What James Earl Jones Fans Don't Know About The Legend
By Matthew Martinez
One of James Earl Jones' most memorable film moments comes in 1989's Field of Dreams. The film's hero is Ray (Kevin Costner), a man who receives an inexplicable vision of a baseball diamond built in the middle of his cornfield. And Jones plays Terence Mann, a radical author whose books Ray read when he was younger and of whom both Ray and his wife, Annie (Amy Madigan), have dreams. Mann wants nothing to do with Ray at first, and Ray kidnaps him, pretending he has a gun, but eventually the writer comes to believe in the miracle of the baseball field and the friendly ghosts emerging from the corn.
Mann then delivers a powerful speech toward the end of the film, telling Ray, "America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again." It was powerful enough that sports commentator Vin Scully recited the speech to mark a North American tour of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2016.
And it almost didn't happen.
On the 25th anniversary of Field of Dreams, Jones admitted to The Hollywood Reporter that he had some serious concerns about the film and that it was ultimately his late wife, Cecilia Hart, who convinced him to take the role. Fittingly, Hart proved just as bad at predicting the future as her husband when she warned him that his monologue would never make it into the final cut of the film.
