Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out The "Field of Dreams" That Hollywood Forgot About this episode 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.
This episode originally aired October 17, 2023.
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Transcript 9,433 words · 23 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:54 Pablo Torre? Offer not valid for delivery. Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is. If you build it, you'll get screwed. Right after this ad.
3:08 Speaker 02 You're listening to Giraffe Kings Network.
3:21 Pablo Torre? Today, I wanted to do a story that does a number of things. It allows us to cover baseball amid 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, like, just a genuinely good friend, that I am pretty sure you consider the opposite. Hollywood showrunner and comedy legend Mike Schur.
3:43 Speaker 03 Oh, damn, he's a legendary coward. He's on, like, my Mount Rushmore of cowards. He might be number one for me personally.
3:48 Pablo Torre? So for people who don't know this, Cortez, the Minister of He-Propaganda, Parakeet Cortez, that is his legend. Mike Schur is Levitard shows like Resonant, Red Sox, baseball, Celtics, Boston, superfan, which explains the antagonism.
4:01 Speaker 03 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, or whatever.
4:07 Pablo Torre? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Just on the most popular television show of all time, maybe, The Office. But Mike Schur 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 Moneyball stuff, metrics, math.
4:27 Speaker 03 I remember the blog as a kid. They did, you know, big, important things like fighting Bill Plasky.
4:34 Speaker 03 Very important.
4:35 Pablo Torre? So Mike Schur went on to do yet 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 Nine-Nine, The Good Place. He's one of the most prolific accomplished writers in all of entertainment.
4:49 Speaker 03 I've literally never heard of any of those shows.
4:51 Pablo Torre? 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 want to talk about is how in 2021, Mike Schur got picked by NBC Universal to birth his passion project. He got hired to reboot Field of Dreams.
5:14 Speaker 03 That old-ass movie. That's cool though.
5:16 Pablo Torre? That old-ass movie, which lots of people consider the greatest baseball movie of all time. And he was hired to reboot it as a TV show, also called Field of Dreams, which is kinda like being asked to, you know, recast Kevin Costner and also become Kevin Costner's character at the same time.
5:44 Pablo Torre? Here's the nerdiest best part to me. Mike Schur 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.
6:04 Speaker 03 So when is this show supposed to come out?
6:07 Pablo Torre? And here is, here is the thing. Because it's not.
6:12 Pablo Torre? So, god. So they spent all this money, production was about to begin, and then Universal suddenly canceled Mike Schur's Field of Dreams. This is despite the fact that they'd built this functioning baseball field in a [bleep] cornfield in Iowa, that still exists, by the way, right now.
6:30 Speaker 03 So the guy who started Fire Joe Morgan got fired?
6:35 Pablo Torre? You are enjoying this way too much. But what I wanted to do on today's show, Cortez, is find out why.
6:43 Speaker 03 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.
6:49 Pablo Torre? Let's start the show.
6:50 Speaker 03 Okay.
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10:39 Pablo Torre? 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 Field of Dreams before diving into this story that we're here to do today. I 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.
11:02 Speaker 05 And what's your review? Because it's a very controversial movie among baseball fans, sports fans. Some people love it, some people hate it.
11:09 Pablo Torre? 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, watching it, I realized, oh, this is like the prime example of that thing that is parodied so often.
11:26 Speaker 05 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.
11:44 Speaker 06 What you mean if you build it, they gonna come? Who are these people that gonna come to a [bleep] cornfield? You know? Who gonna cut the grass? I know you don't expect me to sell no peanuts out this [bleep].
11:54 Speaker 05 I'd also seen this bit from The Substance.
11:57 Speaker 07 Let me get this straight. You mowed down all that corn to build a football field, hoping it would lure the ghosts of former players down from football heaven? Uh huh, and look.
12:13 Speaker 07 Hey, I don't recognize any of these guys. Why are there two 50-yard lines? Aw, damn it, I built a Canadian field!
12:22 Speaker 08 Oh, sorry, Hozer. Hi, buddy.
12:25 Speaker 07 Hey, nice rouge there, Gordo.
12:28 Speaker 05 And there was this scene from another cartoon, John Lovitz's The Critic.
12:35 Speaker 09 Wow, Babe Ruth. Hey, where can a fella get a hooker around here? Ty Cobb. Where's the nearest Klan meeting?
