Turns out, John Dutton has a sense of humor.
After comedian John Mulaney had some fun with the plot of Field of Dreams as he introduced the award for Best Sound at the Oscars on Sunday, Costner took to the social media account of his band, Kevin Costner & Modern West, retweeted a video of Mulaney’s bit and wrote, “Not a bad summary 😂.”
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Not that Costner doesn’t take the film seriously.
In 2021, he took part in the very earnest Field of Dreams MLB game in Iowa, which was set in a special-purpose stadium built near the original movie set.
At a pre-game press conference, Costner admitted he still felt an emotional connection with the Field of Dreams film 32 years after its debut.
“I’m moved by it. I am,” he said “Somewhere along the line, if you have some unfinished business, that movie starts to take over.”
Mulaney on Sunday was less reverent, walking through the film’s plot which, admittedly sounds hokey without the magic of cinema.
“For years, movies didn’t have sound, and then they figured it out. Some people say that the silent era was the golden era of film — these people are difficult and insane,” began Mulaney.
“Without sound we wouldn’t have been able to hear such classic lines as ‘You’re going to need a bigger boat,’ ‘I’ll have what she’s having,’ and, ‘He was in the Amazon with my mother when she was researching spiders just before she died,’ ” he continued, referencing Jaws, When Harry Met Sally and, more bitingly, last month’s Madame Web.
“Or what about that moment in Field of Dreams where we hear, ‘If you build it, he will come,’ and then Costner does it, he builds a baseball field,” said Mulaney. “Or I guess he doesn’t build it — he mows down corn, and then there is a field and he’s like, ‘I’m going to watch ghosts play baseball,’ and the bank is like, ‘You wanna pay your mortgage?’ And he’s like, ‘Nah, I’m gonna watch ghosts play baseball.’ “
“And then he finds James Earl Jones, who wrote The Boat Rocker, which I thought was a real book deep into my 20s, and he’s like, ‘People will come, Ray,’ — he’s the only one with a financial plan,” Mulaney added. “But what’s weird is Timothy Busfield pushes little Gaby Hoffmann off the bleachers and she falls down and she’s unconscious.”
“He comes up and he pats her on the back a couple of times and he’s like, ‘Hot dog, stuck in the throat,’ and then he can’t go back in the game,” Mulaney joked. “Because I guess there’s a rule in ghost baseball that if you leave the field at any point to become an elderly ghost and do the Heimlich maneuver, you can’t return to the field.”
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