The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz - PTFO EXCLUSIVE — How Hollywood Forgot Mike Schur's "Field of Dreams" Reboot

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

Michael Schur is a legendary comedy writer who calls his TV reboot of the classic baseball film "the best thing I've ever written." (He's written for SNL, The Simpsons, The Office, Parks and Rec, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place...) So why didn't his version of "Field of Dreams" ever get made? Also: what happened to the actual baseball field that he built, out there in the cornfields of Iowa? Sports-movie nostalgia has never felt quite so painful. Or surreal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Pablo Tore finds out I am Pablo Tore and today we're going to find out what this sound is. If you build it, you'll get screwed. Right after this ad. You're listening to Giraffe King's Network. Today I wanted to do a story that does a number of things. It allows us to cover baseball. I made the baseball postseason. It's the ALCS and the NLCS both underway this week. But it's also a story about somebody that I consider, just a genuinely good friend,

that I am pretty sure you consider the opposite. Hollywood showrunner and comedy legend Mike sure. Oh, yeah, he's a legendary coward. He's on like my mountain rush more of coward. He might be number one for me personally. So for people who don't know this Cortez, the minister if you propaganda, parakeet Cortez, that is his legend. Mike sure is a levitar shows like resident red socks, baseball, Celtics Boston superfan,

which explains the antagonism. I heard he's been an actor, like he's done like a bit part with a beard or something that's like, his claim to fame or something. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Just on the most popular television show of all time, maybe the office. But Mike Sher is also somebody who co-wrote,

co-founded a baseball blog, Fire Joe Morgan. It was there to criticize the old school baseball broadcasters and journalists during the mid 2000s by using statistical insights, like money ball stuff, metrics, math. I remember the block as a kid, they did big important things like fighting Bill Plashky. He's very important.

So, Mike Scher went on to do, get more important things. I mentioned the office, he wrote for the office, he wrote for the Simpsons, he wrote for Saturday Night Live, he made Parks and Rec, Brooklyn 9.9, the good place. He's one of the most prolific accomplished writers in all of entertainment. I've literally never heard of any of those shows.

Okay. So the good news for you in all of your ignorance is that we're not here to talk about any of those shows in specific, despite their fame and success. Because what I wanna talk about is how in 2021, Mike sure got picked by NBC Universal to birth his passion project. He got hired to reboot field of dreams.

That old-ass movie, that's cool, that old-ass movie, which lots of people consider the greatest based on movie of all time. And he was hired to reboot it as a TV show, also called Field of Dreams, which is kind of like being asked to recast Kevin Costner and also become Kevin Costner's character at the same time.

If you build it, he will come. If you build it, he will come. Here's the nerdyest best part to me. Mike sure went out and built an actual baseball field out of actual cornfield in actual Iowa in real life. He built his own field of dreams in the Midwest to film the show as the movie literally tells Kevin Costner himself to do. So when is this show supposed to come out? And here is, here is the thing, because it's not. So God.

So they spent all this money production was about to begin and then Universal suddenly canceled Mike Sherr's field of dreams. This is despite the fact that they built this functioning baseball field in a f***ing corn field in Iowa. That still exists by the way right now. So the guy who started Fire Joe Morgan got fired.

You're enjoying this and weighed too much. But what I wanted to do on today's show, Cortez, is find out why. It's probably because he's a coward. He's always been a coward. He's always going to be a coward and he's still a coward. Let's start the show. Okay. Mike, before we get to the story of the field you built, I do need to disclose for everybody

who might be listening right now that I had never actually seen fields of dreams before diving into this story that we're here to do today. I had thought I could have sworn to you for a long time. I had seen it. I had not seen it until just like a day ago. And what's your review? Because it's a very, it's a very controversial movie among baseball fans, sports fans, some people love it, some people hate it. Right.

Well, I get all of that. I get why it's polarizing. I get why also I had thought I had seen it because I, I watching it, I realized, oh, this is like the prime example of that thing that is parodied so often. I feel like I should say that fields of dreams did get nominated for Best Picture, and Best Screenplay, and Best Original Score at the Oscars in 1990. What I had seen, though, instead was a movie called How High. How high? I'd also seen this bit from the subsets.

