under that name. No doubt he breathed a sigh of relief when the vote didn't pass -- though it came close.) Part two of Mike Katz's saga deals a bit more about college life, most notably his foray into Fraternity World, something dying out in most colleges in the 1970s, but still popular at Northwestern, forced upon him because, as he notes, if your family lived within 40 miles of campus, you weren't eligible to live in a dorm. "About half the chapter was pretty much like me, guys who did not want to live in a dorm or at home, and were willing to put up with a little bit of “initiation” tomfoolery in return. The other half thought it was still 1957." Despite the benefits of offering a place to live, Katz was still reticent because of the infamous Rush Week and its annoying hijinks. However, he had an ace up his sleeve. "I was able to leverage my most valuable asset, an automobile, into a reduction in 'pledge' nonsense." Up until this moment, I think I've avoided mentioning to Mike that -- though we overlapped in our years at Northwestern, and come from the same town, Glencoe -- er, I was not only able to get accepted into a dorm room my freshman year, but lived on campus in dorms for all four years. And my last two years were even in a dorm made up all of single rooms, no roommates! I used a very sneaky method, you see -- I didn't take Northwestern's admonition at face value and, instead, applied. (That said, I think the housing office screwed up in my case, getting me into a dorm from the very first day, since a couple weeks before when I checked, they had told me I was something like #35 on the waiting list. But...I was on a waiting list, not told I was ineligible. I believe that sound of screaming you are now hearing is that of Mike Katz reading this...) Anyway, Mike has a part three upcoming, and if it has anything in common with NU football and his housing adventures, there will be other tales of woe. Some of which he, perhaps could have avoided if he'd just asked me first...
Here's the next "Piano Puzzler," a weekly segment from Fred Child's daily Performance Today classical music radio show on American Public Radio, with the wonderful talent of Bruce Adolphe.
Adolphe arranges some popular piece of music in the style of a classical composer, and a caller has to guess both, with the always cheerful assistance of Child. Usually the caller is some random lover of music who might still be involved in the fringes. Today though the is Alan Fletcher, a composer himself and the president and CEO of the Aspen Music Festival. I'm happy to say that this is one of the rare Puzzlers where I got both correct. So, that means you probably have a chance as you play along. The audio player below will show that this piece runs 13:06 -- ignore that. For some reason, when this podcast was downloaded, they ran the same episode back-to-back. It's only a little over six minutes. One of my favorite independent movies is a little, unknown gem, Belizaire the Cajun. It's not for everyone, so my recommendation of it always comes with a caveat. The movie is written and directed by Glen Pitre with great affection and authenticity, and it's that authenticity that probably makes the movie a challenge for a lot of people. It takes place in the back bayou country of 19th-century Louisiana and spoken with thick, heavy Cajun accents, no quarter given for making it easy on the audience. So, although the movie is all in English, you're going to miss a third of the dialogue. But as long as that concept doesn't bother you, know that you'll follow everything with ease. It's a joyful, dirt-under-the-fingernails, quirky, rambunctious, exuberant tale of a flamboyant flimflammer (in many ways, a Zorba the Greek-like character) living on the edge of society with his wits, conniving and charm (all of which are are in great supply), who's reluctantly become the bothersome spokesman of his fellow Cajuns that the rest of the good people in the area would like to drive away. The movie stars Armande Assante, and it's what made me a massive fan of his. He was at his peak as a romantic leading man when this film was made in 1986. Suave, always elegant, often tough, perhaps best known as the 'Dandy Don,' John Gotti in the HBO movie, and as Judy Benjamin's cheating French husband in Pvt. Benjamin, opposite Goldie Hawn. Assante is not only still making movies today, 40 years after he started his career, but this year alone he shot or had released an amazing NINE movies. That's not "still working," that's not pausing for a breath. That's trying t one-up Michael Caine. But in Belizaire the Cajun, Armande Assante shed his matinee-idol persona and showed that he was actually a very real actor (something that the subsequent years have well-proven). There isn't a hint of elegance or savoir-fair in his performance as 'Belizaire Breaux,' not a wink the his fans that "okay, you know it's really me...!", as he's as scruffy as you could happily want for the role, almost to the point of being unrecognizable. A full-flowing beard, long unkempt hair, scraggly clothes, down-and-dirty, rough hewn and earthy. In short, he doesn't play 'Armande Assante' as many other actors might, he's Belizaire. That he took such a mangy role -- and for such a tiny movie -- is part of why I was so impressed. (That he's so great in it, of course, is the main reason.) But I suspect that those are the very reasons he did take the role, to show producers what he could actually do. The movie likely got made because of the involvement of Robert Duvall, who has a small role in the film as a preacher and I believe serves as executive producer. (On the DVD, he's actually listed first -- boy, won't that be a shock to people who rent it to see him... -- though the cover does at least highlight Aramande Assante's name.) What probably helped get Duvall interested in the movie is that the female lead, Gail Youngs, was...well, married to him at the time. Thank heavens for nepotism, in this case.
Also jubilant in the film is the great Cajun score, written by the wonderful Michael Doucet and performed by him with his group Beausoleil. This song below isn't from the movie, but it's from Doucet with Beausoleil and in the very same spirit. "There's 3 million jobs every month in this country that go unfilled...And the trouble is, it's because they either can't find people to come to work sober, daily, drug-free and want to learn the necessary skills going forward to be able to do those jobs."
-- Rep. Dave Joyce (R-OH) The point that Representative Joyce was making here was that...well, hmm, okay, actually, I don't know the point he was making. It just seems like one of those gumfummery things that a lot of Republican officials like to make that sounds socially concerned, and outraged, but also sounds like they're criticizing the lower class, with a wink-wink about Black people, but offering utterly nothing substantive to support it. Actually, that's not fair. After all, when you think about it, Mr. Joyce sounded very Shakespearean. You know, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. To be honest, at first I thought when I read what Dave Joyce was saying about people unable to come to work sober, daily, or drug free, while lacking the necessary skills to do though jobs, I thought he was describing members of Congress. To defend himself, the Congressman pointed at the Cleveland Plain-Dealer as having substantiated his statement. The problem is that while the newspaper had confirmed his number of of unfilled jobs, they said that their reporting had absolutely nothing to do with the attribution Mr. Joyce made in explaining it. Mind you, there are reasons why so many jobs do go unfilled, though they have nothing to do with prospective employees being drunk or on drugs. Most notably, the biggest problem in the labor market "is not a skills shortage" at all, the New York Times editorial board wrote, but rather. "it is a persistently weak economy where businesses do not have sufficient demand to justify adding employees." Gee, go figure. The best part of all this, though, was when Mr. Joyce's staff was called to defend their boss and explain what he might have been trying to say. Something that Mr. Joyce himself was unable to do -- probably because he was unavailable, rather than not sober or on drugs, or ill-equipped. "Rep. Joyce came to Washington to be a fact-based problem solver and during this 20-second clip of a 15-minute speech," Christyn Keyes said, "he was simply sharing the concerns of small-business owners with other local business leaders." Ha! God love 'em. So, let's see if I have this straight. (And I do.) Dave Joyce "came to Washington to be a fact-based problem solver" -- and yet neither he nor his staff can provide any "facts" to support the charge that he made. Which brings us back to that whole Shakespearean thing. A tale told by an idiot. Full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing. |
AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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