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Kevin Costner didn’t become an Oscar-winning director by being a pushover. He is a notoriously headstrong Hollywood player, and he doesn’t have to be directing to exert his influence. There’s a great story about Costner butting heads with director Roger Donaldson over a bit of staging while shooting “No Way Out,” and how that reignited Gene Hackman’s desire for acting. It’s not often advisable or appropriate to undercut your director in front of the crew, but sometimes it produces a happy result.
But there’s a time and a place, and that time and place is rarely the press tour in support of the movie you should want to be a major hit. The trouble with speaking out this late in the game is that there’s nothing to be done; lots of people have a good deal riding on the film’s potential success, so inveighing against some shortcoming or perceived slight from one’s bully pulpit can come across as a distraction or outright abusive.
This is the situation Costner found himself in while promoting Sam Raimi’s “For Love of the Game” (one of the 30 best baseball movies according to /Film), and it was problematic enough to force Universal Pictures to hurl a brushback pitch at its star.
Universal wanted to keep For Love of the Game family friendly
In the build-up to the release of “For Love of the Game,” Costner sat down for an interview with Newsweek and aired his displeasure about cuts that were made to the film to appease the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings board (back when the MPA was still the MPAA). As the star told the once-readable magazine (via the Los Angeles Times):
“For Universal, this movie has always been about the length and the rating. It’s never been about the content. You feel a studio would want to release the best version of the movie, not the one they think appeals to the biggest common denominator. […] Universal wasn’t even willing to try [to fight the MPAA]. They said it wouldn’t do any good. The love of the movies, I believe, is waning [in Hollywood].”
But, hey, come see my new movie!
Costner’s issue was with Universal trimming one use of the f-word, which was necessary to procure a PG-13 rating from the notoriously conservative board. The original cut of the film had two uses of the word, which is an automatic R. That one of those utterances had a sexual meaning (“I don’t f*** like that”) rendered the dispute moot, because you can’t use that word in that manner in a PG-13 movie under any circumstances. This is something a veteran of the industry like Costner should’ve known before he groused to the media.
Then Universal chairwoman Stacey Snider knew this, and was unstinting in her response to Costner. “Kevin’s not the director and it’s not fair for him to hijack a $50-million asset,” said Snider. “I realize this is very much about principle for Kevin, but principle doesn’t mean that you never compromise. Our feeling is that we have backed the filmmaker and his name is Sam Raimi, not Kevin Costner.”
For the record, an R-rated Costner cut of “For the Love of the Game” has never surfaced, so we shall consider the matter settled in the favor of Snider and the MPA. Whether that’s a good thing might very well depend on how you f***.