When I get this straight, you mow down all that corn to build a football field, hoping it would lure the ghost of former players down from football heaven. Uh-huh, and look! Hey, I don't recognize any of these guys! Where are there two 50-yard lines? Oh damn it! I built a Canadian field! Oh, sorry, Hozer. Hi, buddy! Hey, nice Roos there, Gordo.

And there was this scene from another cartoon. John Levitz is the critic. Wow, babe, Roos. Hey, where can a fella get a hooker around here? Ty Cobb. Where's a nearest clan meatin'? If you haven't seen the Godfather, you've still kind of seen the Godfather, right?

Because it's, you've heard the quotes and people have ripped it off so many times, yeah, exactly. And, and feel the dreams has a number of moments and a number of scenes in it that have so permeated the American cultural landscape that it's entirely possible that your brain tricked you into thinking you would see in the whole movie. So Mike, sure. The quick elevator pitch I am to be summary. The people who have not seen fields of dreams, the movie that you rebooted into a series that we're here to talk about. How do you describe it for those who are unfamiliar? A former hippie sort of child of the 60s, now married, living with his wife and daughter

in a cornfield in Iowa, is walking amongst the corn. Here's a voice, say, if you build it, he will come. If you build it, he will come. He sees a vision in his corn of a baseball stadium. He tells his wife what has happened to him. His wife kind of incredibly says, go nuts, man. My completely nuts.

That completely. It's a good baseball field, right? It's kind of pretty, isn't it? She's very enthusiastic about it. She's extremely, extremely forgiving and on his side in all matters. And so he builds a cornfield, a baseball field in his cornfield. And somehow intuitively he knew is Shulis Jo Jackson, his the famous member of the

1919 Chicago Blacksock scandal, say it ain't so Joe. Shulis Jo Jackson was Ray, Ray is the farmer, Ray's dad's favorite ball player. Yes. He builds the baseball field with his daughter, everybody in the town thinks he's nuts one night. Shulis Joe Jackson shows up Hi Break and sell Joe Jackson He plays baseball on the field. Some of his old Black Sox teammates show up all the eight who were kicked out of baseball. He hears the voice again. This time his wife is in the

middle of a battle with the school board over the banning of certain books and one of the books that's been banned is a book by a fictional author named Terence Mann, James Earl Jones' character. And somehow Rey knows that he now has to go find Terence Mann and bring him back to Iowa. He doesn't know why. He just does it. Coincidentally, his wife who maybe is starting to lose patience with him has had a dream that Ray and Terrence Man were at Fenway Park watching a Red Sucks game. So she's again super on board this very, very crazy plan. One might say conveniently on board. One might. So he does that. They have another vision. They hear the voice again, or actually they don't hear the voice this time. They just see on the

jumbo tron, Moonlight Graham, who was a ball player, who played in one inning, never got to hit. They go to Minnesota to find him. Moonlight Graham appears to them as an old man. To feel the tingling your arm as you connect with the ball, they run the bases, stretch your double into a triple and flop a face first into third. Wrap your arms around the back.

That's my wish we can sell them. That's my wish. And is there enough magic out there in the moonlight to make this dream come true? What would you say if I said yes? They've somehow transported back in time to the 70s because I was putting like cram as long dead. Yup.

You can ask about that. That is time travel. Yep. Okay. There's time travel in the film. That's right. He says come with me basically to Iowa. There's a place where dreams can come true. When like Graham turns them down, but then they're driving back and they meet a young man

who they give a lift to and the young man turns out to be a young moonlight Graham. They bring him back to the view. This is where it felt like tenet by the way. I was like, so what? Hold on. You're both you, but you're also in the same physical space, but the timelines are crossed. I got very confusing for me. Yeah. And by the way, let me just say right now, this is no longer an, quote, elevator pitch. And this is now I'm just giving you a lot of. Elevator is broken. Here's what happened, Pablo... the elevator broke and the fire

department said we need about three hours and i was like well as long as we're here let me tell you the story of the dreams so anyway um... moon night grand comes back they they play more baseball terrence man is there he can see all the goes some people can see the ghost some people can't can see the ghost some people can't. They'll find, have reserved seats somewhere along one of the facelies. But they're satin-y with children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game. It'll be as if they'd tipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick that the brush and the white interfaces.

