Culture
James Earl Jones’ voice marked the time, in baseball and beyond
James Earl Jones, who was 93 when he died Monday, will be remembered by baseball purists for the stirring, soul-reaching words he delivered in the 1989 film “Field of Dreams.”
Cast as a fictitious writer named Terence Mann, Jones is nominally speaking to Kevin Costner’s Ray Kinsella. But what he’s really doing is speaking to anyone in the audience who has long wondered whatever became of the baseball cards they collected growing up. He’s speaking to anyone who ponders what Babe Ruth would hit today, or what Shohei Ohtani would have hit yesterday. He’s speaking to anyone who’s ever held a baseball glove up to their nose just to smell the leather.
We know this to be true partly because of the staging. Mann is facing the camera while standing on the edge of a baseball field that’s been carved out of an Iowa cornfield. But the real magic comes from Jones, who uses his rich baritone voice in such a way that we want to go outside and build a ball field:
The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.
These words have become a baseball anthem without music, in much the same way Jones, accompanied by the Morgan State University choir, recited “The Star Spangled Banner” before the start of the 1993 All-Star Game at Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
And yet Jones was not a baseball fan growing up. And he did not fall hopelessly in love with the game as a result of appearing in such baseball-themed movies as “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings” (1976) and “The Sandlot”(1993), as well as the Phil Alden Robinson-directed “Field of Dreams.”
But neither was Marlon Brando a mafia boss before “The Godfather,” or Margaret Hamilton a witch, wicked or otherwise, before “The Wizard of Oz.” What we see from Jones in “Field of Dreams” is an actor who pulled all the necessary dramatic levers and pulleys inside him to become a baseball fan, or, in my case, the kind of baseball fan I remember as a kid growing up just two miles from Fenway Park.
In the scene in which Kinsella has somehow convinced Mann to attend a Boston Red Sox game at Fenway, we see Jones watching the action in a manner that jumped out at me when I first watched “Field of Dreams.” While Costner’s Kinsella is busily jotting down the name “Moonlight Graham” on his scorecard, Jones’ Terence Mann shows us a look of earnestness mixed with a dash of serenity as he watches the game action. In an era before mobile phones, before the wave, before beer decks, before walk-up music, that’s how people watched baseball. It’s such a small thing, but Jones figured it out.
Yes, it’s the “people will come” exhortation on the ballfield in Dyersville, Iowa, that transformed Jones into a baseball icon. But it’s what happens just before the speech that had me wanting to stand up and applaud when I first watched “Field of Dreams.” As Kinsella’s brother-in-law (played by Timothy Busfield, who happens to be a for-real baseball fan) charges into the scene to announce that Ray is bankrupt and must sell the farm, we see Mann with a copy of “The Baseball Encyclopedia.” In the pre-internet days, it was the baseball bible. And Mann treats it as one. It’s on his lap, open, perhaps to the page revealing the lifetime stats of Shoeless Joe Jackson, Eddie Cicotte, Buck Weaver or any one of those baseball-playing ghosts on the field.
That struck a note with Larry Cancro, a senior vice president with the Red Sox who has worked on the marketing side of things for nearly four decades. He told of a time when he was around 10 years old and his family was visiting relatives in Melrose, Mass. “I was sitting there with my three sisters,” he said, “and my father’s cousin had a copy of ‘The Baseball Encyclopedia.’ It was the first time I’d ever seen one. And I started poring through it. In the years to come, I ended up getting several copies. When you see that scene in ‘Field of Dreams,’ there’s James Earl Jones, proudly holding a copy. Only a real baseball fan sits there looking through ‘The Baseball Encyclopedia.’”
Cancro helped facilitate the Fenway Park scene in “Field of Dreams,” shot while the Red Sox were on the road. Costner and Jones are seated in Loge Box 157, Row PP, Seats 1 and 2.
Cancro is happy to report that the two actors were “gracious and friendly” to all Red Sox employees who were involved in the shoot. Even better, Cancro remembers the bond that formed between Jones and the late Joe Mooney, the longtime Fenway Park groundskeeper who was one of those old-timey curmudgeons with a way of being standoffish to strangers. He could also display exaggerated disinterest when dealing with celebrities whom he perceived as not being real fans, or not knowing the history of Fenway Park, or both.
“The way Joe operated, if you were there to show off or trying to be a big deal, he wanted nothing to do with you,” Cancro said. “Joe was a sweet guy, of course, if he knew you. But he and James Earl Jones really hit it off. Kevin Costner, too. But the thing with James Earl Jones, they were laughing and having a good time. Joe liked him, which is really all you need to know about James Earl Jones being at Fenway Park.”
Now, there are baseball purists who have their issues with “Field of Dreams.” There’s the late Ray Liotta’s Shoeless Joe Jackson batting right-handed. (Shoeless Joe was a left-handed hitter.) There’s Kinsella navigating his Volkswagen bus the wrong way on Lansdowne Street behind Fenway Park. But there can be no denying what Jones brought to the production, from his spoken baseball anthem to his very believable portrayal of Terence Mann, who, we learn, grew up loving the game and dreaming of playing alongside Jackie Robinson at Ebbets Field.
GO DEEPER
‘One constant through all the years’? The ‘Field of Dreams’ speech meets 2020
As Jones often said, he considered himself more of a stage actor than a film actor. He won three Tony Awards. Nor was “Field of Dreams” his most famous film role. Providing the voice of Darth Vader in the “Star Wars” films pretty much ends that discussion. In terms of honors, he earned an honorary Academy Award in 2011 and was nominated for best actor in “The Great White Hope” (1970).
He won Primetime Emmy Awards for “Heat Wave”(1990) and “Gabriel’s Fire” (1991), a Daytime Emmy for “Summer’s End” (2000) and a Grammy Award for “Best Spoken Word” in “Great American Documents” (2000). When joined with his three Tonys — “The Great White Hope” (1969), “Fences” (1987) and a Lifetime Achievement Award (2017) — and his honorary Oscar, he is in the rare company of actors who achieved EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) status. In “Fences,” he plays the role of Troy, a former baseball player in the Negro Leagues. Other notable film roles include “Coming to America” (1988), “Claudine” (1974), “Cry, the Beloved Country” (1995) and the voice of Mufasa in “The Lion King” (1994).
And yet in an interview for “Field of Dreams at 25,” he called the film “one of the very few movies I’ve done that I really cherish.”
Looking back on the film, Jones said, “Magic can happen if you just let it happen and don’t force it. And that was (director) Phil Robinson’s choice with ‘Field of Dreams.’”
The same could be said of his portrayal of Terence Mann. He just let it happen. He didn’t force it. In doing so, his voice marks the time.
(Photo: Kevin Winter / Getty Images for the American Film Institute)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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