ANNIE NARRATES BECAUSE SHE'S INCIDENTAL:

Dwyer Murphy: In The Church of Baseball, you write, "The biggest mistake a sports movie can make is to have too much sports in it." I always thought of Bull Durham as a romance first and a sports movie second. A romance between characters. A story about people with romantic ideals moving through the world. How about you: you made the movie, how would you characterize it?

Ron Shelton: I've spent thirty years trying to figure out the movie and why it works. Some of it, I was unconscious of while we were making it. For example, what is Crash Davis about? He's a man who loves something more than it loves him back. That's a universal thing that makes the movie last. We've all loved something more than it loves us back. And Annie Savoy is a woman at an equal crisis point in her life. She's invented a game around boys and young men, something that's unsustainable, too. So they're both at this crisis. If they stop doing what they love, they'll have to grow up. That's the risk that it takes them an hour and forty-eight minutes to work through.

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