Field of Dreams : The Ending

Abstract

Field of Dreams: The Ending Phil Alden Robinson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Field of Dreams. Dwier Brown, Kevin Costner, Phil Alden Robinson on location. Courtesy Universal City Studios, Inc. [End Page 598] Motion pictures can almost always be defined by their endings. The great screenwriter William Goldman once wrote that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a movie about how two outlaws from the Wild West wind up in South America. Goldman, a structuralist if ever there was one, crafted his screenplay so that virtually every scene in the movie nudges Butch and Sundance closer and closer to leaving the changing Old West for South America. Even the opening scene, in which Paul Newman eyes a bank’s new defenses and muses how beautiful this bank used to be, points us unblinkingly toward The End. And every time Butch or Sundance said of their pursuers, “Who are those guys?” they were manifesting a growing realization that their world was changing in ways that would not accommodate them. In that regard, Field of Dreams is a movie about how a young Iowa farmer meets his departed father. How this came to be the ending is something of a tale. Part I: In which I think of an Ending In W.P. Kinsella’s wonderful novel Shoeless Joe, the farmer asks Shoeless Joe—in the first chapter!—if his late father can join the players on the field, and Joe agrees. Thus, the father shows up long before the book’s end, a surprise to neither the farmer nor the reader. When I first read the book, I was so thunderstruck by the emotional effect of the father’s appearance that I felt we ought to save it for the ending of the movie, and make it a surprise, to boot. That’s pretty much the extent of my contribution to the story. [End Page 599] I wrote Kinsella—whom I had not yet met—a long, deferential, and continually apologetic letter in which I gingerly explained how much I loved his book and why I felt this change was necessary and how much I loved the book and it’s really a tiny adjustment and oh God I love the book and I’d never do anything to hurt it and I hope you understand because I really, really love the book. Weeks went by with no response. I found myself lingering by the front window each day just around mailman time, so that I could see Kinsella’s letter as it was slid into the mailbox. Finally, it came. It was a postcard from Hawaii, where he was vacationing and had just received my forwarded appeal. The message was short, and I kick myself to this day for not having saved and framed it. It read: “Dear Phil, Do whatever you have to do to make it a movie. Love, Bill.” I read and reread it, looking for the catch, and when I realized there was none, I spoke aloud, paraphrasing Sundance: “Who is this guy?” When Bill returned home to British Columbia, we talked on the phone. He told me he had been caught flat-footed that most of my emotional reaction to the book had been because of the father-son relationship. As a writer, he had been more interested in the J.D. Salinger character, and so he ended the book with a chapter entitled “The Rapture of J. D. Salinger,” in which the reclusive author is invited to join the players after a game and then disappears into the corn with them. Surprisingly unpossessive, he encouraged me to experiment with his structure and change it to suit the needs of a different medium. Part II: In which I write the Ending A few months later, I turned in a draft of the screenplay to the studio. Executives wept. (Trust me, that’s rare.) One was so moved by this ending that he proposed a slightly different structure. [End Page 600] “Since it’s so powerful when Ray meets his father,” he pitched, “why don’t we have Ray kidnap him instead of kidnapping the James Earl Jones character? Then a good...