[LeslieMoran]

This article is all over the place, but the idea of Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, Tin Cup) doing a movie about Q school sounds pretty cool.

Where Are the Good Golf Movies?

By JOHN PAUL NEWPORT

For a sport with a great literature, golf has not inspired a bounty of great films. The most famous, "Caddyshack," is social satire. Its golf scenes are funny only because Bill Murray, Chevy Chase and Ted Knight are funny; the movie isn't really very interested in the game of golf itself. The same goes for "Happy Gilmore," one of only four golf movies ever to have sold more than $20 million in tickets at the domesticbox office. It stars Adam Sandler as a hockey-player-turned-golfer and is best known for the scene in which Mr. Sandler smacks game-show host Bob Barker upside the head.
That leaves "Tin Cup" and "The Legend of Bagger Vance" as the only commercial successes plausibly about golf itself. And the main reason they succeeded, it seems, is because the movie makers cleverly figured out ways to minimize their golfiness.

"You have to have characters for people who can't imagine playing golf, or worse yet, watching golf on TV, or worse even than that, listening to men talk about golf. The best way to clear out any room in America is to talk about how guys hit their three iron," said Ron Shelton, the man who co-wrote and directed "Tin Cup."
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I spoke with Mr. Shelton over lunch the other day at Riviera Country Club here, along with several others trying to get a project in motion: a new movie called "Q School," set at the PGA Tour's excruciating year-end qualifying tournament. But golf movies are a tough sell.

Partly that's because so much of the tension and excitement that people who play the game experience is internal, and thus hard to dramatize. "The way we handled that in 'Tin Cup' was to lead up to a mano-a-mano gunfight at the end," Mr. Shelton said. The title character, played by Kevin Costner, was a talented but derelict golf pro who tries to qualify for the U.S. Open. "We've established his character, so the audience wonders if he's going to self-destruct. Can he hold it together for 72 holes? He doesn't, but the audience doesn't know how things will go wrong."

Another challenge is that, though golf courses can be beautiful in person, they tend to feel static in the context of a movie, and the pace of play is languid. "It's the slowest game to shoot by far. In sports movies, you've got to keep the game moving. It's got to be visually interesting, but golf is not on film."

It's also hard to find actors who can swing convincingly. In "Follow the Sun," a 1951 film about starring Glenn Ford as Ben Hogan, Mr. Hogan himself served as a double for the golf scenes, but those sequences were shot from so far away that they lost verisimilitude. "Tin Cup" featured cameos by 35 Tour pros, and Mr. Costner was tutored extensively by Gary McCord and Peter Kostis. "But we could never get Kevin to finish a swing right, so we had to turn that into a plot device," Mr. Shelton said. The solution was presenting the swing as one tailored to get the job done in windy West Texas, where the character came from.

The two actors attached to the "Q School" project so far are Dennis Quaid and Tim Allen. Mr. Quaid is a good golfer, but his swing is probably a bit too "scoopy," in the opinion of some, to pass for Tour quality. No problem, since he will be playing a former baseball superstar trying to make it on Tour. Mr. Allen, portraying a blue-collar club pro from Indiana, will need a swing double, Mr. Shelton said. "You can teach anybody to set up over the ball correctly, but it's harder than you'd think to teach nongolfers how to put the tee in the ground in just the right way, or to lean on their putters. Those things matter."

You might think, given the auspices of "Q School," that it would sail into production. The producer is David Friendly ("Big Momma's House," "Dr. Dolittle," "Little Miss Sunshine"); Mr. Shelton's credits include "Bull Durham" (baseball) and "White Men Can't Jump" with Woody Harrelson (basketball).

But the major studios are risk-averse these days. "The only thing they feel safe bankrolling are obvious concepts like 'Transformers' or 'Batman.' And golf movies aren't obvious," said Mr. Friendly. The studios are also concerned that golf movies don't have enough appeal overseas, even though, as Mr. Friendly pointed out, the game is booming in Asia and is headed for the Olympics in 2016. There are other golf movies in development, including one based on Rick Reilly's novel "Missing Links," is being developed, for actor Steve Carell.

Messrs. Shelton and Friendly feel that the inherent drama of Q School—entire careers depend on the outcome of a single shot—makes it the perfect setting for a golf movie. But to help their cause, Mr. Shelton and his writing partner, John Norville, have sexed up the plot. There's a bombshell 17-year-old girl with a stage father trying to become the first female to qualify for the Tour (any resemblance to Michelle Wie is entirely conjectural), several studly young pros, one with a gorgeous mother for Mr. Quaid to pal around with, and a charismatic young Asian player with distinct similarities to the 18-year-old Japanese sensation Ryo Ishikawa.
"You have to make their plights universal," said Mr. Shelton. "That's the secret." Alongwith not talking about how to hit a three iron.