A bunch of other stuff happens. The fire department just got here. We only have 30 seconds left. So the point is that at the end of the day, the he turns out not to have been true, let's Joe Jackson, but rather raise father. Ray had a tricky relationship with his father. Back when his father was alive, they said things to each other, they couldn't take back. His dad shows up as a young man at the very end of the film. They have a chat as he's about to leave.

Ray says, dad, the man turns around and he says, do you want to have a catch and the two of them end the movie by throwing the ball back and forth. Hey, dad. the movie by throwing the ball back and forth. Hey, Dad. You want to have a catch? I'd like that.

All right, so what's your review? So my review is that it got to me at the end. So I'll jump right to what I felt embarrassed about because there is a lot of schlock. There's a lot of just like heartfelt monologue that I cringed at as somebody who could hear the writers write. And I was like, oh, I hear the writing.

And I, that's just triggering for me as a person who is always just self-conscious about that. But the end, man, if I didn't feel some liquids cooling around my orbital boats. It's kind of a good litmus test for sociopathie because if you don't cry at that moment, I think regardless of how you feel

about the rest of the movie, I think you are a black-hearted, cold-hearted soul who has no human emotion. Like, it doesn't matter if you like baseball, if you don't care about baseball, if whatever your relationship is to your own parents, if when Kevin Costner says,

Dad, do you wanna have a catch? If you don't feel tears welling up in your eyes, there's something wrong with you. Because the truth is, I also want to have a catch with my dad. It's all I want. That's what I realized, like, f***. Yeah, well, the thing that I found as the essence of the movie is a question, and the the question is what would you do to get five more minutes with a person you loved? Like what are the lengths you would go to to get

five more minutes or a game of catch with someone you loved and the answer that the movie suggests is anything you would do anything and this is part of why I took on the project of adapting it. It is a movie that, especially when you listen to me explain the plot, it sounds bananas, right? It's like this movie, this story, has no business working as a narrative at all.

It has no business being anything that it should have been for Kevin Costner, what water world ended up being, right? Which is like a... One hundred, a hundred. A famous flop. And yet, to his credit, and to Phil Alden Robinson's credit, who made the movie,

and to everyone's credit, it was involved with it, for some goddamn reason, when the movie ends, you cry. And the whole thing, holistically, ends up feeling like you went on a sort of beautiful, magical journey. And there are, and listen, there are plenty of people who hate the movie or just think it's shlocky

and think it's no, no, no, that it's not a good baseball movie, it's not a good movie, period. I am not one of those people. I loved it when I first saw it. I still love it today. And that's why I decided to take on the project of trying to adapt it. Well, let's talk about everything that happened because you put work into this in a way that staggered me. Like, I'm not merely here to talk about field of dreams because it's a cultural artifact that actually is rich with symbolism that still resonates today.

I wanna do this story because you put yourself into the making of this in a way that feels not just unusual but kind of crazy. Like what explain, explain just the level of work that you put into this thing, which is now, we'll get to this too, now not a thing. I was finishing the show, the good place,

and I work for NBC Universal, and they came to me and they were starting this new streamer, Peacock, and the point of company like NBC Universal, having a streamer is that they take their IP, their library, they blow the dust off the cover and they breathe new life into it with with reboots or updated versions or sequels or what have you. And they asked me about feel the dreams because they knew I love baseball and I was extremely reticent, I would say at first. I never adapted anything that pre-existed before. I revered the movie and was scared of screwing it up. But eventually I thought, you know, I love baseball, I love that movie, I've never written about baseball.

