Don’t Let Money Be the Root of Bad Writing
Love what you do and be ready, willing, and happy to do it for free.
Remember back in the late ’80s and ’90s when Kevin Costner was a major movie star? For a minute there during the first George Bush era, he was like a one-man Marvel Cinematic Universe, giving Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, and Julia Roberts a run for their box-office supremacy.
I never understood what the fuss was about. He wasn’t drop-dead hunky or especially talented. I figured he was for people who only knew the song “I Will Always Love You” from the Whitney Houston cover version in the 1992 Costner-Houston romantic drama The Bodyguard, or those who preferred Houston’s sledgehammer take to the more-delicate 1983 country version by Dolly Parton, the woman who wrote it, took it to number one on Billboard’s country singles chart twice, and made it into a country classic decades before Houston delivered it to the ages.
But there was one particular movie from Costner’s waning period called For Love of the Game that has stuck with me for more than 20 years, although I’ve never seen it. I’m not even sure what the movie is about beyond the baseball theme that was so pivotal to Costner’s peak-era success (see Bull Durham and Field of Dreams).