12:45 Speaker 05 If you haven't seen The Godfather, you've still kind of seen The Godfather, right? Because you've heard the quotes, and people have ripped it off so many times. Yeah, exactly. And Field of 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 had seen the whole movie.
13:08 Pablo Torre? So, Mike Schur, the quick elevator pitch I am to be summer. For 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?
13:22 Speaker 05 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."
13:43 Speaker 10 If you build it, he will come.
13:47 Speaker 05 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."
14:01 Speaker 10 Am I completely nuts?
14:06 Speaker 11 Not completely.
14:09 Speaker 11 It's a good baseball field, Ray.
14:12 Speaker 10 It's kind of pretty, isn't it?
14:14 Speaker 05 She's very enthusiastic about it. Extremely, extremely forgiving and on his side in all matters. And so he builds a cornfield, a baseball field in his cornfield. And the he, somehow intuitively he knew, is Shoeless Joe Jackson. He's the famous member of the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal, Say It Ain't So, Joe. Shoeless Joe Jackson was Ray, Ray is the farmer. Ray's dad's favorite ballplayer. Yes. He builds the baseball field with his daughter. Everybody in the town thinks he's nuts. One night Shoeless Joe Jackson shows up.
14:52 Speaker 10 Hi.
14:55 Speaker 10 Ray Kinsella.
14:59 Speaker 10 Joe Jackson.
15:07 Speaker 05 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's character. And somehow Ray 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 Terence Mann were at Fenway Park watching a Red Sox game. So she's, again, super on board this very...
15:53 Speaker 05 Very crazy plan.
15:54 Pablo Torre? One might say conveniently on board.
15:57 Speaker 05 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 Jumbotron. Moonlight Graham, who was a ballplayer 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.
16:17 Speaker 12 To feel the tingle in your arms, you connect with the ball. They run the bases, stretch your double into a triple, and flop face first into third. Wrap your arms around the bag.
16:28 Speaker 12 That's my wish, Riconcello. That's my wish.
16:33 Speaker 12 And is there enough magic out there in the moonlight? To make this dream come true?
16:38 Speaker 05 What would you say if I said yes? They've somehow transported back in time to the 70s, because Moonlight Graham is long dead.
16:46 Pablo Torre? Yup. I was gonna ask about that. That is time travel. Yup, okay, noted.
16:50 Speaker 05 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. Moonlight 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 field.
17:05 Pablo Torre? 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. It got very confusing for me.
17:17 Speaker 05 Yeah. And by the way, let me just say right now, this is no longer a quote elevator pitch. End quote. This is now, I'm just giving you the whole plot.
17:24 Pablo Torre? The elevator is broken.
17:26 Speaker 05 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 Field of Dreams." So, anyway, Moonlight Graham comes back. They play more baseball. Terrence Mann is there. He can see all the ghosts. Some people can see the ghosts, some people can't.
17:47 Speaker 13 We'll find, we have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines.
17:54 Speaker 13 Where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes.
17:59 Speaker 13 And they'll watch the game. And it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they'll have to brush them away from their faces.
18:11 Speaker 05 A bunch of other stuff happens. The fire department just got here. We only have 30 seconds left.
18:15 Pablo Torre? Oh, thank God.
18:17 Speaker 05 So, the point is, is that at the end of the day, the he turns out not to have been Shoeless Joe Jackson, but rather Ray's 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.
18:46 Speaker 08 Hey, Dad?
18:52 Speaker 08 You want to have a catch?
18:56 Speaker 08 I'd like that.
18:58 Speaker 05 All right, so what's your review?
19:00 Pablo Torre? 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, but the end, man, [bleep] if I didn't feel some liquids pooling around my orbital boats.
19:34 Speaker 05 It's kind of a good litmus test for sociopathy, 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, 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 want to have a catch?" If you don't feel tears welling up in your eyes, there's something wrong with you.
20:06 Pablo Torre? Because the truth is, I also want to have a catch with my dad.
20:13 Pablo Torre? It's all I want. That's what I realized. I was like, [bleep].
20:16 Speaker 05 Yeah. The thing that I found as the essence of the movie is a question. And 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.
21:01 Speaker 05 It has no business being anything that... It should have been, for Kevin Costner, what Waterworld ended up being, right?
21:09 Pablo Torre? 100%.
21:11 Speaker 05 A famous flop. And yet, to his credit, and to Phil Alden Robinson's credit, who made the movie, and to everyone's credit who 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... And listen, there are plenty of people who hate the movie, or just think it's schlocky, and think it's...
