Life on a City’s Asphalt Stage : Playground Style Enchants Writer

There is an inner game of basketball, but it has nothing to do with best-selling volumes on middle-class self-improvement. It’s the game that takes place on every outdoor or rec center court or after-hours school gym in every inner city in the country. It is a black game, fast, vehement and always, one way or another, unforgiving--your ego is tested along with your body, and brute strength isn’t enough to gain respect. It has to be topped off with a curlicue of improvisational grace, an inspired, witty midair retort.

Writer-director Ron Shelton was reminded of it when he was at work on a screenplay called “Blue Chip,” which deals with a big-time college coach under pressure to win, and his relationship with three inner city recruits potentially worth millions to the NBA.

“We had one playground scene to shoot,” Shelton said. “And when I wrote it I said, ‘I wanna do more. I want to write 120 pages on just the wonderful craziness that goes on behind those chain link fences.’ I love the theater of it, the posturing and the rituals. Basketball’s a black game, an Eastern game. The question was, How am I going to do it?”

“White Men Can’t Jump,” which opens Friday, is the result. Wesley Snipes plays Sidney Deane, a cocksure L.A. playground hustler whose jive pregame chatter whips his would-be opponents into such a competitive frenzy that they never fail to snap up his bait--”$500 and you can pick anyone you want for my teammate.” All eyes quickly scan the playground and seize on an unfamiliar character who is not only unprepossessingly dorky-looking, but best of all, white !

Fellas, meet Billy Hoyle, putative chump, played by Woody Harrelson. Under the layers of baggy sweats is the well-conditioned body of a ringer from Louisiana who balances a heavy gambling debt with eyes for the summer pro league. Sidney and Billy enjoy some good paydays together before things grow complicated. (James Brown’s “I Feel Good” on the soundtrack underscores the joy of their hustle.)

“White Men Can’t Jump” may wear its plot like a loose shirttail flapping in a fast break, but it’s also Shelton’s paean to a setting everyone knows about but no one has seen treated directly in a movie.

“I’m always looking for the unusual angle or point of view on a story and I came up with a white brother hustling in black playgrounds,” Shelton said over lunch at a Hollywood diner. “Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had told me some playground stories. He said that when he was with the Milwaukee Bucks and won the NBA title, there were steady offers from playground hustlers to play him one on one for $1,000.

“I looked at the movie ‘The Hustler’ for the conceit. Only here they’re really talking trash.”

Shelton has written about a setting he’s marginally known about for some time as a playground ballplayer himself, and the film’s open exuberance is reminiscent of a couple of his other movies, notably “Blaze” and “Bull Durham.” So is his ear for language.

At 45, Shelton had a life before the movies, first as a collegiate basketball star at Westmont College in Santa Barbara and then as a Triple A baseball player under contract to the Baltimore Orioles. (He played second base.) He left baseball after a five-year career that took him no closer to the majors than Rochester, N.Y. “Baltimore was loaded with talent, and those were the days when a franchise owned you for life. I knew I’d never move up.

“In college I was a slashing, driving guard,” he said of his basketball career. “I held the school scoring record at 1,500 points. But I’m slow now. I broke my wrist two years ago, then I hurt my hand. My knees are about shot. I don’t do much driving anymore. But I can’t imagine a better preparation for this business than being an athlete. You learn that, no matter what happens, you don’t quit. If you’re good, you take chances all the time. You get cheered and booed as part of your daily diet.”

Age has softened the facial features of what once must have been a lean and hungry young athlete’s look. A high prominent forehead slopes over deep-set wintry-blue eyes conditioned to read fractions of inches at a distance. He has a good hitter’s big-boned arms and hands, and he walks with the easy authority of someone who isn’t pushed around.

It was baseball, ironically, that led him to the movies.

“I majored in English and got interested in movies through a couple of teachers who took me to films that had changed their lives, thinking they might change mine. I went into baseball a movie lover, even though I didn’t know a thing about how they were made. As a ballplayer, you have endless time in a day to kill. Movies was what I did from 1 to 4 in the afternoon. I was completely undiscriminating. I’d sit through anything.”

Shelton didn’t realize it at the time, but he was putting in an apprenticeship in those small-town movie houses. Later, when he decided to try and crack the industry, he wrote a screenplay, “like everyone else. Unlike everyone else, I threw it away. Then I wrote another one called ‘A Player to Be Named Later.’ I got an agent and felt like the luckiest guy in the world. I didn’t like classical structure. I worked with my own rhythms and ideas to keep audiences. In the early ‘80s, no one knew what to do with me. I always wrote a good story for a good cast, but no one ever knew what the film was about.”

