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:
“In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.”
—George Grosz (1893–1959)
“Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)