Durham to Pynchon to Sontag

[David Morris]

One can only hope that Pynchon didn’t personally know what his lawyer was
doing, wasn’t knowingly such an asshole, because, as Shelton says,
*“I thought*
*Pynchon had a sense of humor.”*

This legal action represents the real defamation of Pynchon’s character,
defamation of the funny cool person we think we know from reading his
fiction.

On Thu, Jul 7, 2022 at 9:25 PM Darah Kehnemuyi via Pynchon-l <
pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:

>  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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>
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>