The Terrific 1987 Baseball Comedy-Drama Long Gone Is So Much More Than Just a Minor Footnote in the Bull Durham Story
The delightful surprises continue with 1987’s Long Gone, an HBO television movie that would probably be dismissed as a Bull Durham wannabe if it didn’t come out a year before Ron Shelton’s beloved baseball comedy or adapt a 1979 novel. If anything, Bull Durham might have stolen from Long Gone, since Shelton attended its premiere and, according to Madsen at least, jotted down notes of all things he wanted to “borrow" for his cult baseball sex comedy.
It makes sense that Long Gone would have its roots in the late Jimmy Carter years because its gleeful profanity, candor about race, sex and class and unabashedly adult nature mark it as a welcome throwback to the raunchy sports comedies of the 1970s.
Like the best sports comedies, Long Gone is fundamentally a human story about complicated, multi-dimensional and sensitively realized characters who just happen to be athletes.
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