James Earl Jones’ character of Terrence Mann in the film Field of Dreams was, in W.P. Kinsella’s original 1982 novel Shoeless Joe, actually J.D. Salinger.
So.
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Holy crap, I knew some literary trivia that you didn’t!
One of the few cases where I prefer the movie (hippie annoying wife and straw christians and all) to the book. Weirdly The Natural is another. Must be something about baseball.
My college roommate read Shoeless Joe for some class and some college idiots almost ruined the movie for me by bitching that Terrence Mann shouldn’t have been nostalgic for his childhood in his crowning speech of awesome because baseball didn’t allow black people to play at the time. Even though Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers were prominently mentioned as major baseball influences inn him earlier in the movie. For years all I could do was think of that when I watched the movie and it would just piss me off.
Then I found out that Ray Liotta knew that Joe Jackson was left handed and it wasn’t Ray’s idea to bat righty in the movie. That helped.
Catcher…in…the…Rye. Oh! it all makes perfect sense now.
The left-fielder in the corn.
Apparently your classmate didn’t grasp the distinction between “baseball not allowing” vs. “major league baseball team owners not signing.”
I’ll bet he honestly believed it was against the law for black people to play baseball back then. The Negro Leagues? They had to play in hiding lest the FBI swoop in and arrest everybody.
Silly me. I thought that Kinsella’s dad coming out of the corn to have a catch with his son was just subtle as all get-out.
And of course it made me think of Bernard Malamud in a way that A League of Their Own didn’t.
Sorry if my story about the overeducated idiot ruins Field of Dreams for anyone else. I didn’t really think it through before passing it along.
Yeah but Salinger did not approve. Not that it was a terrible movie (the part about the players and the father and son reconciliation), but that whole book burning/sixties thing subplot was stupid.
Not to worry, BN. I had already skimmed the Wikipedia articles for both the book and the movie, and there was already scant chance I would put the movie in my Netflix queue before I saw your post.
For that matter, I’d had several years to see it and never gone to the trouble, so it’s not even as if the Wiki-pods bear much blame.
I knew this, and my favorite part of the movie is when Terrence goes ballistic on the hippy.
If I ever write a character based on Salinger I think I’ll name him… Bill or Tom, anything but Terrence!
Hell, I didn’t even name any of my kids that.
And Darth Vader also played a baseball player in the much better baseball movie, “The Sandlot”. (one of my favorite movies of all time) Somehow that baseball player managed to beat Jackie Robinson to the punch by about 30 years…
The Ketchikan, Alaska, then.
Corn is not rye. And sour mash is not rye whisky.
And I can figure out why Ed Harris is a poltical mess, his crazy wife screwed him up.
Here’s the thing: even with the annoying hippies and bs college idiot thing, I fkking LOVE the movie. I think it’s mainly for the baseball speech Vader gives at the end, but also… I don’t know. A lot of times in movies, especially sports movies, especially especially baseball movies, the whole father-son thing comes off contrived. This one pulls it off in my opinion, and I’ve found – interestingly enough to me anyway – that when I watched the movie as a kid, I thought of things through Costner’s POV, but now that I’m older and have a son of my own I increasingly see it through his dad’s…and it kinda freaks me out.
Very well, The Can O Corn dot net.
Now I’m going to have to find something else that Jeff doesn’t already know. Damn.
Bacon Ninja, I get choked up when he has a catch with his dad.
BN,
Normally, if I really like a movie, I’ll make a point to go read the book. In most cases the book is better, but I can see why things were changed to make it more “cinematic” (which is why I advised friends to NOT read LOTR before they watched the movies). In both your cases, I never had much interest in reading the book. Maybe I thought it would spoil the fun. Perhaps you’re right, it must be something about baseball.
It gets very dusty in my house at the end of that movie, for sure.
I’m melting !
I’m melting !!
Back in the day, the Land O’ Corn (IC), made a regularly scheduled, full station stop at Dyersville, Iowa, as opposed to a short one.
Illinois Central #’s 13 & 14, for those of you keeping score at home.
James Earl Jones probably had a better voice than Salinger. But, you know, Costner, PC and all kind of called for his unique flavor of absolute moral authority.
“Illinois Central #’s 13 & 14”
boomer country
Yeah, I cannot make it through Field of Dreams. My dad died suddenly when I was 19 and we had gone through several rounds of headbutting about typical teenage stupid crap.
I’m now older than he was when he died, and there’s not a day goes by when I would give 10 years to have one day of him back, just to tell him how much I get what he was trying to tell me. And to have a catch.
Damn. Crying now.
A movie about a father wanting to play baseball with his son would go over great with my older brother. My dad just didn’t know what to do with a bookworm like me.
My dad just didn’t know what to do with a bookworm like me.
Your Dad never threw the book at you?
He was afraid I’d catch it and throw it back.