Screenwriting 101: Ron Shelton

“Movie stars like to shine. They like to have their movie-star moments. I will sometimes write a speech that I think I’m gonna cut out later, but it’ll attract the movie star. Bull Durham has the famous speech. I wrote it just to get a movie star, and it worked. It’s not my favorite moment in the movie. It’s been quoted, it’s been published: ‘I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy…Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone…’ Well, it got the right actor. I though, ‘I’ll cut the scene.’ Everybody loved it, so I kept it — and I was probably wrong, and everybody else was probably right. But I think you have to realize, in trying to write a movie-star part, that it still has to be a good part. It has to be honest, the character motivations all have to be appropriate. But movie stars are bigger than life, and so maybe there’s something bigger than life about that character you write.”

— Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump), exerpted from “Tales From the Script”