Cecilia Hart spent a few hours reading a script while her husband was away, then stopped him as soon as he came back through the front door. You have to do this movie, she told James Earl Jones. You need to do it just for this speech alone.
Jones, too, recognized the power and the poetry of the soliloquy. And he just as quickly concluded that the lines stood no chance. “I know it’s not going to be in the film,” he told Cecilia. “They always cut this stuff out.”
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Of course, the words appealed directly to the actor. Phil Alden Robinson, who wrote the screenplay, could practically hear Jones’ voice even before the cameras rolled. 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. 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.
“I imagined he’d just let it rip and orate it,” Robinson said by phone last week. “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’d been waiting all summer for this. This was going to be like a reward. 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.”
Jones explained to Robinson, who also directed the film, that doing it “big” would run contrary to the Terence Mann character. Too egotistical, he told him. Too showy. 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.
“Phil, I think this has to be done really straight,” Jones told Robinson. “I like the words. Just let me read the words.”
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. The Terrance Mann speech is an ode to the enduring, unstoppable, mystical powers of baseball. It’s a testament, as Mann says, to a game that “reminds us of all that once was good, and could be again.”
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And now COVID-19 threatens to ruin that, too. The pandemic puts nearly every line of the speech in peril.
People will come, Ray.
Not this year, they won’t.
The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball.
It’s hanging by a thread here, Ray.
America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.
Baseball, Ray, may have finally met its match.
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, this year marked the first April without a major-league game in 137 years. 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. 11, 2001, that postponed games.
But 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 are doubleheaders with seven-inning abominations just to reach the critical mass of a season. 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.
That’s if they can keep this season going at all.
Among the recent wave of cancelations was the “Field of Dreams” game, scheduled to be played this week between the Chicago White Sox and St. Louis Cardinals, a showdown at the Dyersville, Iowa, stadium where baseball fantasy was filmed. 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.”
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The game was scrapped earlier this month, not long after MLB announced that a number of Cardinals players and staffers had tested positive for COVID-19.
As baseball tiptoes across these hot coals, it’s possible that one of the most famous speeches in baseball history will be cast in a whole new light. Maybe the game defies the odds and again proves its resolve with a World Series that allows fans, as Terence Mann says, to feel “as if they’d been dipped in magic waters.”
But maybe this time, the dream is too much to ask.
Maybe this is the time they lose the farm.
It’s why The Athletic reached out to Robinson, who wrote the lines, to ask if he’s thought about how the pandemic’s wrath might shape how we view those words Jones delivered, at a near whisper, more than 30 years ago.
“I think about it all the time,” Robinson replied.
“Field of Dreams” writer/director Phil Alden Robinson with actors Dwier Brown (John Kinsella) and Kevin Costner (Ray Kinsella). (Courtesy of Dwier Brown)
John Kinsella is on the line. There was no need to plow under a cornfield to summon him from the beyond, no ghostly plea from Shoeless Joe, no kidnapping of a civil rights icon. He has a website now.
Dwier Brown, who played the father who has a catch with Kevin Costner, was a struggling actor in 1986 who mostly specialized in getting killed in guest-star roles. In the “Thorn Birds,” for example, his character of Stewie met his demise when he was run over by a wild pig. (He jokes in his autobiography that he was “boared to death.”)
Desperate for something more lasting, he made a deal with God on Halloween night in 1986. Brown was headed to a costume party dressed as Jimmy Stewart and before he stepped out of the house he told God that if He would put him into one meaningful film, like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” he would use that opportunity to help people.
A few years later, he auditioned for a part with this description:
JOHN KINSELLA: (early-mid 20s): Serious, handsome, charismatic, magical young man with clear wisdom beyond his years. One look in his eyes and it’s clear that he is a very special, old soul.
He wound up in a movie very much in the Frank Capra mold, and it was almost a wonderful life, indeed. Jimmy Stewart was in line for the Moonlight Graham role before health problems prompted the studio to look elsewhere for a bygone embodiment of virtue. They landed on the wondrous Burt Lancaster.
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“I was just very excited to be involved at all, but to be honest I really did not think that movie was going to be very popular,” Brown said over the phone. “It has none of the things that make a movie exciting to watch. There are no car chases, there’s no cursing. There’s no big romantic love story, no sex and all that stuff.
