"They said the movie was the problem. They were wrong. The Giants were the problem."
In 1996, Tony Scott — God rest his soul, the man could direct a car chase better than anyone alive — called me up and said he had a script. A baseball script. A man named Gil Renard. A knife salesman from San Francisco. Obsessed with the Giants. Specifically obsessed with a player named Bobby Rayburn, played by Wesley Snipes, who I will say was an absolute professional and also could actually run the bases in a way I could not convincingly fake without about four hundred takes.
I said yes. I read the script. I said yes again. We made the movie.
And then the San Francisco Giants, the team that LET US film at their stadium, at Candlestick Park, in the fog and the wind and the general misery that is watching baseball in San Francisco in any month that isn't July — they turned around and said they wished the movie hadn't been made.
Thirty years. THIRTY YEARS and they're still talking about it. You know what that means? It means the movie mattered. It means Gil Renard got under their skin in a way that three World Series championships apparently couldn't fix.
You're welcome, San Francisco.
The Fan was not a baseball movie. Let me be very clear about this because the critics at the time seemed genuinely confused. The Fan was a movie about obsession. About what happens when a man's entire identity collapses and the only thing left holding him together is a baseball team that doesn't know he exists.
Gil Renard was not a villain. Gil Renard was a warning. He was what happens when you let sports be the thing that defines you. When you let a jersey number mean more than your own name. When the fortunes of twenty-five men playing a children's game become the measure of whether your life has value.
That's not a baseball problem. That's a human problem. I just happened to play it out at Candlestick Park.
Yes. The box office was not what we hoped. The critics were not kind. Roger Ebert gave it two stars and said something I've chosen not to remember. But here's what I know: every single person who saw that movie thought twice the next time they screamed at a stranger in a baseball uniform. That's worth something. That's called art doing its job.
The Giants just didn't want to be the backdrop for that particular lesson. Which is ironic, because nobody embodied the chaos of San Francisco baseball in the 1990s quite like the Giants themselves.
Let me take you back to 1992. The San Francisco Giants were this close to becoming the Tampa Bay Giants. The ownership group had a deal. The city of Tampa had already BUILT the stadium — the Florida Suncoast Dome, fully constructed, fully operational, sitting there empty and waiting for a team that the National League refused to let move in. The National League had the votes. It was done. It was over. San Francisco was losing its baseball team and honestly? Looking back? That would have been the correct outcome for everyone involved.
Bob Lurie, who owned the Giants at the time, had spent years trying to get San Francisco to build him a stadium. YEARS. The city voted it down. Multiple times. The voters of San Francisco, a city that will spend eighteen dollars on a single artisanal pickle at a farmer's market, repeatedly refused to fund a baseball stadium because they apparently had better things to do.
The deal fell through because the National League owners blocked it at the last minute, Lurie sold the team to Peter Magowan's group instead, and San Francisco got to keep pretending it cared about baseball while continuing to vote against stadiums and complaining about the fog at Candlestick.
Tampa Bay is a legitimate baseball market. I know this is not a popular opinion in certain coastal cities that shall remain nameless. I know the Rays have spent thirty years playing in a stadium that looks like someone built a dome over a parking garage dispute. I know the attendance numbers. I know all of it.
But here is what you need to understand about Tampa Bay and the Giants deal: the Florida Suncoast Dome was not a plan. It was not a proposal. It was not a rendering on some architect's drafting table. The Suncoast Dome was a fully constructed, fully operational stadium that was already sitting there, empty, waiting for a baseball team to move in.
They built the stadium first. Without a team. On speculation. Because they believed that if they built it, baseball would come. That is either the most optimistic civic act in the history of American sports infrastructure or the most heartbreaking one, depending on how you feel about the National League owners who blocked the Giants move in 1992.
The Suncoast Dome opened in 1990. It sat empty for years, hosting conventions and concerts and monster truck rallies, waiting. San Francisco voted down stadium measures. Tampa Bay waited. Bob Lurie tried to sell the Giants to a Tampa ownership group. The deal was essentially done. And then the National League voted to block it, Lurie sold to Peter Magowan's local group instead, and the Florida Suncoast Dome went back to waiting.