It sounds really hard, sounds really difficult in that. Usually in my life has meant that it's worth doing. And that is ultimately the thing that maybe you want to do it. So I said yes, finish the good place, took about six months probably to just try to think of the approach vector. How to do this? How to satisfy the people who love the movie and win over the people who don't. That was the challenge. And so for the next man, I don't know, year, I would say,

it was probably 18 or 20 months from beginning to end. I broke out the story. It was gonna be seven hours long, it's sort of like mini series, limited series with the possibility of future versions, future seasons. Got a writing staff together. We wrote the seven scripts and we did a lot of casting. We had lined up to be in it. Well, Andre Brower was going to play James Earl Jones's role. Oh, that's good. Kristen Bell was going to be in it. Nick Offerman was going to be in it, and Nick Offerman was going to be in it, Will Harper, who played Cheety on the good place was going to be in it.

And we then began construction on a baseball field in a cornfield in Iowa. So Morgan Sackett, who is the longtime producer of most of the stuff I've ever done, is from Iowa. And so he had a lot of, knew a lot of folks there and we had a location manager. And what happens is you go to a site in Iowa and you drive through endless fields of corn and you come upon a beautiful picturesque white farmhouse. And you look around, you think like, yeah, this could work. Seems like the right kind of look here. And then you go, okay, let's go to the next one. And then you drive for 48 minutes through cornfields

and you arrive at a nearly identical white farmhouse. And you're like, yeah, this could also work. And we just did that. It was insane. It was maddening. It was like for two days, all we did is drive through cornfields and come upon white farmhouses and then nod and say, yes, this could also work. How do you decide that this cornfield, this White House, is our cornfield our house?

Great question. Part of it was that the one we found was actually on a little rise. was that the one we found was actually on a little rise. I was pretty damn flat. And the house that we found was on a little bit of a hill, which makes it look very picture-esque. The way that the driveway moved from the house out to the main road was perfect. The farm itself was enormous.

It was several thousand acres, which meant that the nearest, highly trafficked roads were very far away, so there wasn't a lot of sound. It was just perfect. All the other ones were workable. This one was perfect. So we made a deal.

We essentially rented six or so acres, I think, from the farmers in question. And we began construction on a baseball field. And we laid out the dimensions and looked, it was exactly like the movie. It was going to be major league dimensions. I think it was 330 down the lines and 385 to center. And there were lights and there were, you know, there were risers for the audience or the crowd to sit in.

I mean, it is a professionally made field. It is stunning. It's perfectly flat. And it's being tended to or no. Oh, it's got a full irrigation system, Pablo. It's got it as a full irrigation system. We went as far as to bury the power lines that ran along the road leading up to it so that we would have better sight lines for cameras. Amazing. And it ended in, it terminated in just cornfield, like just like the movie and we were going to

shoot in August when the corn is high in the whole deal. Okay, so at this point in the whole deal, as much as Mike and I have clear farming credibility, you may be wondering about the actual people whose corn this was, whose house was on that hill right next to this field of dreams. So were we. I'm Anna McLeigh. This is my husband Tyler McLeigh. We live in Polk City, Iowa, and our profession is farming. It's corn and soybeans. Then we have a herd of cattle. corn and soybeans, and then we have a herd of cattle. Since 1854, they homesteaded the area. Each generation would be my, our kids, you know.

It's been a while. And now it was 2022. And here were these two strangers, these outsiders, Mike and his producer Morgan from Hollywood, making these visits. And even still, Anna and Tyler had no idea what these people might want their farm for. A few months later, we got a phone call from Morgan that said, I think you're the place we want to be. And we said at that point, that sounds great,

but can you disclose what's happening? And then he's told us field of dreams. And I think we agreed right then and there that this is the opportunity that we want. It would be in an Iowa, you know, it's the most well-known movie in this state, you know. So we were all on board with that, you know. The baseball field unfolded rapidly at that point.

