How I love that movie.
ME TOO! One I will always watch when it comes on TV.
Three points of interest about the Field of Dreams movie:
1.) It was filmed in 1988 and at the time the weather in Iowa was record setting heat. There was also a farm crisis going on and farms were going under right and left. The grounds were all brown and dry and the art director and set decorator and their crews are largely responsible for the lush green corn fields and scenery we remember in the film! You wouldn't know the filming conditions from the look of the film we remember! Also, the scene where the ballplayers first come out of the cornfield at dusk and Ray sees them...it is twilight and this ethereal cloud of fog is descending around them...that was not a special effect, nor planned, it was an accident of when they were filming it. As the evening progressed the temperature began dropping, moisture came into the air and it caused this fantastic look that the director and crew were just in wonderment! Nice to know it wasn't visual effects!
SIDEBAR: That's one thing about movies today... When you see a scene filmed outside and there's some kind of weather pattern or you see the sky with a great moon, now my mind just supposes it's a visual effect they put there, not that it was something natural they painstakingly waited for to capture or an accident of filming at the right time. To me that notion they just did it, makes it less special, even if it is natural now...who's to know?
2.) When the movie was filmed in 1988, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon were trying to make their way into the business. They knew that they were filming some scenes or location footage at a Boston Red Sox game the night that they did that, and they made their way there to be in Fenway Park that same night. So somewhere in that stadium scene are Matt & Ben!
3.) The movie is based on the novel Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella. The movie's director wanted to keep that name for the movie, but Universal didn't really like it and was testing different titles with preview audiences and "Field of Dreams" was the one audiences liked more than the others. (I wish I knew what some of the other titles they tested were.) So, Universal decided, over the director's objections, that Field of Dreams would be the name of the film. The director was unhappy and did not want to tell the book's author the title was going to be changed, but he finally made the call. "I have to tell you something," he said. "I fought for it, but Universal has decided not to use the name of your novel as the title. It's going to be called Field of Dreams, instead." To the director's surprise, he heard this on the other end of the line, "Oh, that's okay. Shoeless Joe was the book publisher's idea. I didn't come up with that title. I wanted to call it "
Dream Field." LOL!
A couple other items of interest: The author of the book is Canadian! The character that James Earl Jones plays in the movie is a fictional character, but in the novel that person is J.D. Salinger, who wrote Catcher in the Rye. I don't know if they couldn't use Salinger's character in the film or chose to make it a fictional person, but I think it was a wise choice. The real Salinger persona would've distracted audiences from the story in a way it doesn't in the book.
Also not a visual effect: 2500 cars line the road to create the final magic:
