How a Kevin Costner ultimatum led his way to a hit movie: “You have to make a decision by noon”
There is a strange paradox about Kevin Costner. He’s spent much of his career embodying a sort of bland All-American hero trope, but from the beginning, he built his status in Hollywood by taking unconventional leaps of faith. He is one of the most relentless figures in the business. If there’s a script he wants to make, he’ll do whatever he has to do to get it over the line. He might even remortgage his house and direct the thing himself if he has to.
Although this might not make him everyone’s favourite person to have a business meeting with, it has certainly led to results. Time and again, Costner has bucked expectations and been vindicated, most notably when he took his first swing at directing. After rocketing to the top of the Hollywood heap as a leading man in hits like The Untouchables, Field of Dreams, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and The Bodyguard, he could easily have coasted as a movie star for the next few decades. Instead, he decided to direct and star in a western at a time when the genre had long passed its sell-by date.
Dances with Wolves was a commercial and critical success that swept the Oscars and gave Costner carte blanche for his next projects. Those follow-ups have been decidedly mixed, but he proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he intended to be taken seriously and had earned his seat at the table.
While the film was his clearest assertion of willpower up to that point, he had, in fact, been demonstrating his ambition and tenacity for a while. Case in point was the effort he went through to get the 1989 baseball movie Bull Durham over the line. He had just broken out as a star following the 1987 gangster movie The Untouchables, but he wasn’t exactly in a position to lay down the law with studios. Somehow, that didn’t stop him from acting like he did. Instead of following up a big-budget blockbuster with another big-budget blockbuster, he set his sights on a little baseball movie from first-time director Ron Shelton.
Costner must have known that getting Bull Durham greenlit would be an uphill battle, but he didn’t seem to mind putting the work in. “Ron and I showed the script around town like a couple of Santa Monica hookers,” he told Vanity Fair after the film came out. “Everybody was saying, ‘He’s going to end up without a movie again.'”
Instead of begging, Costner went the opposite direction. He gave an ultimatum. He knew that the production company Orion was already doing a baseball movie, but he took the script to them anyway and told them that they had until noon the next day to get back to him about it. When they asked for a few more days, he turned them down, saying that he needed to “get on with his life”. This was a ballsy move for a 32-year-old who was barely a household name, let alone a Hollywood mogul, but it worked.
“I swear to God,” he said. “A minute after noon on Friday, [Orion vice president] Mike Medavoy called and said okay.”
It turned out to be a boon for everyone involved. Bull Durham was a grown-up take on baseball, following a love triangle between a veteran player, a rookie (Tim Robbins), and a fan (Susan Sarandon). On a budget of $9 million, it pulled in $50m. It also paved the way for Dances with Wolves, which Orion financed and which helped rescue the company from bankruptcy.
