- Hey, I'm Mark Wilson with Fast Company.
We're here in Dyersville, Iowa
to get a behind the scenes tour
on how the Field of Dreams game came into existence.
- Is this Heaven?
- It's Iowa.
- [Mark] People will come, Ray.
They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom.
They'll turn up on your driveway,
not knowing for sure why they're doing it.
They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children,
longing for the past.
The memories will be so thick,
they'll have to brush them away from their faces.
People will come.
I can not walk through the Field of Dreams
and avoid my own cynicism
and a sensation that borders on irony.
The good old days of baseball were highly exclusionary.
And here I am on a movie set.
It's a depiction of a baseball field
on which the MLB decided to host
its first baseball game in Iowa ever.
But to do so, they built a second field,
capable of hosting the game.
I cannot pretend that I, in any way,
understand what this means, logically speaking.
But if you've seen the movie,
you'll know the field was never built upon logic.
So when you visit the Field of Dreams,
the first thing you want to do is walk into the corn,
just like they do in the movie.
And here for the major league game,
it's a key part of the experience.
They actually set up this special doorway into the stadium.
- [Ghost Voice] (whispers) If you build it, he will come.
- You hear the soundtrack of the movie.
You hear key quotes from the film.
It should be really cheesy,
but it's just the right amount of cheesy.
Your imagination expects the Field of Dreams to be bigger.
When you come up to it, it's smaller than you expect.
And so, this being so much bigger,
it exceeds your expectations in a, in a really fun way.
A really fun, you know, sort of childlike way.
So I'm with two of the people that actually made,
literally made all of this.
Talk to me about how it started.
- I was at MLBs office in New York.
And at the time Tony Pettiti said,
could you build a baseball park in the middle of nowhere?
I said, absolutely.
And he gave us the brief on the idea.
And he asked us to come out here and validate the idea,
do a feasibility on what it would take to make it happen.
And so, we were here two weeks later.
We were here in June of 2015.
There was absolutely nothing here.
The corn was a foot high.
- [Mark] What were the big questions for you, then?
- Could we physically fit a ballpark
and all of the infrastructure required onto this site?
Because we're sort of tucked down in some low ground.
There was no power here.
There's no internet, there's no cell signal here.
We have brought in, with all of the partners,
mobile cell service.
We brought in a temporary internet system.
- I visited here almost 20 years ago.
I was a fan of the movie, went to the University of Iowa.
Came out to the movie site.
The movie site is small.
My big question was, why not put it on there?
If you're doing the Field of Dreams game,
why not do it on the Field of Dreams?
- This field right here can't fit
on the size of the movie site field.
And right field angles up.
The ability to be able to have the quantity of fans
to be able to attend would have been far less.
They only location that we would
really have fans put in the place
would have been in the outfield.
And then you just detract that it might just be, you know,
any ballpark in the United States at that point.
- The Field of Dreams means a lot of things
to a lot of people.
For baseball fans, it's a proof point
of the sports importance of bridging generations.
Convincing argument that a century of stats
are not just hits and errors and strikeouts,
but markers of eras of human existence.
And then there's the more intimate side,
for any parent and child,
it's a reminder that life is too short
to let some silly argument stand in the way of living it.
I'm here with Dwier Brown,
who plays the pivotal father in Field of Dreams.
You're back here, what's it feel like?
- It reminds me of the first time in 1988,
when I drove down that long driveway
and saw this house and the beautiful baseball field here.
MLB did an amazing job, creating the same kind of magic
with a structure that's easily 10 times bigger.
- Is it trippy to actually hear the soundtrack here?
Because that's actually,
what's hitting me the hardest. - Yeah.
- Because I'm in the corn, I hear the soundtrack,
I, like, start tearing up.
- Those, you know,
tinkly little piano chords
and those strange resonant sounds kind of just,
I don't know, they really tick,
you know, touch your heart.
- I myself, am a lifelong White Sox fan.
I went to college a few hours down the road,
at the university of Iowa,
and took classes at the writer's workshop.
Just like W.P. Kinsella,
author of the original book this film is based upon.
But none of that is what really draws me to this story.
For me, I guess that I saw the film as a kid.
Now I'm a few years older than Kevin Costner was
when he actually filmed it.
The overriding theme to me, that makes me cry,
from a few minutes into the film,
all the way through the credits, is about dreams.
Specifically, the dreams we have when we are young,
might not be the ones we have when we're older.
And frankly, they shouldn't be.
So the white Sox just came out
and walked on the field for the first time.
And they were like, giddy.
They look like kids going out to play, like, I don't know,
little league baseball game or something.
Does everybody want to pitch this game?
- I actually don't. - You don't?
No I, I want to be here and just enjoy it.
Kinda like from a fan experience, you know.
I'm, I grew up a bit of a fan of the movie.
So being out here, you know,
I just want to be the best cheerleader possible
and enjoy, kind of everything going on.
It's a special day.
- Surreal is the only word that comes to mind.
It's amazing.
You walk in, and it's right there in front of you.
You have all this build up in your head and then bam,
here you are.
It's a dream come true and a dream that,
that is coming true exactly the way you picture it.
- What does the film mean to you?
- I think Field of Dreams isn't,
in the end it's not really about baseball.
It's about just that, the feel-good, you know traditions,
you know, the way that, the connections with family
and that's the theme throughout the movie.
So yeah, I mean, it's an iconic baseball film
and here we are about to see
the very first major league game ever played.
But it goes so much, I mean,
baseball goes so much deeper, right?
- Okay, so you've been here before.
Does it feel different for this game though?
- Well, there's a lot more enthusiasm
and a lot more activities around here.
I first came here when my son was 14.
So, that was a while back.
He was with his high school team,
so we played on the field and did some of those things.
So it was kind of fun coming back here today.
Relive some of the old memories,
but also check out some new ones.
My grandson's never been here before,
so it's pretty cool to have him here today.
- Well, you're not going to top this one.
(bat cracks against the ball)
- [Announcer] And it's shot into left field,
back at the wall, it is good.
(crowd cheers)
Here comes the pitch.
(bat cracks against the ball)
That is smoked into right, and into the corn.
(crowd cheers)
(bat cracks against the ball)
(crowd cheers)
There it goes!
Back at the wall, and it's gone.
(crowd cheers)
Yankees on top!
Anderson, hits it in the air to right.
Back at the wall, the White Sox win!
(crowd cheers)
- A very perfect Hollywood ending to it all.
You know, what was really interesting
was they did all of the opening stuff.
You know, Kevin Costner showed up,
kind of like everybody expected.
You heard a lot of lines from the movie over and over again.
But ultimately around, around the fourth inning,
it somehow just became a baseball game.
And that was kind of beautiful.
I was watching at one point and just realized like,
oh, like it's the game, like, that's why everybody's here.
(soaring music)
The U.S. houses 96 million acres of corn production.
The Field of Dreams sits on a mere three and a half.
I can't tell you what it's worth
in terms of return on investment.
What I can say, is that there comes a time
when all the cosmic tumblers
have clicked into place,
and the universe opens itself up, for a few seconds,
to show you what's possible.
And bringing real games to the Field of Dreams,
The MLB has embraced those possibilities,
and yes, the people they had come.