Bull Durham to Have its Day

Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon and Bull Durham will reunite for a 15th anniversary celebration this Wednesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, two weeks after the Baseball Hall of Fame canceled out:

Both Sarandon and Robbins, who played groupie Annie Savoy and rookie pitcher Nuke LaLoosh respectively, will be on hand for the screening, as will former real-life minor-leaguer Shelton and Robert Wuhl, who costarred as assistant manager Larry Hockett.

And according to those involved, the borough couldn’t have been a more perfect venue, especially given its history with the Dodgers.

“From Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges and Sandy Koufax to the Cyclones, Brooklyn’s glorious baseball heritage makes it a fitting place for the Bull Durham celebration,” Robbins said in a statement released Thursday.

Echoing those sentiments was Brooklyn Academy of Music president Karen Brooks, who hailed the flick as “one of film’s great love letters to America’s game.”

Details of the anniversary party are still sketchy, but according to organizers Robbins has demurred about participating in a Q&A following the screening so as to avoid injecting politics into the occasion once again. [E! online]

So it would appear that Robbins really, really didn’t want to politicize the celebration in the first place. As far as I’m concerned Robbins and Sarandon are babbling monkey-brains politically, but it is unfair and unwise to cancel an event in order to prevent its politicalization without first finding out if anyone was going to politicalize it in the first place. Oops.

But Hollywood’s most durable unmarried couple will have a much larger forum for their views in the near future:

While Sarandon and Robbins plan to keep the screening devoid of politics, the longtime partners will have a chance to delve into their dispute with the Hall of Fame when they appear, alongside Shelton, on HBO’s On the Record with Bob Costas on May 2, to talk about the film.

“It just seemed so logical,” Costas told the New York Times. “Our show is a hybrid of sports, entertainment and a little bit of news. It’s a perfect fit for us.”

Costas also added that Petroskey “was 100 percent wrong” in censoring Robbins and Sarandon for their viewpoints but said he hoped to get beyond that issue when the twosome come on his show and instead focus on Bull Durham as a movie that “captured the romance of baseball without the violin strings.”