On the strength of an unproduced screenplay about a real estate tycoon, Shelton teamed up with director Roger Spottiswoode on “Under Fire,” a film about an American news photographer (played by Nick Nolte) sent to cover the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Though, in Shelton’s words, “the movie did no business,” it showed an unusually sophisticated sensibility at work, particularly in its depiction of a love triangle among Nolte, Joanna Cassidy (a journalist colleague), and Gene Hackman (as their home office editor).

“He has a real voice,” Spottiswoode says of Shelton. He has the ability to imagine complex people and then bring them off the page. He also has an interesting take on powerful women. He genuinely admires women in a way that not all men do--and I mean heterosexual, happily married men who somewhere in their psyche are fearful of women.”

Which is one way of explaining why Shelton’s best movies, particularly “Blaze” and “Bull Durham,” contain such good-natured, passionate sex. Unlike most modern cinematic depictions of sex that treat it either as a sodden thirtysomething longueur under the death-head poster of AIDS, or a savage, clear-the-room coupling of the pathologically enraged (as in “Fatal Attraction” and “Basic Instinct”), Shelton goes back to the basics of sex as pleasure principle, hot and unself-conscious and fun.

So it is between Harrelson’s Billy and Rosie Perez’s Gloria, his girlfriend, in “White Men Can’t Jump.” For Billy, safe sex means managing to steer his convertible in a straight line with Gloria wriggling in his lap.

How Shelton manages this is part of his response to the basic struggle of filmmaking. “I love movies, but what drives me crazy is that in all their technology and slickness, the human balance is lost. Cinematography is often gained at the expense of drama and human emotion. I’m trying to get life on the screen even though life contradicts the movies by being messy.”

One of the things that led Shelton to directing was the discovery of how much he enjoyed working with actors. “You build confidence and trust in actors. You treat them with dignity--they’re not treated with dignity often. I always listen, even if it’s a bad idea. You never shoot a sex scene in the first week. I try to get rid of this private language actors have, from fear and from what they’ve learned in acting school, and I try and reduce the scene to the Spencer Tracy school of look-’em-in-the-eye-and-tell-’em-the-truth.”

“There’s a scene where I’m yellin’ at the black players,” says Woody Harrelson of “White Men.” “I thought we should push the racial tension. It was more subtle in the script. I wanted to make it rough and disagreeable, to challenge the issue. I wanted to run a risk, and he kept it in.”

Even to the untrained eye, sports movies are never convincing when it comes to the depiction of the sport itself--their staginess is undisguisable. For verisimilitude in “White Men Can’t Jump,” Shelton recruited some NBA and former college stars, including Marques Johnson, Nigel Miguel, Duane Martin and Freeman Williams as supporting players and held an actual tryout and basketball camp before shooting. “We held daily basketball tryouts for three weeks at Hollywood High,” Shelton said. “I had an elite category of basketball players, then a group of good athletes, then everyone else. I didn’t let anyone read lines until we were ready. In ‘Bull Durham,’ I’d gone backwards by looking for guys who could act before finding out whether or not they could play.”

Of the real skill of his lead actors, Shelton said: “Wesley’s not a natural basketball player, but he’s a brilliant natural athlete. At 5 feet 9 inches, he can get a foot above the rim. Woody’s kind of a street player. He moves right, he’s a good passer, he’s got a good left hand. He could drop into any game.” Asked if there was any racial tension over a white production company’s incursion onto black turf, Shelton replied: “No. In fact, they were willing to go farther than the script, especially with the insults. My favorite line was ‘Yo’ mama’s so fat her blood type’s ragout.’ The one thing no one wanted was to say anything bad about being black.”

Shelton denies any racist connotation in the title, a question that seems to keep popping up before him. “I don’t think it’s racist at all. The whole notion of political correctness is crap. Language should be open and free and expressive. That’s what I like about sports. You get it out and it’s all over in a hurry.” (“Of course it’s racist,” says one observer. “Could you make a movie with the title ‘Black Guys Can’t Swim’?”)

On balance, it doesn’t seem likely that someone shaped by the oversimplifications of sport, could hack it through the political foliage and anxious, infinitely changeable weather of life in the film industry. Shelton takes a long view. “Would working for the Medici family have been any different than working for Jeffrey Katzenberg? Is the New York publishing industry any less cynical than Hollywood? I have no complaints. It’s like Velasquez painting Philip IV. My job is to take the money and paint the king without the king knowing what I’m really doing. I’m the world’s nastiest junkyard dog when it comes to guarding my little piece of turf.”