It was built in probably four months. Yeah, just like in the movie, which you can see in all of absurdity, very clearly, if you're watching along on the DraftKings Network or on YouTube. Honestly, I think we were just overwhelmed. I don't think it really even hit me personally until the evening that we turned the lights on the baseball field. I just thought, oh my gosh,

we have a baseball field sitting out here. It was pretty surreal. I do remember when the lights got turned on for the first time ever. Somebody, one of the neighbors, put out there that they saw players and uniforms out on the field. Yeah. When there, there wasn't. No, no. We thought that was funny. I think people so badly probably wanted to think that things were going on, that their

imagination ran away. on that their imagination ran away. That's what ultimately is the sort of saddest thing about this is that we went as far as you can possibly go without actually doing the thing that we set out to do. Which is extraordinarily cruel because the whole f***ing premise of field of dreams as stated is if you build it, they will come. They will come. And what you got was if you build it, you'll get a deadline Hollywood headline that says field of dreams has struck out at peacock period. Yeah, if you build it, you'll get screwed. Essentially, it's unbelievably funny in its cruelty, admittedly. Let me retract my previous dumb joke.

It is not fair, I think, to say we got screwed. fair, I think, to say we got screwed. We are hardly the first Hollywood project to get close to production and then get shut down. This is a common occurrence, right? Sure. And I think it needs to be said for the record. This is a thing that happens. This is a thing you are prepared for mentally and emotionally that at any moment. I mean, as long as there have been TV shows and movies, there have been TV shows and movies that got right up to the starting line and then got, got, got, got, got, got, got, got, got, got. Right. It's, it's a very great footnote. It's a fair footnote, but I don't know if, I don't,

I'm just inventing something here. I don't know if the inspector gadget reboot. Had an actual hat with a helicopter pop out of it that they built an engineer that is just sitting somewhere in the way that your field is sitting in Iowa right now, as we speak. The thing that makes this different is that it's two things. One is the field itself being actually built is

it stands to this day as a sort of monument to the, to the thing that happened, right? And also that the whole emotional pull of the movie, like you said, is if you build it, he will come. And then we built it and, and he didn't get the chance to show up. That's right, that's right. It's not like the movie said in fairness to you. If you greenlight this, it will stream into living rooms. But they basically did. I want to get to just the why of what you wanted to do here, because so much of this story is about, let's just call it nostalgia. It's about the ways in which nostalgia actually cloud our thinking and make us do things and

lead us to feel things that are objectively irrational. How much of what you wrote and the arc that you envisioned for your version of this engaged with that idea specifically? This is a various dude observation that you made because the first thing I did when planning how I was going to approach this was to make the observation, as you did, that the movie is about nostalgia to some degree. And in a meta way, the act of rebooting it would itself be an act of nostalgia.

And that meant to me that nostalgia was doubly important, right? Like this is, you could almost get lost in trying to untangle the ways that nostalgia needed to figure into the project. So I began the creative process from that exact observation. And what I realized was that nostalgia itself is a trap. that nostalgia itself is a trap. It is a way for people to only remember the good parts of the past without remembering the bad parts or the painful parts. Nostalgia itself means pain, right? It's a word that evokes pain because you're feeling the pain of something lost. And in the very beginning, in the first five minutes of the first episode, what is happening is you're seeing Kristen Bell's character.

You don't know who she is yet. And there is a group of old crusty sports writers sitting in a bar watching a twins game. They're in Minneapolis. And they start talking about jack morris and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and And how the thing that the twins really miss right now is Jack Morris, because Jack Morris had guts and he had guile and he pitched a 10-inning game in the World Series and all that. He was more wins in the 80s than any other pitcher and all the stuff. And she comes over and she reads in the Riot Act and she goes, you guys, you are trapped by your own nostalgia you don't

remember that the year after Jack Morris pitched that game he pitched in the World Series and got lit up. This is the first free run home against Jack Morris all year a splitter that doesn't split. He was not the picture you think he is, and it was my way of trying to send this message that this movie or this show, rather, this limited series, was not going to only, at least, solely traffic in nostalgia. This is not going to be a project where the only thing that you had to do was sit back and remember the good old days

of Field of Dreams, the original film. So that theme permeated the entire project. But the idea of nostalgia, begetting nostalgia, and then in this era of Hollywood, right, where again, let's just be very blunt about this. Intellectual property, IP, being rebooted, like we are in an economy of entertainment that is fueled by nostalgia. It's kind of the most algorithmically validated thing is this is this is what's underneath comic book movies, the MCU, this is underneath so many different things. But in this case, why did they decide to not go forward with your nostalgia? Well, the answer to that is complex as you would imagine, but I believe what essentially