21:40 Pablo Torre? No doubt.
21:41 Speaker 05 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.
21:52 Pablo Torre? 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 want to 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.
22:30 Speaker 05 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 you know, the point of a 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 Field of Dreams because they knew I loved baseball. And I was extremely reticent, I would say, at first. I never adapted anything that pre-existed before. I revere the movie and was scared of screwing it up. But eventually I thought, you know, I love baseball.
23:15 Speaker 05 I love that movie. I've never written about baseball. It sounds really hard, it sounds really difficult, and that usually in my life has meant that it's worth doing. And that is ultimately the thing that made me want to do it. So, so I said yes, finished 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.
23:58 Speaker 05 It was going to be seven hours long, a 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. Andre Brauer 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. Will Harper, who played Chee Dee on The Good Place, was going to be in it. Right. And we then began construction on a baseball field in a cornfield in Iowa.
24:42 Speaker 05 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, and 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, yeah, this could also work. And we just did that. It was insane. It was maddening. It was like for two days.
25:25 Speaker 05 All we did is drive through cornfields and come upon white farmhouses, and then nod and say, yes, this could also work.
25:33 Pablo Torre? How do you decide that this cornfield, this white house, is our cornfield our house?
25:40 Speaker 05 Great question. Part of it was that the one we found was actually on a little rise. Iowa's pretty damn flat. And the house that we found was on a little bit of a hill, which is, which makes it look very picturesque. 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. Like, all the other ones were workable. This one was perfect.
26:25 Speaker 05 So we, you know, 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 it was exactly like the movie. It was gonna be major league dimensions. I think it was... 3:30 down the lines and 3:85 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.
27:11 Speaker 05 It has a full irrigation system. We, 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 sightlines for cameras. Amazing. And it ended and it terminated in just cornfield, like just like the movie. And we were gonna shoot in, in August when the corn is high and the whole deal.
27:36 Speaker 05 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.
27:52 Speaker 05 So are we.
27:55 Speaker 14 I'm Anna Mackley. This is my husband Tyler Mackley. We live in Polk City, Iowa, and our profession is farming.
28:03 Speaker 10 It's corn and soybeans, and then we have a herd of cattle. Since 1854, they homesteaded the area. Eight generations would be my, our kids, you know? It's been a while.
28:20 Speaker 05 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.
28:39 Speaker 14 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.
28:58 Speaker 10 Being in 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?
29:08 Speaker 14 The baseball field unfolded rapidly at that point.
29:12 Speaker 10 It was built in probably four months.
29:16 Pablo Torre? Yeah, just like in the movie, which you can see in all its absurdity very clearly if you're watching along on the DraftKings Network or on YouTube.
29:24 Speaker 14 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.
29:40 Speaker 10 It was pretty surreal.
29:43 Speaker 10 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 in uniforms out on the field.
29:55 Speaker 14 Yeah.
29:55 Speaker 10 When there wasn't.
29:57 Speaker 14 No, no.
29:58 Speaker 10 So we thought that was funny.
29:59 Speaker 14 I think people so badly probably wanted to think that things were going on, that their imagination ran away.
30:09 Speaker 05 That's what ultimately is the sort of saddest thing about this, is that we went as far as you can possibly go.
30:17 Pablo Torre? Right.
30:18 Speaker 05 Without actually doing the thing that we set out to do.
30:23 Pablo Torre? Which is extraordinarily cruel because the whole fucking premise of Field of Dreams as stated is if you build it.
30:32 Speaker 05 That's right.
30:33 Pablo Torre? They will come.
30:34 Speaker 05 They will come.
30:35 Pablo Torre? 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."
30:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, "If you build it, you'll get screwed" is essentially.
30:53 Pablo Torre? It's unbelievably funny in its cruelty, admittedly.
30:59 Speaker 05 Let me retract my previous dumb joke. It is not 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? 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 yanked, right?
31:38 Pablo Torre? It's a very great footnote. It's a fair footnote, but I don't know if, I'm just inventing something here. I don't know if the Inspector Gadget reboot
31:50 Pablo Torre? had an actual hat with a helicopter pop out of it that they built and engineered that is just sitting somewhere in the way that your field is sitting in Iowa right now as we speak.
32:00 Speaker 05 The thing that makes this different is that, is, is, it's two things. One is the field itself being actually built is a, 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.
