The Natural

Roy Hobbs is a fictional character from The Natural.

Release date:1984

Directed by:Barry Levinson

Rated:

Runtime:137 minutes

The Natural is a 1984 film adaptation of Bernard Malamud's 1952 baseball novel of the same name, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Robert Redford, Glenn Close and Robert Duvall. The film, like the book, recounts the experiences of Roy Hobbs, an individual with great "natural" baseball talent,... spanning decades of Roy's success and his suffering. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actress , and nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress . Many of the baseball scenes were filmed in Buffalo, New York's War Memorial Stadium, built in 1937 and demolished a few years after the film was produced. Buffalo's All-High Stadium stood in for Chicago's Wrigley Field in a key scene. It was the first film produced by TriStar Pictures. A young Roy Hobbs plays baseball with his father on the family farm. Roy's father dies suddenly under a tree. That tree is split in half by lightning, and Roy carves a baseball bat from it. He burns a lightning bolt on the barrel and calls it Wonderboy. In 1923, a 19-year old Hobbs is granted a tryout by the Chicago Cubs as a pitcher.
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A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and... in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century. Further definition of the genre is historically difficult. The construction of the narrative, the plot, the way reality is created in the works of fiction, the fascination of the character study, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history. The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements , a characteristic subject matter that creates both intimacy and a typical epic depth can be seen as features that developed with the Western market of fiction. The separation of a field of histories from a field of literary fiction fueled the evolution of these features in the last 400 years.
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