happened was that when they came to me with the idea, they had a sort of vision for what Peacock was going to become. Every company who started their own streaming service, Disney, Warner Brothers and NBC, they had a sort of vision for the future. And quite simply, in the two years or so that it took between that first approach and the time when we were about to start production, the vision had changed. The things that were working on peacock

were, you know, the Premier League was a big deal and I think wrestling was a big deal and there were a few things here and there are original things that were sort of breaking through, but you know, it was not going to be cheap to make this. It was, you know, the seven episode series had a, had a, I don't actually remember the budget, but it was a very large amount of money. You built a field, Mike.

You built a baseball field. Yeah, it wasn't cheap, right? It was a big cast and it was, you know, it was like $80 million or something or more. So when it comes time to actually cut the check for something like that to be made, there's another assessment that gets made and they have to decide whether it's worth the money.

And the business has shifted so dramatically in the last five years that some of the ideas that you have for what you're gonna do six months from now might change dramatically in six months. So it was essentially economic. I mean, no, I'll say this. At no point did once we set the budget, the budget was a fight like all budgets are.

Once we set the budget, the budget never increased. But to examine the spreadsheet, the multivariate equation that lands inside of a spreadsheet that says, we're not going to go forward with this. Certainly not unique in Hollywood, but I will again remind you that I feel like it is unique in so far as you're the guy who just wrote a monologue to begin the series that got the plug pulled on it about money. About the ways in which quantitative reasoning is actually a way forward towards the truth and actually the inefficiencies that you don't understand. And that in the end, Mike, I don't know if other projects get told in the same way, given your personal investment in these

themes, sorry, your vorp isn't high enough. Your value over replacement project just didn't make the cut for NBC Universal. Well that, you know, my argument back to them at the time was I understand that, you know, look, I've been at NBC for, I've been continuously employed by NBC for 25 years, more than 25 years now, which is rare. And my argument back to them was simply to say, I don't know, I'm not privy to the inside conversations about the future of the streaming service or the company or anything. I just have to believe that even if you have a limited number of bullets in your gun, that

field of dreams, like putting the words field of dreams over a picture of some beautiful waving corn at Magic Hour as a poster, people are gonna watch that, I think. You know, like I think the of some beautiful waving corn at magic hour as a poster, people are gonna watch that, I think. I think the vorp of field of dreams is pretty high. But you know, replacement crop. Yeah, corn that's going up there. Vork is very high.

So it's stung, I'm not gonna lie. Obviously a lot of work had gone into it. What comes to mind in terms of what you're mourning because Mike, I do all, I want to add another layer of metaphor onto this metaphor eating itself, which is that this is a movie, not just about nostalgia. It's also a work about loss. Yeah. I'm mourning a lot of things. I'm more than the loss of the work that had already been done by a lot of people. Not just Morgan Sackett, who had scouted and prepped and sort of planned out the whole thing. We had our property master, woman in gay, Porello had gotten the exact kind of baseball

that was used in certain games from certain eras. We had chosen gloves and uniforms for the black socks and for other folks who showed up that were vintage uniforms. I got to choose Sh shoeless Joe Jackson's glove from a pile of vintage gloves. What a dream for Mike sure. Oh my God. I'm telling you, man.

It was like, I was your career in Hollywood leading to that decision. I would go into work and our, our costumers, Kirsten Mann, and our property master, Gaparello would say, like, we need you in this conference room when I would come in and there would just be racks of vintage baseball uniforms and bats and gloves and balls and old programs. And it was like a fever dream. No, and you really love it.

And you become your own version of a young moonlight gram. Suddenly you are now somehow just, you're in puberty in the room, amid the timeline of everyone else, just probably getting the promise of what's to come. I was 47 year old me and I was also like nine year old me at the same time. But I'll tell you what I'm more in the most.