It eventually became Tropicana Field when the expansion Tampa Bay Devil Rays arrived in 1998. By which point the stadium had been waiting for a baseball tenant for eight years. Eight years of empty seats and monster truck exhaust when it could have had Barry Bonds — excuse me, Bobby Rayburn — hitting home runs into the upper deck.
San Francisco earned their team through geographical luck and a last-minute billionaire rescue. Tampa Bay built an entire stadium on faith and got nothing for it for eight years. Those are not the same thing. One of those cities deserved a baseball team more than the other and it was not the one with the artisanal pickles.
If the Giants had moved to Tampa Bay in 1992, here is what would have happened:
Tampa Bay would have gotten a team with actual history, actual tradition, actual Hall of Famers in the lineage. Not an expansion franchise playing in a dome that smells like 1990. A real team. The Tampa Bay Giants. Barry Bonds would have played in Florida. Think about that for a moment.
And San Francisco? San Francisco would have eventually gotten an expansion team, built a beautiful stadium on the waterfront — which they did anyway with AT&T Park, or Oracle Park, or whatever they're calling it this week — and started fresh without all the baggage of the Candlestick years.
Everyone wins. Nobody makes a movie about an unhinged knife salesman. The Giants never have to be uncomfortable at film premieres.
I'm going to say something that is going to make Giants fans very angry and I want them to know that I have been making people very angry since 1973 and I am completely comfortable with this.
The Oakland Athletics were the Bay Area's legitimate baseball franchise. Full stop. End of essay. Go home.
The A's won three consecutive World Series championships from 1972 to 1974. THREE. IN A ROW. That is a dynasty. That is what a real baseball organization looks like. Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, Joe Rudi, Rollie Fingers with the most magnificent mustache in the history of professional sports. The Bash Brothers in the late eighties. The Moneyball era that literally changed how every team in baseball thinks about player valuation.
Meanwhile the Giants spent the 1970s being mediocre, the 1980s being slightly less mediocre, and the early 1990s being so bad their owner tried to sell them to Tampa Bay. At least he was honest about it.
The A's are gone now. Las Vegas. They packed up and left because nobody — not the city, not the county, not the state, not the other Bay Area teams, not the league — could figure out how to build them a stadium. A city that produced three World Series dynasties couldn't keep its baseball team.
Meanwhile the Giants are still in San Francisco, playing in a beautiful waterfront stadium, having won three championships in the 2010s, acting like they were always the rightful inheritors of Bay Area baseball.
They weren't. They were the team that almost left. They were saved by money and circumstance and stayed to eventually overshadow the team that had ACTUALLY won the championships. The team that actually built something.
That's not a sports story. That's a Robert De Niro movie. It's got obsession, identity, a city that doesn't know what it has until it's gone, and a villain who turns out to be the system itself.
Tony Scott would have loved it. We'd have shot the whole thing at the Oakland Coliseum. I'd have played an obsessed A's fan screaming into the fog across the bay at a Giants team that never deserved to be there.
The Giants still would have wished I hadn't made it.
Let me address the elephant in the room. The very large, very talented, very complicated elephant who hit 762 home runs and had a head circumference that changed measurably between 1993 and 2001.
Bobby Rayburn — the character Wesley Snipes played, the superstar outfielder who switches his number, who forgets the fans, who becomes unreachable and untouchable and wrapped in his own mythology — was not based on Barry Bonds. The writers will tell you that. The studio will tell you that. Everyone involved in the production will swear up and down that Bobby Rayburn was a composite, a fictional construction, a dramatic device.
They are lying. Bobby Rayburn was Barry Bonds with the serial numbers filed off and honestly not even that well.
The number switch was the tell. In the movie, Bobby Rayburn wants number 11. Number 11 belongs to Juan Primo. Primo is not going to give it up. And so Gil Renard — who has decided that Bobby Rayburn getting number 11 is the most important thing in the world, more important than a man's life — murders Juan Primo. He kills him. That is how Rayburn gets the number. That is the engine that drives the entire movie. Gil Renard committed murder over a jersey number and nobody knew it, and THAT is the knot the whole film ties itself around. That specific storyline — a man so consumed by his idol's desires that he eliminates the obstacle without being asked, without acknowledgment, without any possibility of reward — that is the darkest possible expression of parasocial fandom. And it maps onto the Barry Bonds archetype perfectly. Because Bonds inspired exactly that kind of irrational, total, all-consuming devotion in a certain kind of fan. The kind of fan who didn't just want Bonds to succeed. The kind who needed it. Whose entire identity depended on it. Gil Renard was that fan. Juan Primo was in the way. The rest is a crime film dressed as a baseball movie.
