October 12, 2007

Phil Alden Robinson
Visits for Alumni Writers Series

The first guest writer for Writers Return: The 2007-08 Alumni Writers Series was Phil Alden Robinson '71, acclaimed director and screenwriter. At two well-attended events on October 12 and 13 during Homecoming, Robinson provided a delightfully witty insider's look at the film industry and recalled fondly his years at Union as a Political Science major who also worked at WRUC and Channel 6.

In an evening presentation at the Nott, Robinson discussed the nine-year journey from idea to completed movie for Sneakers, which he co-wrote and directed. During those nine years, he also worked on other screenplays in order to make a living. He described how he and his co-writer did numerous drafts of Sneakers. One of those contained the minimal number of scenes to make the movie intelligible, but another "maximum" draft contained every viable idea and scene taken from every other draft. The final screenplay struck a happy medium between the two extreme drafts.

The title of the movie derives from "sneakers" -- people whose job it is to check security systems, particularly those involving computers. Robinson told how someone played a practical joke on him during the filming and sent a supposed "agent" from the federal government who said that the movie was revealing national security secrets and so had to be shut down and scrapped. To this day, Robinson does not know who played the joke, but it certainly worried him for a while.

In Sneakers and in Robinson's work as a whole, one sees the broader themes of males bonding both within and across generations. Robinson deals with everymen who are called to deal with extraordinary situations, like agent Jack Ryan in The Sum of All Fears (a film that Robinson directed) who must act during a terrorist attack. But Robinson is probably best known for adapting W.P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe into the screenplay Field of Dreams and then directing the film. At a Q & A brunch at Wold House on October 13, Robinson was asked whether he had foreseen the huge success of Field of Dreams. No, he replied. He was "gobsmacked" by it. While making the film, he sometimes felt extremely discouraged and thought it wasn't working at all. In fact, when the men who were going to write the music came to see an early cut, and one left the room immediately after the screening, Robinson thought the film was so terrible that the man had fled for good. Actually, the man had been moved to tears. Robinson also told a funny story about sneaking into a cinema to see Field of Dreams with an audience, since, by the time it was finished, he had no perspective on it. He sat behind of a couple, and the man didn't think much of the film, but the woman said, "This movie is going to win the Grammy for Best Picture!" Indeed, the film was nominated for three Oscars.

Robinson has won many well-deserved awards, including the Christophers Award, the Humanitas Prize, Premiere Magazine's Readers Poll for Best Picture of 1989 for Field of Dreams, a Writers Guild Award, three NAACP Image Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Sound Editors Golden Reel Award, the San Francisco Film Society's Golden Gate Award, a National Association of Minorities in Communications Image Award, and an Emmy for Best Directing of a Miniseries, Movie or Dramatic Special.

Robinson's fellow alumnus and friend Robert Saltzman has a website devoted to Robinson and his visit to Union. Please visit the site by clicking here

Report and photo of Phil Robinson courtesy of April Selley