But I also more and I should say, I just had Andre Browers voice in my head writing these monologues. And I had Kristen Bell's voice in my head writing her character. And I obviously have worked with those folks before and Nick Offerman too and Will Harper. And I had, I just knew how good they were going to be and to not have that is obviously deeply depressing. The thing, I'll tell you the thing I'm more in the most though. So my vision for the series was this. I was going to essentially retell

the entire story of the movie with some significant changes. And it was going to take place around the time the movie took place. In the movie, Ray has a young daughter who's, you know, six years old or something. And I was going to retell that the entire story of the movie except the daughter was going to be older. She was going to be in high school. And then simultaneously, in a different timeline, in a contemporary timeline,

I was going to tell the story of her, his now grown daughter, that was Kristen's character, in the very beginning of the series, Ray dies off camera. And she was going to go through her own version of searching for a way to heal her relationship with Ray, just the way Ray had with his dad in the movies. So you were getting two parallel stories in two different timelines.

That was the basic structure of it. Among the changes that I made to the original story was, you know, when I watched it for the millionth time, I remarked about how Terence Mann, who was a civil rights author and activist, is brought back to Iowa and sees the ghosts playing on the field. And all of the ghosts are white dudes from the segregated era of baseball. I was going to bring this up at some point. Yeah.

And interestingly, he has the same to have any comment about that. No, it doesn't really strike him as interesting or problematic or annoying or anything. No, he just really loves baseball too. He just loves melott. He just is really psyched to see melott. So in my version, Moonlight Graham was a Negro leagues player. And the reason he never got to fulfill his dream of playing in the major leagues is because baseball was segregated until 1947. So the journey that they go on to find Moonlight Graham, which was a had of different name, because Moonlight Graham is a real person,

is a journey into the pretty unpleasant, pretty ugly past of the segregated world of baseball in the mid-40s. The postwar era, almost 20 million people attended professional league games, 52 organized leagues in the land. 388 ball clubs. People spoke of returning to normal state,

which in baseball means involved progress. There is a true story, which is that in 1945, under extreme pressure from the Boston City Council, there were a group of people, journalists and city council folks who thought that Boston ought to integrate. The war was over. Black men and women had fought to end fascism and yet couldn't play baseball. That seemed stupid. Boston was the site of the abolitionist movement and they

thought that Boston ought to lead the way here and they basically forced Tom Yocky's hand into giving tryouts to Negro League players. They said under the Red Sox, yes. And they said if you don't do this we are going to refoke your ability to play baseball on Sunday and you won't be able to have any games on Sundays. So his hand was forced, and he decided to give a tryout to three players, one of whom was Jackie Robinson. And he came, and he had a tryout on the field at Fenway.

And the whole thing was for show. It was Kabuki Theater. There was nothing behind it. They just did it to check a box. Famously, the Red Sox ended up being the very last team to integrate. Pumpsi Green joined the team in 1959, 12 years after Jackie broke in with the Dodgers. I told that story through the fictional lens of a player named Moonlight Williams, who was given this tryout and then basically

told, you'll never be on this team, you'll never make the majors. That was the kind of fulcrum to the whole series because it culminates in a big scene between Moonlight, which was well-harp, gonna be Will Harper's character and Tom Yauke, where Moonlight says to him, I understand you. You think I don't understand you, but I do. And your problem is that you are racked with nostalgia. You are feeling the loss of a world you used to know, and you're afraid of the one that's going to come next.

And I just want to tell you that it's going to happen. We are going to play baseball in the major leagues. I don't know when, but soon. And there's nothing you can do to stop it. And you should essentially overcome your nostalgia, your pain, and accept that. And he also said that the world that you remember in love is a world that is painful for me. And just because you feel pain from its loss, I feel pain from its existence.

And it was sort of, it was right, it was the fourth of seven episodes. It was right in the middle. The whole thing took place in 1945. It was all that story, and you were getting the story in flashback. And I, so when you ask what I'm mourning, I think that that episode of TV

is the best thing I've ever written. I truly believe that. Like I, it was, I conceived of it. It was, I was helped a great deal by the other writers who helped me shape it and conceive of it. And I finished it and I said, and I like most writers, I rarely like the things I write. It's a very rare feeling.