Wesley played it beautifully, by the way. He gave Rayburn a complexity that the Barry Bonds comparison almost undersells. Because Bonds was legitimately one of the greatest baseball players who ever lived, and that greatness came wrapped in a thorny, difficult, magnificent package that nobody in San Francisco quite knew how to handle.
Including, eventually, a fictional knife salesman named Gil Renard.
Barry Bonds never acknowledged the comparison publicly. Barry Bonds also never acknowledged most things publicly. Which, again, is very on brand for Bobby Rayburn. So we've come full circle.
I'm not saying Barry Bonds is Gil Renard's fault. I'm saying Gil Renard would absolutely have been obsessed with Barry Bonds specifically, and the movie knew exactly what it was doing by setting it in San Francisco in the mid-nineties with that particular archetype of player at the center of it.
The Giants wished I hadn't made the movie. Barry Bonds has never said anything about it one way or the other. Which tells you everything you need to know about both of them.
What I'm about to describe is the greatest baseball movie never made. It existed in draft form somewhere between the first table read and the moment a sixteen-year-old with a lawyer ruined everything. It was beautiful. It was ridiculous. It would have made $400 million dollars and been remembered forever. And it was killed by a kid who now looks like Joe Burrow left in a drawer for fifteen years, which is a sentence I never expected to write but here we are.
Let me tell you about The Alternate Fan.
The key pivot point — the hinge on which the entire alternate timeline swings — is simple. In this version, Gil Renard never picks up the knife. Instead, the Giants front office, doing what Giants front offices do, makes a baffling mid-season trade. Juan Primo — whose number 11 Bobby Rayburn wants, whose continued existence on the roster is the source of all the tension — gets traded to the Cleveland Indians. In exchange for two players to be named later who turn out to be Pedro Cerrano and Rick "Wild Thing" Vaughn.
Primo goes to Cleveland. Primo is thrilled. Cleveland is ecstatic — they needed a shortstop and they got one without having to explain where he came from or why he was suddenly available. Number 11 is now available. Rayburn gets his number. Gil Renard, whose entire psychological spiral was predicated on removing the obstacle to Rayburn's happiness, suddenly has nothing to be rageful about.
Nobody dies. The knife stays in the kitchen drawer. Gil goes to the game. Gil has a hot dog. Gil watches his team play baseball like a normal person.
This is where the RomCom begins.
That's the movie. A man who in the original timeline committed murder for love of a baseball player instead argues about baseball with a woman he falls in love with. The knife is never used. The Giants are in a pennant race. Pedro Cerrano is hitting curveballs now because Jobu told him he could. Wild Thing is closing games but still occasionally uncorking one into the upper deck for reasons nobody can fully explain. And somewhere in Cleveland, Juan Primo is alive, playing shortstop, completely unaware that in the darker version of this story he was supposed to be dead.
This is the part Wesley Snipes refused to do and I maintain to this day he was both completely right and completely wrong simultaneously.
In the alternate version, getting number 11 unlocks something in Bobby Rayburn. He loosens up. He starts joking with teammates. He stops being the brooding, contractually obligated superstar and starts being — and this is the word the script used, I remember this specifically — "joyful."
By the middle of the second act, Rayburn is stealing bases he has no business stealing. He is doing celebration dances that his agent explicitly told him not to do in public. He is giving interviews where he says things like "I'm just out here having fun" which no $40 million dollar player had ever said in 1996 and meant. He has, functionally, become Willie Mays Hayes.
Wesley read the third act pages and called Tony Scott and said — paraphrasing, since my memory is unreliable — that he had spent the entire production building a specific, layered, psychologically complex character and he was not going to spend the back half of the movie doing pratfalls in a Giants uniform.
Tony said: it's not pratfalls, it's joy.