“It’s funny. It wasn’t like I was turning down jobs but I was so just excited to do it but mainly because it was such a nice, sweet script.”
As for Brown’s part of the deal with God, that part about helping people — well, it proved inescapable. To this day, one look at his face is enough to make grown men weep. He’s been hugged by strangers in supermarkets and he’s consoled teary seatmates on plane flights. During countless promotional visits to minor-league ballparks, there’s always someone who approaches Brown to tell him how their dad never played catch with him — or how he played catch every night.
“It’s like I’m a traveling priest,” he said, “taking confessions wherever I go.”
Once, after a camping trip near tiny Bodfish, Ca., a man recognized Brown as John Kinsella in the grocery store and told him that when he saw “Field of Dreams,” he hadn’t spoken to his dad in 15 years. After he saw it, he drove to his father’s house, grabbed him by the arm and hauled him off to the movie theater. “And that was it,” the man told Brown. “We just stopped being mad at each other.”
As Brown wrote in his autobiography, he and the stranger did an awkward-cry bro hug right there, even as other fishermen squeezed past them shopping for bait.
Brown gets it.
“I mean, my dad died 30 days before we went to shoot the movie in Iowa,” he said over the phone. “My only regret from the whole film is that I never got to watch it with him. And I feel like my little encounters with people at minor-league fields or in airports or wherever they happen to recognize me is my way of keeping my dad’s memory alive for me. Hopefully, it helps them do some processing of their own father relationship. So it’s kind of a cool thing.
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“Those are the things that make it seem like it’s not just a five-minute part I had in a movie 30 years ago. It feels like something bigger.”
My dad’s old glove on the pitcher’s mound at the Field of Dreams.
I love you, Dad and I’ll miss you forever.
— Dwier Brown (@DwierBrown) September 8, 2019
Brown was supposed to capture some of these moments on film this summer while touring minor-league games as part of a “Field of Dreams”-theme documentary. The doc was supposed to culminate this week, with the major-league game on that farm in Dyersville, Iowa. Instead, like everyone else, Brown has been monitoring COVID-19 news.
Brown was there with Robinson, of course, on that day in 1988 when James Earl Jones delivered the speech about baseball being the one constant through all the years. And he was there the next day, too, when Jones gave Robinson the pumped-up version the director originally wanted.
The crew had returned for the reaction shots — close-ups of the actors as they soaked in Jones’ soliloquy. Jones had no reason to come to that part of the filming, but he showed up anyway because he figured his co-stars would benefit from hearing the words again. There was no whisper this time.
“So he ended up doing it for our own accord, not for the cameras but just for the sake of such beautiful words being distilled in such a magical place,” Brown said. “So Phil sort of had his dream come true, even if he had to settle for a more restrained version in the movie itself.”
Robinson said that Jones delivered his alternate version “off-mic,” but it might as well have been from a megaphone. That rip-roaring James Earl Jones voice hardly needed amplification. Robinson joked in a speech once that “from a hundred yards away, I saw Teamsters coming out of the trucks to watch. It was great. That voice just filled the Iowa sky.”
Alas, there’s no known outtake that survived. The only people who heard the “People will come” speech in its fire-and-brimstone version were the people who were in the cornfield that day.
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“It was a hell of a thing,” Robinson said. “But his way was the right way to do it, of course. The man is brilliant.”
Lindsay Doran, a friend of Robinson’s who was also a studio executive, gave him a copy of “Shoeless Joe,” the 1982 novel by W.P. Kinsella. When Robinson asked what the book was about, she told him it was about a farmer who hears a voice and then builds a baseball field and then has to kidnap J.D. Salinger.
“Stop, I’m not reading this stupid book,” he told Doran. “And the more she tried to describe it, the stupider it sounded.”
But he lived the cliché — he couldn’t put it down — and finished it in one night. And he saw no reason it couldn’t be a movie. It was inventive, full of surprises and visually imaginative. One of the only things missing was the Terence Mann character.