32:27 Pablo Torre? 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.
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36:05 Pablo Torre? 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. Mm-hmm. 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 very astute 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,
36:48 Pablo Torre? that the movie is about nostalgia to some degree.
36:52 Speaker 05 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, it was, 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. It is a way for people to only remember the good parts of the past without remembering the bad parts or the painful parts.
37:34 Speaker 05 Nostalgia itself is, it means pain, right? It is a, it's a, it's a word that evokes pain because you're feeling the pain of something lost. And in the very beginning, in the, in the first five minutes of the first episode, the 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.
38:07 Speaker 15 And here he is from Highland Park, suburb of St. Paul, Jack Morris. Hometown boy makes good.
38:17 Speaker 15 Down in order go the Braves.
38:21 Speaker 05 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. That's right. He won games. More wins in the 80s than any other pitcher and all the stuff. Damn right. And she comes over and she reads them 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."
38:52 Speaker 15 This is the first three-run homer against Jack Morris all year.
39:00 Speaker 15 A splitter.
39:04 Speaker 16 And it doesn't split.
39:06 Speaker 05 He was not the pitcher 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 was 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.
39:42 Pablo Torre? 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 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?
40:19 Speaker 05 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 and 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,
41:04 Speaker 05 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.
41:17 Pablo Torre? You built a field, Mike. You built a baseball field.
41:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, it wasn't cheap, right? Uh, it was a big cast and it was, you know, it was, it was like 80 million dollars 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, 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, at 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.
42:03 Pablo Torre? But to examine the spreadsheet, the multivariate equation that lands inside of a spreadsheet that says, "We're not gonna go forward with this," certainly not unique in Hollywood. But I will again remind you that I feel like it is unique insofar as you're the guy who just wrote a monologue to begin the series that got the plug pulled on it about Moneyball.
42:29 Pablo Torre? About the ways in which quantitative reasoning is actually a way forward towards the truth and actually there are 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, in these themes. Sorry, your VORP isn't high enough.
42:49 Pablo Torre? Your value over replacement project just didn't make the cut for NBC Universal.
42:55 Speaker 05 Well, that, you know, my argument back to them at the time was, I, I understand that, you know, I, 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, 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
43:40 Speaker 05 corn at magic hour as a poster, people are gonna watch that, I think. You know, like, I think the vorp of Field of Dreams is pretty high.
43:51 Pablo Torre? Value over replacement crop, yeah, corn's up there.
43:55 Speaker 05 Vorp, yeah, the vorp is very high. So, you know, it stung, I'm not gonna lie. Obviously, a lot of work had gone into it.
44:03 Pablo Torre? What comes to mind in terms of what you're mourning? Because, Mike, I do want, 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.
44:19 Speaker 05 Yeah. I'm mourning a lot of things.
44:25 Speaker 05 I mourn the loss of the work that was, had already been done by a lot of people. Not just Morgan Sackody, who had scouted and prepped and sort of planned out the whole thing. We had our property master, a woman named Gay Pablo, had gotten the exact kind of baseball that was used in the, you know, and then in certain games from certain eras. We had, we had chosen gloves and uniforms for the Black Sox and for other folks who showed up that were vintage uniforms. You know, I had, I got to choose Shoeless Joe Jackson's glove from a pile of vintage gloves.
45:06 Pablo Torre? What a dream for Mike Schur.
45:08 Speaker 05 Oh, my God, I'm telling you, man. It was, it was like I would-
45:13 Pablo Torre? The pinnacle of your career in Hollywood, leading to that decision.
45:16 Speaker 05 And I would go into work and our, um, our costumers, Kirsten Mann and our property master Gay Pablo would say, like, "We need you in this conference room." And when I would come in and there would just be racks of vintage baseball uniforms and bats and gloves and balls and, and old programs. And it was, it was like a fever dream for me, it really was.
45:39 Pablo Torre? And you become your own version of a young Moonlight Graham. Suddenly, you are now- Somehow just, you're in puberty, in the room amid the timeline of everyone else.
45:50 Speaker 05 Yes.
45:50 Pablo Torre? Just frolicking in the promise of, of what's to come.
45:54 Speaker 05 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 mourn the most, but and I also mourn, I should say. I just had Andre Brouwer's voice in my head writing these monologues and I had, I had Kristen Bell's voice in my head writing her character and, and I obviously have worked with those folks before and Nick Offerman too and Will Harper and I, 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 mourn the most though. So my vision for the series was this.
