Denver Black Sox Baseball Club: Denver NABA News: New DVD Release of "The Natural"
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New DVD Release of "The Natural"
'The Natural' special DVD set out now
04/03/2007 7:13 PM ET
By Ben Platt / MLB.com
Since filmmaking began at the turn of the last century, baseball has been a theme used in numerous films with varying degrees of box-office success. "The Pride of the Yankees" and "The Stratton Story" rang true with film audiences, but most others didn't draw big crowds. By the late 1970s, baseball films were thought to be box-office poison.
In 1983, Hollywood gave baseball another try when production began on "The Natural." Based on Bernard Malamud's 1952 novel about a 35-year-old rookie with a dark past, named "Roy Hobbs," who explodes on the baseball scene in the 1930s only to have his past catch up with him, the film didn't sound like it had much of a chance, but two men made a big difference -- the film's young director, Barry Levinson, and its star, Robert Redford.
Redford was still one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, and he had won an Academy Award two years earlier as the director of "Ordinary People." Levinson had just directed "Diner," a low-budget film that became a critical and box-office success.
"Bob had seen 'Diner' and liked the film very much," recalled Levinson. "We had talked about working together and gone through a few projects that neither of us were excited about. One day, we were just talking about baseball. He's a big fan, and so am I, and he told me he had seen a script for 'The Natural' a while back, and he dug it up and sent me the script -- and we started from there."
Already 47 years old when production began, Redford was no baseball novice. He played shortstop for Van Nuys High School in Southern California in the mid-'50s -- his teammate was future Hall of Famer Don Drysdale. Redford received a baseball scholarship to the University of Colorado before turning to acting.
Levinson put together a stellar cast that included Glenn Close, Robert Duvall, Kim Basinger, Darren McGavin, Wilford Brimley and Richard Farnsworth. Add to it brilliant cinematography by Caleb Deschanel and a memorable film score by Randy Newman, "The Natural" became a big hit when it was released in 1984 -- opening the door for other successful baseball films including "Bull Durham," "Major League," "Field of Dreams" and "Eight Men Out" to follow.
"The Natural" is now a special two-DVD set, with new footage added to the film and more than two hours of documentary and interviews about baseball and the making of this now-classic motion picture.
"Sony wanted to release it on DVD with updates on the technical side, better sound, better quality of the picture," said Levinson, who in '89 won an Academy Award for his direction of "Rain Man." "This opened the door for some changes, creatively, that I had been thinking about -- but had never accomplished -- and then they added this wonderful package of extras."
Levinson had never been totally happy with the first act of the film. The director and his editing team were under the gun for its release date of May 11, 1984, and even though they had shot the footage, editing it the way they wanted it would have taken too much time.
"I had been talking about for years that we had never got to do the opening the way I had always wanted it," recalled Levinson. "Like an archeological dig, Sony's Chris Holmes started finding these lost pieces of film, and we started to reconstruct it back to what the original opening act would have been."
Even though 15 minutes of footage was added, Levinson's reediting of the first part of the film only adds six minutes to the entire length of the picture.
"I think it just helps the movie," said the director, whose other hits include "Good Morning, Vietnam," "Wag The Dog" and "Tin Men." "The film is a little bit darker and if you enjoyed it before, you are not going to enjoy it any less in this version.
"I think it gives a little more shading to the Roy Hobbs character and knowing, in the sense, that when he goes home to get the bat [Wonderboy, a major character in the film] to head to the Major Leagues, to get his second chance, you see how he was plagued by all the demons and his reevaluation of his past."
The newly updated version will thrill anyone who was a fan of the original version, but the real highlight is the second DVD with 10 documentary featurettes. The featurettes consist of the four-part documentary, "Extra Innings"; the three-part "making of" documentary, "When Lightning Strikes"; new interviews with Levinson, Redford, Close and other participants in the film; "A Natural Gunned Down: The Stalking of Eddie Waitkus" -- a true story of a ballplayer stalked by a fan; "Clubhouse Conversations," in which many people involved in the game -- including columnist George Will, broadcaster Bob Costas and current and former players Jason Giambi, Don Mattingly and Ryne Sandberg -- give their thoughts about the game; and "The Heart of the Natural," in which Hall of Fame inductee Cal Ripken Jr. breaks down the film and relates the parallels of the movie to his own career.
"There are a lot of little things that they added that are great," said Levinson. "If you like baseball, there are a lot of elements that you can pull up that are worthwhile."
So if you're a fan of the film or just a fan of the game of baseball, this DVD set is both informative and especially entertaining.
The director's cut of "The Natural" is available now.
Courtesy of MLB Magazine