Wesley said: same thing.
The scene was cut. Rayburn stayed brooding. The dark timeline continued. Juan Primo remained, in the actual movie that got made, deceased.
This is my favorite scene in a movie that was never made and I think about it more than I probably should.
Midway through the second act, Gil takes Ellen to a bar. The Balboa Café, specifically, because Tony Scott loved that location. They sit down. They order drinks. They argue about baseball.
At the bar, on stools, nursing drinks with the specific studied casualness of men who have decided that being at a bar at 4pm on a Tuesday is a completely normal and dignified activity, are Jake Taylor and Roger Dorn. Retired. Both of them. Taylor's knees finally gave out. Dorn made some money in real estate and lost most of it and is now in San Francisco for reasons he describes differently every time someone asks. They are hitting on every woman within a twelve-stool radius with the absolute unearned confidence of men who were once professional athletes and have decided this fact remains permanently relevant regardless of what year it is.
Taylor and Dorn serve no plot function whatsoever. They are there because Tom Berenger and Corbin Bernsen were available for two days and Tony Scott thought it would be funny and he was correct. They appear in three scenes, each time at a different bar, always on stools, always failing to impress women in ways that are deeply uncomfortable and also extremely funny, and then they disappear from the movie without explanation.
In the final scene, during the World Series celebration, they are visible in the background of the crowd. Dorn is trying to get on camera. Taylor is watching Dorn try to get on camera with the expression of a man who accepted his fate sometime around 1989 and has been at peace with it ever since.
It was perfect. It was stupid. It was exactly what a RomCom baseball movie needed and the world was robbed of it.
Here is something the dark timeline never got to explore: what happens to Gil Renard when his team acquires Ricky "Wild Thing" Vaughn.
In the original film, Gil's obsession is singular and focused. Bobby Rayburn. Number 11. Everything else is noise. The darkness of that obsession is what makes the movie work and also what makes it a movie the Giants have spent thirty years wishing didn't exist.
But in the alternate timeline — where Primo lives, where the knife stays in the drawer, where Gil is sitting in section 42 arguing with Ellen about whether Rayburn is overrated — the Giants make the trade. Pedro Cerrano arrives. Jobu arrives in Cerrano's locker. And Rick "Wild Thing" Vaughn walks into Candlestick Park wearing a Giants uniform and Gil Renard absolutely loses his entire mind.
Not in the dark way. In the pure, uncut, unmedicated way of a man who grew up watching Major League and has just seen his two baseball universes collide. Gil Renard does not need a knife. Gil Renard needs a foam finger and possibly a change of pants.
Wild Thing becomes the emotional center of Gil's redemption arc in a way that Bobby Rayburn — remote, untouchable, professionally obligated to be mysterious — never could have been. Vaughn is chaos. Vaughn is accessible. Vaughn is a guy who throws hundred-mile-an-hour fastballs and also occasionally has no idea where they're going, and that combination of sublime talent and fundamental human unreliability is something Gil Renard understands in his bones.
The knife salesman and the wild reliever. Both of them operating at the absolute limit of their abilities. Both of them capable of greatness and disaster in the same motion.
Charlie Sheen not being available in 1996 is, cinematically, one of the great losses of the decade. I will not elaborate further on why Charlie Sheen was not available in 1996.
Here is where the alternate timeline gets genuinely operatic.
Midway through the pennant race, the Giants' owner — a cold, calculating woman whose name the script rendered as "Mrs. Brennan" but who was coded with unmistakable clarity as a certain type of ownership figure that baseball has occasionally produced — announces that she has been in negotiations to move the Giants to Tampa Bay.
Not because the team is losing. The team is winning. Cerrano is hitting. Wild Thing is closing. Rayburn, loosened up and joyful, is having the best season of his career. The Giants are in a pennant race and drawing crowds and none of that matters because Mrs. Brennan has done the math and the math says Tampa Bay pays more.
Tampa Bay, you will recall, already has a fully built dome sitting there. The Florida Suncoast Dome. Empty. Waiting. Having been waiting since 1990 for a team that keeps almost arriving and then doesn't. Mrs. Brennan looks at that empty dome and sees a deal.
