Durham to Pynchon to Sontag

[Darah Kehnemuyi]

 Thanks Erik.   Pynchon passed over for Sontag ?              D.
    On Thursday, July 7, 2022 at 06:22:36 PM EDT, Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 from LitHub: Ron Shelton on Making Bull Durham, Getting Sued by Thomas
Pynchon, and Why Baseball is the Most Literary Sport ‹ Literary Hub
(lithub.com)
<https://lithub.com/ron-shelton-on-making-bull-durham-getting-sued-by-thomas-pynchon-and-why-baseball-is-the-most-literary-sport/>

DM: So that’s your follow-up book. The Church of Basketball: I Have No Idea
What the Fuck I’m Doing. This is for a literary magazine, so I want to ask
about Crash Davis’ big monologue. His famous “I believe” speech. Am I
understanding right that you wrote that in one go, and nothing changed
except you switched the reference (the writer whose work Crash thinks is
overrated) from Thomas Pynchon to Susan Sontag? Can that be right?

RS: I typed that speech as fast as I could type. I thought it was bullshit,
but it would get people’s attention. I honestly didn’t even think it would
survive the editing. Kevin said it in one take. He wanted another and I
said “nope, we’re moving on.” It stayed in the movie and it turned out to
be the thing everyone talked about. But we can get into the change from
Pynchon to Sontag, if you really want to hear about it.

DM: I absolutely do.

Shelton: Well, my friends and I used to like to argue about Thomas Pynchon.
Some loved him, some hated him. Literary discussions over coffee or drinks
late at night. I thought, what if Annie Savoy loves Pynchon and Crash Davis
hates Pynchon, and they get into arguments about him? Then we see them each
re-reading Pynchon, and by the end we see them switch views on his work,
because they’re falling in love. I cut that out of the script. It was too
much, we didn’t need it. But the Pynchon reference was in the speech until
the day we were shooting it.

Then, we got a notification from a lawyer representing Pynchon threatening
us, saying we were defaming him. I was shocked, because (a) how did the
lawyer find the script? (b) we weren’t defaming him, it was going to turn
into an argument with the characters switching sides; and (c) I thought
Pynchon had a sense of humor, because he always had Professor Irwin Corey
accept his awards, which I felt was really cool.

But, rather than deal with lawyers, we started figuring out who we could
plug in there. Sontag had just written a not very good novel that I had
read. Somehow or another, she got put in there. And she wasn’t the right
person. She was primarily an essayist, so it came off as a cheap shot
against Sontag. It wasn’t intended to be. I always felt bad about that.
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