'Field of Dreams': Fathers & sons, phantoms and phenoms

NEW YORK (AP) — Baseball and tears, the ones streaking down cheeks.

Tears, the kind leaving rifts between fathers and sons.

“Field of Dreams” is about phantoms and phenoms on an unlikely diamond in an Iowa cornfield.

Emotions gush like water across the grass, resonating three decades later because of the nerves the movie digs down to reach.

“I remember, I think it was the very first test screening we had, it was in the LA area and it was a recruited audience and they didn’t know anything about the movie,” director Phil Alden Robinson recalled this week. “And towards the end, I was sitting in the back, and I noticed a woman about two, maybe three rows in front of me on the aisle, just weeping.

“Her head was in her hands, she was sobbing heavily,” he went on. “I started to get out of my seat. I was going to go over to her and just put my arm on her shoulder and say, ‘It’s just a movie.’ And I got one or two steps towards her and I recognized her. She was somebody from the marketing department of the studio and she’d already seen the film. And I thought, oh my God, this is really something.”

Released in April 1989, two weeks after “Major League,” 10 months after “Bull Durham” and eight months after “Eight Men Out,” “Field of Dreams” was No. 6 in The Associated Press’ Top 25 favorite sports movies poll.

Robinson adapted W.P. Kinsella’s 1982 novel “Shoeless Joe” into a screenplay that trimmed and focused the story about a farmer who replaces corn with a ballfield as he seeks a reunion with and redemption from his long-dead father. Ray Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner, hears a mysterious, unidentified voice telling him: “If you build it, he will come,” “ease his pain” and “go the distance.” The movie...

source https://www.chron.com/sports/article/Field-of-Dreams-Fathers-sons-phantoms-and-15241152.php