The city of San Francisco, which had voted down stadium measures repeatedly, which had told Bob Lurie for years that it didn't want to pay for baseball, suddenly discovers that it wants baseball very badly indeed now that someone is threatening to take it away. This is extremely on-brand for San Francisco and the script called it out directly in dialogue that did not make the final cut because it was considered too mean about San Francisco, which tells you something about whose money was financing the film.
The move hinges on the World Series. If the Giants lose, the deal goes through. Mrs. Brennan has structured it that way, deliberately, because she is that specific kind of villain: competent, legally protected, and utterly without sentiment about a game that means everything to everyone else in the movie.
The World Series. Giants versus Indians. Cleveland.
Think about what that means for a moment. The Giants, who acquired Pedro Cerrano and Rick "Wild Thing" Vaughn FROM Cleveland in exchange for Juan Primo, are now playing Cleveland IN the World Series. Primo is on the other side. The man who is only alive because he got traded instead of murdered is now the shortstop for the team standing between the Giants and a championship.
The script understood exactly what it was doing. This was not an accident.
Game 7. Ninth inning. Giants trailing by one. Wild Thing is called in from the bullpen.
In the stands, Gil Renard is standing. He has been standing since the seventh inning. Ellen is standing next to him. Jake Taylor and Roger Dorn are somewhere in the lower deck — Dorn got tickets through a connection he refuses to explain, Taylor came because Dorn asked and Taylor always comes when Dorn asks despite everything. The crowd is fifty thousand people who have decided, collectively, that this moment is the most important thing that has ever happened.
Jobu has been moved from Cerrano's locker to the dugout railing. Nobody questioned this. Nobody questions Jobu.
Wild Thing warms up. The first warmup pitch hits the backstop. Gil Renard, in the stands, does not flinch. He has seen this before. He knows what comes next.
The Giants score two in the bottom of the ninth to take the lead. Now Wild Thing needs three outs.
He gets the first two on five pitches. One of them nearly decapitates the third base umpire. Jobu remains expressionless on the dugout railing.
Then Juan Primo steps into the batter's box.
The crowd goes quiet in the specific way crowds go quiet when something is happening that everyone can feel but nobody can name yet. Gil Renard, in section 42, grabs Ellen's hand without thinking about it. She doesn't let go.
Juan Primo digs in. He looks out at Wild Thing. Wild Thing looks in at Primo. The catcher gives the sign.
Here is what Juan Primo knows that nobody else in that stadium knows: he is only standing in this batter's box because someone in the Giants front office made a trade. He is only alive — in this timeline, in this story, in this version of events — because the knife stayed in the drawer. He got traded to Cleveland instead of murdered for a jersey number, and now he is the last out standing between the Giants and the World Series championship that will keep them in San Francisco and foil the evil lady owner and deny Tampa Bay for the second time in four years.
He knows none of this consciously. He just knows he needs to get a hit.
Juan Primo stands at the plate for one moment after the swing. He doesn't argue. He doesn't look at the umpire. He looks out at Ricky Vaughn, who is being mobbed by his teammates, and something crosses his face that the script described as "a man who just understood something he didn't know he needed to understand."
He tips his helmet. Very slightly. To nobody in particular. To the game itself, maybe.
Then he walks back to the Cleveland dugout, and the Giants pile on top of each other, and Jobu is somehow in the middle of the celebration, and nobody can explain that either.
Gil catches a foul ball from the celebration. Turns to hand it to a kid behind him. Ellen is there instead. The Giants have won the World Series. The franchise stays in San Francisco. Ricky Vaughn, who could not reliably find the strike zone for the entire regular season, found it exactly when it mattered. Against the only man in baseball who fully understood the weight of what just happened.
Jobu gets the credit. Nobody disputes this.
Here is what the alternate timeline understands that the original story — by design, faithfully, correctly for what that story was trying to be — could not allow.
Baseball is supposed to lift us up.
That is what it was designed to do. Not just entertain. Not just produce statistics for people to argue about. It was designed to be the thing a city rallies around. The thing that makes strangers in section 42 argue with each other and then, gradually, care about each other. The thing that gives a knife salesman whose life has come apart something to believe in that isn't destructive.
