Historical Connections
Joe Jackson batted left and threw right, while in the movie Ray Liotta bats right and throws left. The DVD special feature section explains that Liotta would not have been able to hit the ball batting left. Also, Jackson was from South Carolina and had a thick Southern accent, but Liotta, a New Jersey native, uses his own accent.
The character played by Burt Lancaster and Frank Whaley, Archibald "Moonlight" Graham, is based on the baseball player of the same name. The character is largely true to life, excepting a few factual liberties taken for artistic reasons. The real Graham's lone major league game occurred in June 1905, rather than the final day of the 1922 season. The DVD special points out that the facts about Doc Graham, mentioned by various citizens interviewed by the Terrence Mann character, were taken from articles written about the real man.
Terrence Mann is fictional but inspired by reclusive author J. D. Salinger, the author sought by the main character in the novel. In 1947, Salinger wrote a story called "A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All," featuring a character named Ray Kinsella. Later, Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye features a minor character named Richard Kinsella, a classmate of Holden Caulfield. Richard is the name of Ray's twin brother in the novel.
Read more about this topic: Field Of Dreams
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or connections:
“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)