It can be fun to get an idea of how the sausage is made. That isn’t always the case (or casing, if you catch my meaning), but sometimes the story of how something came to be is almost as interesting as the thing itself.

Take movies, for instance. One imagines that most of the time, the moviemaking process is pretty straightforward. Sure, there will be pitfalls and obstacles along the way – particularly on the indie end of things – but most of those issues tend to be fairly similar regardless of the film. However, there are certain movies – beloved and otherwise – whose origin stories are more than the usual.

Ron Shelton is a screenwriter, director and producer who has had great success in Hollywood over the years. He’s worked on plenty of different types of movies, but his calling card has long been sports movies – no surprise for a guy who spent five years playing minor league baseball before turning to the silver screen. And it is that minor league experience that led to his first sports film, one of the greatest baseball movies of all time – “Bull Durham.”

In his new book “The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit” (Knopf, $30), Shelton tells the story of how this iconic film came to be. It’s a story of his own journey as well, his love of the game and his experience within it, all of which led to him taking a shot at telling a sports story unlike any other that we’d seen before.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of cinematic subgenres that consist of “old person does X.” Sometimes it works – old guy action movies have become a personal favorite. Sometimes, however, it doesn’t – see the spate of old person comedies awash in hijinks and/or shenanigans. Those are occasionally OK, but for the most part, they tend to be dull, derivative or both, failing to do anything beyond lean on their thin premises and jab you in the ribs while suggestively waggling their eyebrows.