Thirty years ago, Pat Gallagher flew to Los Angeles for a promising film screening. He flew back to San Francisco with a knot in his stomach.
Gallagher had gone south for a preview of “The Fan,” a Robert De Niro thriller about an obsessive Giants supporter. At the time, Gallagher was a high-ranking executive and marketing head for the San Francisco Giants. In “The Fan,” the Giants’ management saw an opportunity, he said.
“During those Candlestick days, we would do almost anything to get attention,” Gallagher, who is now retired, told SFGATE in a call. “And so the thought of having a movie, and having Robert De Niro in it, and having it be at Candlestick and having a player that was sort of like our left fielder, [Barry] Bonds — it was pretty exciting.”
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On paper, everything about “The Fan” screamed good publicity for the team. Tony Scott, the filmmaker behind “Top Gun,” was the director, and the film shot exteriors at Candlestick Park. Benicio Del Toro played a minor role, fresh off of his performance in “The Usual Suspects.” Wesley Snipes co-starred alongside De Niro, playing a Giants outfielder and star hitter. Cal Ripken Jr. was the sports consultant.
Prior to that fateful LA screening, the Giants intended to help promote the film. Gallagher mentioned the idea of hosting a premier screening, in conjunction with KNBR, to raise money for the Giants Community Fund. Those plans were quickly scrapped.
“I watched it, and I was horrified,” Gallagher, now 77, recalled.
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And for good reason, if you’ve seen the film. Based on a 1995 novel of the same name, it tells the story of Gil Renard (De Niro), an out-of-work knife salesman. After his ex-wife files a restraining order against him, Gil grows obsessed with, and eventually stalks, the team’s star player, Bobby Rayburn (Snipes).
In the novel, Gil is a Red Sox fan. But for reasons Gallagher doesn’t recall, the film adaptation switches the setting from Boston to San Francisco. (In a retrospective on “The Fan,” 7×7 speculated that the team may have won a bidding war.) Snipes’ Rayburn seems to be a fictionalized version of Barry Bonds. At the start of “The Fan,” he inks a $40 million contract with the Giants, mirroring the $43 million deal Bonds made with the team. (Bonds was originally intended to appear in the film, but scenes with real Giants were inexplicably left on the cutting-room floor.)
Wesley Snipes in “The Fan,” 1996.
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Rayburn falls into a slump at one point in the movie. To “help” his hero break out of it, Gil stabs one of Rayburn’s teammates (Del Toro) in a steam room, kidnaps Rayburn’s child and bludgeons a man to death with a baseball bat. This sequence of violent events culminates with SFPD shooting Gil to death in the middle of Candlestick Park during a game.
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The film was shot between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and included exteriors at Candlestick Park. According to a Herb Caen column, Wesley Snipes shot pool at Chalkers, a San Francisco pool hall, for five nights a week during filming.
John Kruk, the former Phillies first baseman, played a bit part as one of Rayburn’s teammates. (Apparently, the script called for a “John Kruk look-alike.”) Kruk, in a 1996 interview with Sports Illustrated, marveled at De Niro’s intensity, recalling when the actor lunged at his character with a knife.
“In one scene he goes after me, and I was like, ‘What the f—!’” Kruk told the magazine. “I thought he was serious. I mean, he goes nuts.”
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Kruk said he was on set for four months, “about 13 hours a day,” and spent most of that time sleeping. The only beer allowed on set was fake, which was “horrible,” he said, although Wesley Snipes helped sneak him a 12-pack of Budweiser at one point. Kruk also noted the film’s inaccuracies:
“In the movie we play in a rainstorm that’s like a typhoon. No real game would go on in that kind of rain and mud,” he told Sports Illustrated. “And they also put books in the dugout. I tried to tell ’em, you don’t get a whole lot of books in big league dugouts.”
A general view of 3Com Park and the baseball diamond with the San Francisco Giants batting against the Los Angeles Dodgers during their Major League Baseball National League West game on Sept. 30, 1999, in San Francisco.
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Barry Bonds, center, talking to Will Clark during the Giants vs. New York Mets baseball game at Candlestick Park in July 1993.
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After reading the script for “The Fan,” the MLB gave filmmakers permission to use the Giants’ logo. But after the early LA screening, both the Giants and the MLB voiced objections to the film. Both parties complained to the San Francisco Chronicle at the time that the film deviated from its script, requesting changes to tone down its violence. What at first appeared to be the Giants’ “Field of Dreams” now looked closer to a publicity nightmare.
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“We knew it was going to be R-rated,” Gallagher told the paper at the time. “But when you read a script and see it on the screen, it’s very different. We have asked for about a dozen changes — some individual scenes and some dialogue — that will make it closer to the script we saw.”
In response, a spokesperson for the film’s studio, Dennis Higgins, pushed back, arguing for the film’s integrity. “We will make the changes that we feel we can make while maintaining a hard-hitting thriller,” Higgins said.
Today, Gallagher no longer recalls which changes were made. But the resulting film, while evidently a thriller, isn’t particularly “hard-hitting.” Today, it sits at a middling 38% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is not a terrible film, and it is not an excellent one, either.
“This one-two pairing of De Niro and Snipes should score a quick run at the box office, but this same old derivative story pitch featuring De Niro as a Travis Bickle-Rupert Pupkin-Max Cady-ish mad stalker is just a long foul ball,” wrote a Hollywood Reporter writer in a contemporary review.
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The LA Times called it “one of the more feeble and misguided films in recent memory.”
Robert De Niro stars as a fan whose obsession with his favorite celebrity turns deadly, in “The Fan,” 1996.
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“Even in thriller terms, nothing rings remotely true here, with even the baseball action — including a game that is not called despite enough rain to unnerve Noah — laced with a heavy dose of preposterousness,” critic Kenneth Turan wrote.
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When a good batter eyes a bad pitch, he lets it fly right by. The Giants opted to do the same with “The Fan,” distancing themselves from the film. The idea, Gallagher said, was simply to “let it run its course.”
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And run its course “The Fan” did. It was a box office bomb, and cycled through movie theaters quickly. According to Gallagher, the film had no effect on the team’s ticket sales. Today, “The Fan” is a distant memory — a blip in both the Giants’ history and De Niro’s career.
Gallagher, in his synopsis, put it gently: “I don’t think Robert De Niro would list this as one of his favorite roles.”