The original Fan is a masterwork about what happens when that function breaks down. When the lift becomes a trap. When the love of the game curdles into something that requires a body count. Gil Renard loved baseball so completely, so totally, so without any other anchor in his life, that the love became indistinguishable from obsession and the obsession became indistinguishable from violence. That is a true story about a real thing that happens. The book understood it. The movie understood it. The Giants understood it and wished we hadn't made it quite so vividly at their stadium.
The alternate Fan is about the same love, differently routed.
Same Gil Renard. Same knife in the same drawer. Same Giants, same Rayburn, same desperate need for the team to win and the number to be right and the world to make sense through the lens of a baseball season. But in the alternate timeline, the trade happens instead of the murder. Juan Primo goes to Cleveland instead of the morgue. The knife stays put. And all that love — all that enormous, unmanageable, potentially catastrophic love for a baseball team — gets redirected into something that doesn't require anyone to get hurt.
It goes into arguing with Ellen about whether Rayburn is overrated. It goes into crying in section 42 when Wild Thing walks out of the bullpen in a Giants uniform. It goes into standing up in Game 7 and believing, completely, that this man with the thick glasses and the unpredictable fastball is going to save the franchise from an owner who doesn't love it the way Gil loves it.
The love was never the problem. The love was always the point.
The original story didn't have room for that. It was too busy being honest about what happens when the love has nowhere to go. That's not a failure of the original. That's what made it worth making. That's what made the Giants uncomfortable for thirty years — not the violence, but the recognition.
The alternate timeline is the mercy version. The one where Gil gets to be saved by the same thing that destroyed him in the other story. Where baseball does what baseball is supposed to do.
Where the knife salesman gets the girl, Wild Thing saves the franchise, Jobu gets the credit, and Juan Primo watches all of it from Cleveland, alive, eating black beans, feeling fine.
That movie deserved to exist.
Macaulay Culkin, who now looks like Joe Burrow aging in a wine cellar, made sure it didn't.
Some timelines are lost forever. That one should have been ours.
Joe Pesci — my friend, my collaborator, the man I have made several very good movies with and whose judgment I respect in almost every area except this specific one — became convinced during pre-production that the funniest possible addition to the Alternate Fan was Harry Lime and Marv Merchants, the Wet Bandits from Home Alone, running a concession stand theft operation at Candlestick Park.
I want to stress that this idea has a certain internal logic if you've had enough to drink. Harry and Marv are petty criminals. Stadium concession stands have cash. Joe was not wrong that these two facts could theoretically intersect. He was wrong about everything else.
The specific legal problem was Macaulay Culkin. Who was sixteen. Who had lawyers. Who sent word through channels that the Wet Bandits could not appear in any film without Kevin McAllister also appearing to defeat them, because that was the established and inviolable narrative law of the Home Alone universe and Macaulay Culkin was prepared to litigate this position indefinitely.
Nobody wanted Macaulay Culkin at Candlestick Park. This was not a Home Alone movie. Kevin McAllister had no business being at a Giants game in 1996 defeating Joe Pesci with a funnel cake and a strategically placed bag of peanuts while Gil Renard watched from section 42 and fell in love with a woman who was wrong about Bobby Rayburn.
The subplot was cut. Joe was unhappy for three weeks and then moved on. The Wet Bandits were not involved in any baseball-related crime in 1996. The RomCom died. The dark thriller lived. Juan Primo, in the actual movie, did not survive. The Giants still wish we hadn't made it.
All because of a sixteen-year-old who now looks like an NFL quarterback aging in reverse.
Some timelines are lost forever. In the best one, Juan Primo is alive in Cleveland, the Giants win the World Series, Gil Renard gets the girl, and Jake Taylor and Roger Dorn are at a bar somewhere in San Francisco being exactly who they are.
That timeline deserved to exist.
The novel The Fan was written by Peter Abrahams and published in 1995. In the book, the team is the Chicago White Sox. The obsessed fan is Gil Renard. The superstar player is Bobby Rayburn. The psychological darkness is identical.
When Tony Scott brought the project to me, one of the first questions I asked was: why are we changing it to San Francisco? The book is set in Chicago. The White Sox are right there. They have history, they have Comiskey Park — which they were already ruining with the new stadium — they have a perfectly good mid-market baseball tragedy available for our purposes.