46:39 Speaker 05 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, 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.
47:18 Speaker 05 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 movie. 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 Terrence 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.
48:03 Speaker 05 I was gonna bring this up at some point. Yeah. Yeah. And interestingly, he doesn't seem to have any comment about that. Nope. Like, it doesn't really strike him as interesting, or problematic, or annoying, or anything. No, he just really loves baseball, too. He just loves Malott. He just is really psyched to see Malott. 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 had a different name, because Moonlight Graham is a real person, is a journey into the pretty unpleasant,
48:48 Speaker 05 pretty ugly past of the segregated world of baseball in the mid-'40s.
48:55 Speaker 17 The post-war era. Almost 20 million people attended professional league games. 52 organized leagues in the land. 388 ball clubs. People spoke of returning to normalcy, which in baseball means involved progress.
49:16 Speaker 05 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 Yawkey's hand into giving tryouts to Negro Leagues players. Owner of the Red Sox. They said... Owner of the Red Sox, yes. And they said, "If you don't do this, we are going to revoke your ability to play baseball on Sunday,
50:01 Speaker 05 and you won't be able to have any games on Sundays."
50:05 Speaker 05 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 no, nothing behind it. They just did it to check a box. Famously, the Red Sox ended up being the very last team to integrate. Pumpsy 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."
50:48 Speaker 05 That was the kind of fulcrum to the whole series because it culminates in a big scene between Moonlight, which was gonna be Will Harper's character, and Tom Yawkey, 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.
51:27 Speaker 05 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, "The world that you remember and 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.
52:12 Speaker 05 I truly believe that. Like, I, I, I, it was, it was, I conceived of it. It was, it was, I was helped a great deal by the other writers who helped me shape it and, and conceive of it. And, um, and I finished it and I, and I, like most writers, I rarely like the things I write. It's a very, it's a very rare feeling. But I, 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.
52:52 Speaker 05 The reason to do this is to write this story, which is a terrible and also 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 want it 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.
53:16 Pablo Torre? Jeez. That's, that's, um... Yeah, it's a good idea. You should pitch someone that concept.
53:27 Pablo Torre? After putting in this truly, you know, 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, the historical fidelity, not just to baseball itself, but to the, to the movie, the movie that you are now trying to honor while also subverting.
53:46 Pablo Torre? What, what is happening with the field? Like, right now?
53:52 Speaker 05 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.
54:08 Pablo Torre? 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.
54:20 Speaker 10 There's a lot more involved with taking care of a baseball field than most people know, especially the sand area.
54:28 Speaker 14 Yeah. We went ahead and we invested in a professional ball field mower so that our kids are learning how to take care of the ball field so that we can keep it up and running.
54:41 Speaker 14 This past summer that we let the local high school boys come out and use the baseball field.
54:46 Speaker 18 The field was built for the show on the Meckley Farm. Tonight, the North Polk baseball team coming out for practice, a sandlot game. They even got to enter through the cornfield. This was the first event at the field.
55:01 Speaker 14 It would be a really great opportunity, I think, for us to maybe use it as a fundraising experience for the school as well.
55:08 Speaker 10 We plan on maintaining it for forever, I guess.
55:12 Speaker 14 Yeah, 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.
55:34 Pablo Torre? Is this, is this it? Is it done? Is it, is there no, is there no chance for this to, to ever live?
55:42 Speaker 05 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 running again. But I mean, that's sort of the message of the movie, right?
56:22 Pablo Torre? I was gonna say.
56:23 Speaker 05 You should believe in believe in the in the possibility of miracles. So I 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.
56:51 Pablo Torre? Yeah, yeah. Mike Schur, in full awareness and in simultaneous denial of the math you love so much. Thank you for telling us about the metaphor that is, you know, eating itself and and you, potentially.
57:06 Speaker 05 My pleasure. Well, not really, but for the sake of this podcast, my pleasure.
57:11 Pablo Torre? Yeah, noted.
57:31 Pablo Torre? 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, is nostalgic for it, but also loves sabermetrics, Moneyball, statistics, math. That was his version of this reboot.
58:16 Pablo Torre? Except math turned out to be the very thing that got his reboot booted.
58:26 Pablo Torre? Because it turns out that Field of Dreams nostalgia, 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
59:08 Pablo Torre? 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.
59:39 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.
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