In the book, the reclusive author really is J.D. Salinger, who apparently was not amused. Salinger was not the type to hug strangers in grocery stores. As Robinson told it during an appearance in 2013, Salinger’s lawyers wrote to the book’s publishers that read: Our client, Jerome David Salinger, protests this fictitious and sentimental portrait of himself.
Robinson laughed when he told that story. “That’s great,” he said. “He’s pissed off that it was sentimental.”
But the movie’s writer/director was also a big Salinger fan and considered it reasonable to be asked to be left alone. So in an early draft, Robinson reinvented the author character as a thinly disguised imitation — G.R. Messenger, or some such — before totally creating a different persona entirely. He decided to replace Salinger with a civil-rights activist to give the movie with a bit of the ’60s counterculture ethos. He also wanted this film about the American experience to showcase a person of color, someone with significant gravitas. (Robinson, 70, grew up as a Brooklyn Dodgers fan and as a little kid went games at Ebbets Field, where Jackie Robinson used to play.)
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Robinson had already decided to make the Terence Mann character a civil rights icon, even before watching James Earl Jones in “Fences.” But seeing the play gave him other ideas. Robinson started thinking about the comic relief that would come when Costner (and his fake gun) tried to kidnap someone as imposing as Jones, a sturdy, 6-foot-2.
But even then, there was still one more puzzle piece to re-fit. After he got a message from The Athletic about how the pandemic might challenge the “test of time speech,” Robinson went back and looked at his early drafts. Doing so confirmed that he originally gave that climactic moment — the “People Will Come” speech — mostly to Ray Kinsella, with some of the players chiming in from behind him.
“It felt false to me,” he said. “So I gave it to Terence Mann. And that made all the difference.”
Jones is now 89. An email to his agent was returned in less than 60 seconds saying that Jones would pass on an interview. But in a previous conversation, with Canada-based “City Lights” in 1989, he talked about how the “Field of Dreams” pages won him over right from the start. “I opened it and I started crying,” he said in that interview. “That was OK. I kept reading and I kept crying. And I haven’t even gotten to my character yet. So by the time I got to my character, I was taken by the story.’
The meaning of his speech now hangs in the balance, even as the games roll on. Because this incarnation of a baseball season, with its experimental rule changes, has the man who wrote about baseball’s enduring purity squirming in his seat. Robinson thinks about that line — “test of time” — and cringes at the universal designated hitter, seven-inning doubleheaders and runners starting at second base in extra innings.
“But what I really detest are the stupid sound effects all over the park,” Robinson said. “Let us hear the sounds of the game. It’s a beautiful soundscape. The crack of the bat, the ball hitting the glove. Mic up the players, mic up the managers and umpires and let us hear the sound of the game. I want to hear what they’re saying. We can handle the language. We have cable TV.”
From the start, there were split reviews. Then, as now, there are those who embraced its nostalgic glow and those who rejected it as sentimental treacle. The old “Siskel & Ebert” review show kicked off the debate way back in 1989. Ebert called it “so fragile and so perfect, it’s like a miracle” and said the James Earl Jones speech made a tingle go up his spine. Siskel said: “It didn’t work on me. The fantasy fell apart.”
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Peter Travers of Rolling Stone didn’t buy it at all, and in his scathing review he took direct aim at Terence Mann for his “inexcusably sappy speech.” Richard Corliss of Time magazine called the movie a “male weepie at its wussiest.”
Others seem to like it just fine. “Field of Dreams” was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It was preserved in 2017 by the Library of Congress for “cultural, historic and aesthetic importance.”
For better or worse, though, that speech has endured. It even got the ultimate reimagining, this 2016 version from Vin Scully on behalf of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
People will come, Vin.
Vin Scully recites the most iconic speech from a baseball film ever. #HallofFameTour
— MLB (@MLB) May 26, 2016
But will those words still mean as much by the end of 2020?
“I think it will prove again that James Earl’s speech is accurate,” Dwier Brown said. “I think hardship, in whatever form it takes, often makes it better. And I know that’s always hard to see when you’re in the middle of it, but I think of all the things my parents’ generation went through — the Depression and World War II — made them pretty awesome people.
“And canceling baseball for a season isn’t like that, but I’m holding out hope that it will somehow make baseball better. In the least, it will make people appreciate it more.”
(Photo: Universal / Getty Images)
