Can sports films work without the underdog aspect?
Oh yeah. I mean, it’s more about the price paid. In sports, there’s always a price. In Bull Durham, the season doesn’t end. In White Men Can’t Jump, it never really does either. Underdogs are that if they ultimately succeed. What if they just linger? But sports films really aren’t about sports. Sports is just the plate you serve the story on. Well, with sports, TV can do so many things that I can’t do. They can give you twenty angles on a play. High speed, slow speed, forever. You see it the way you never had. But I can take my camera twenty places they can’t go. You can say Bull Durham isn’t really a baseball movie, and you’re right, but it is one too. It starts and ends with the game. Would Bull Durham have a chance of getting made today? Well, not with a studio. It’d be independent, and even then it’d be difficult because the independent market is really based on foreign sales, and I’m not sure baseball in this form would travel. *CORRECTION: In the initial run of this article, Shel