But when I was done, I was like, this is the reason to do field of dreams. The reason to do field of dreams isn't to indulge in nostalgia or to feel connected to a thing that I loved or so that I can someday meet Kevin Costner. The reason to do this is to write this story, which is a terrible and also a beautiful story of a very, very specific moment in time in the history of the game I love, and to film this and make it exactly the way I wanted to and put it out into the world. And that is the,

when you ask me what's the thing I mourn, that I lost, that's the thing that I mourn the most. He's, that's, that's, yeah, that's a good idea. You should pitch someone that concept. After putting in this truly origami level of meticulousness into how you're crafting this folding over every little corner, making sure everything looks right, the uniforms, the gloves, the historical fidelity, not just the baseball itself, but to the movie.

The movie that you are now trying to honor while also subverting. What is happening with the field, like right now? We leased the land from the folks who own it for a certain number of months, and I don't remember how many months it was, but I think that lease has expired. So I think it's just back in their hands again.

And so with this lease expired, we obviously had to go back to Anna and Tyler, our seventh and eighth generation farmer friends in Iowa to find out. There's a lot more involved with taking care of a baseball field than most people know, especially the sand area. We went ahead and we invested in a professional ball field more so that our kids are learning

how to take care of the ball fields so that we can keep it up and running. This past summer that we led to the local high school boys come on and use the baseball field. The field was built for the show on the Meckley Farm tonight. The North Polk baseball team coming out for practice a sandlock game. They even got to enter through the cornfield. This was the first event at the field. It would be a really great opportunity, I think, for us to maybe use it as a fun raising experience for the school as well. We plan on meeting and it's for every other thing.

Yeah, our hope is someday, hopefully this project will move forward and we can get everybody back out here and they can film and then maybe afterwards, you know, we can share somewhat with the community. I think the whole community is rooting for this, that hopefully, hopefully something will happen. Is this it? Is it done? Is there no chance for this to ever live?

There's never no chance, I would say. I mean, as quickly as the Sands shifted in Hollywood in a way that was detrimental to the project, they could shift back the other way tomorrow. Who knows? I mean, I'm always going to hold out a little hope because it did mean a lot to me to work on it. I think it meant a lot to the writers and to the crew that worked on it. We were all getting very excited to shoot it.

But for now, you know, it is dormant as we speak and it it'll take a miracle I would say to get it up and writing again, but I mean that's sort of the message of the movie, right? You should believe in the possibility of miracles. So I don't think, however much longer I am a writer in Hollywood, I don't think I will ever get to the point where I completely give up on it. You know how, when your team is like, you know, 75 and 78 and there are 12 games left and you look at the playoff odds, it says less than 0.1%. It doesn't say zero. Yeah.

Yeah. Like sure. In full awareness and in simultaneous denial of the math, he loves so much. Thank you for telling us about the metaphor that is, you know, eating itself and you potentially. My pleasure. Well, not really, but for the sake of this podcast, my pleasure. Yeah, noted. So as I sit down at my keyboard here and reflect on what it is that I found out today, I am honestly just blown away by the levels of this story. Because let's remember, field of dreams is a movie about nostalgia.

That was in the process of being rebooted by a guy who loves that nostalgia. Who loves baseball as an nostalgic for it, but also loves saber metrics, money balls, statistics, math. That was his version of this reboot. Except math turned out to be the very thing that got his reboot booted. Because it turns out that field of dreams nostalgic per Hollywood's own statistical modeling wasn't nostalgic enough.

In this age of reboots and IP, it wasn't Marvel, wasn't Transformers, wasn't Ninja Turtles and on and on. And so what Mike sure is left with. At the end here is the most on the nose manifestation of his own nostalgia possible. The literal field of dreams that he built. As a tribute to field of dreams. Exactly as it was in the movie. Except also the exact opposite.

And that, that is a pretty good movie. Come to think of it. Someone should probably make that. This has been Pablo Tore finds out a metal-lark media production and I'll talk to you next time. you