Tony Scott looked at me and said something I have thought about many times since.
I want to be clear that this is a direct quote. Those were his exact words. Tony Scott, one of the finest visual directors of his generation, a man who made Top Gun and True Romance and Crimson Tide, reduced the entire question of location scouting to that single sentence.
And he was not wrong.
San Francisco in 1996 was electric. The city was at the beginning of the first tech boom. Money was moving in. The culture was shifting. Candlestick Park sat out there on the bay like a concrete monument to civic stubbornness, cold and windy and completely unpleasant to watch baseball in, which made it perfect for a movie about obsession and misery.
Chicago in 1996 had the new Comiskey Park, which looked like someone had designed a baseball stadium by committee after the committee had never seen a baseball stadium. It had no atmosphere. It had no fog. It had no bay. It had a white roof that Tony Scott looked at once in location photos and rejected immediately.
And with the greatest respect to the city of Chicago, which has given the world many extraordinary things — deep dish pizza, the blues, the architectural school that defined American cities, Mike Ditka — the White Sox in 1996 were not a team that inspired the kind of unhinged devotion that drives a man to the edge of sanity and over it.
The Cubs, maybe. The Cubs have a fan base that understands suffering at a cellular level, a devotion that persists through decade after decade of spectacular failure in ways that the clinical psychologists who study sports fandom find genuinely remarkable. A Cubs fan version of Gil Renard would have been perfectly plausible.
But the White Sox? The White Sox fans are a perfectly reasonable group of people who watch baseball in a perfectly reasonable stadium on the south side of Chicago and go home at a perfectly reasonable hour. That is not the energy of The Fan. That is the energy of a commuter rail schedule.
San Francisco was right. Tony Scott was right. Candlestick was right. The Giants were the correct team for this story even if they were, in every other sense, the wrong team for the Bay Area.
And no one fucking cares about the Chicago White Sox. Tony said it. I'm standing behind it. He's not here to defend himself so I'm defending it for him.
Sorry, Chicago. You know it's true.
Here is what nobody wants to say about Gil Renard: he was right about one thing.
Not the murder. Not the obsession. Not the knife. I want to be very clear that I am not endorsing the knife. The knife was a choice that Gil made that I, Robert DeNiro, personally would not have made in that situation.
But Gil was right that Bobby Rayburn had forgotten where he came from. That the money and the fame and getting number 11 — a number Gil had killed for, that Rayburn didn't even know had a body attached to it — had turned him into someone who didn't remember what it felt like to just play the game. To care about it the way people in the stands care about it.
The Giants wished I hadn't made that movie because it made their stadium the location for a story about what sports fandom can do to people at the margins. What it feels like to need a team to win so badly that your entire sense of self depends on it.
I made that movie because that story needed to be told. Tony Scott told it with rain machines and Nine Inch Nails on the soundtrack and Wesley Snipes running bases in slow motion. It was not a subtle film. It was not designed to be.
It was designed to make you uncomfortable. Mission accomplished. You're welcome, San Francisco.
The Oakland Athletics were the Bay Area's legitimate baseball franchise and their loss to Las Vegas is a civic tragedy that nobody seems appropriately upset about.
The San Francisco Giants should have moved to Tampa Bay in 1992. Tampa Bay deserved better. Oakland deserved the entire market.
The Fan was a good movie. Not a great movie. But a good one. Gil Renard was a warning that nobody listened to.
The Giants have been mad about it for thirty years, which means it worked.
I don't hold grudges. I'm not that kind of person. I'm a professional. I've been in this industry for fifty years and I've learned that you make the movie, you stand behind the movie, and you let the audience decide.
The audience of history has decided: the Giants should have gone to Tampa Bay. Oakland should still have a team. And Gil Renard, for all his considerable flaws, understood something about baseball fandom that the comfortable, championship-winning, beautiful-stadium-having San Francisco Giants have never had to reckon with.
What it feels like when the team is all you have left.
That's the movie. That's always been the movie.
— Robert DeNiro
Grumpy, Correct, Unapologetic
The DeNiro Zone, May 2026