Why Did Sony Kill The Pitt/Soderbergh Film Adaptation Of Moneyball?
Last week Sony killed Moneyball, the Steven Soderbergh-directed $US58-million baseball film starring Brad Pitt based on Michael Lewis’ book about former Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane, just five days before filming was set to start. So what the hell happened?
Rumours have been swirling since Variety first reported last week that Soderbergh’s vision for the film differed dramatically from the vision studio executives had for the film, but up to this point no one associated with the project has been willing to speak on the record about it.
But yesterday Sony’s Amy Pascal, the studio executive in charge of the film, spoke to the LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein. According to Pascal, what it all boiled down to was essentially simple—The studio loved screenwriter Steven Zaillian’s original adaptation of Lewis’ book, while Soderbergh felt the script lacked authenticity and rewrote it himself, making radical changes that Pascal and the studio weren’t willing to gamble on, fearful that Soderbergh would turn it into an “artsy” film like Solaris or Schizopolis, especially when baseball movies traditionally don’t do well at the box office outside of the United States. Soderbergh was insistent that everything in the movie had to have happened in real life.
Some changes to Zaillian’s script were subtle, others were dramatic. At one point, Beane signs Scott Hatteberg, a journeyman catcher with a bad arm whom Bean can get for peanuts and turn into a first baseman. Beane loves Hatteberg’s ability to get on base, but his staff is appalled — he just can’t turn anyone into a slick-fielding first baseman overnight. In Zaillian’s script, one of the coaches watches Hatteberg taking ground balls at a Little League field, his wife armed with a plastic laundry basket full of baseballs. She hits the balls to her husband off a tee, with their 4-year-old daughter backing him up down the line. One ball takes a bad hop and goes between Hatteberg’s legs. When his daughter scoops it up, the coach quips: “Maybe we should sign her.”
Soderbergh cut out the joke because it was the screenwriter’s invention — the coach had never actually said it. He also cut out a scene where Beane gives a tongue-lashing to Jason Giambi, one of his departing free agents, again because it didn’t actually happen. Zaillian’s script was anchored by on-screen monologues by Bill James, the oddball guru of modern-day baseball statistics (who today works in the Boston Red Sox front office). James functioned as a Greek chorus for the film, offering wry, Yoda-like explanations about the complexity of the game.
Zaillian’s deft renditions of James’ maxims were funny and always to the point, allowing the audience the opportunity to see inside the game. In one monologue, James says: “If you score three runs and the other team scores four, you can be inspired as all hell but you still lost. The numbers represent the ineluctable sum of victories and defeats, and that cannot be made one iota larger or smaller than it is by PR campaigns, personal animosities or any of the greater and lesser forms of B.S.” But in Soderbergh’s draft, the James material had all vanished, presumably to be replaced by interviews with Beane’s real-life associates.
At a “summit” held after Soderbergh turned in his draft of the script, he reportedly pleaded “trust me” to the Sony executives, who were obviously unwilling to do so. Besides Pitt, the film was also set to star comedian Demetri Martin as well as former ballplayers Darryl Strawberry, Mookie Wilson, David Justice and Lenny Dykstra, but Soderbergh’s unrelenting zeal for authenticity proved to be the project’s demise.
Bob Costas would be proud.
As for Michael Lewis, he seems unfazed by the developments with the film version of his book, telling MSNBC recently, “I don’t understand why they bought it for a movie in the first place.”
Sony’s Amy Pascal Speaks Out About Moneyball [LA Times]
Image via Vulture
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
@raincoaster: But "I can do this job better than anyone, even though everyone else in the entire business thinks I'm wrong (due in part to my spectacular flameout when I tried to play the game myself)" offers a boatload of possibilities, I would think.
In The Blind Side -- and I'll say it again, it's a riveting book -- I just don't see dramatizable conflicts at work. Freakish natural talent sweeps the field and renders social barriers meaningless -- that's the best I can do with that book, unless you're really going to try to illuminate some kind of hypocrisy in the Tuohy family (tough sledding there). Who are your antagonists -- the poor undersized Christian-school kids forced to play nose tackle against this unholy behemoth? (And frankly I thought the NCAA lady who got treated so dismissively by Lewis was actually one of the good guys. I have a soft spot for bureaucrats, I guess.)
@skahammer: That's exactly the question, though. "I've found a new algorithm, team," isn't exactly the St. Crispin's Day Speech.
Blind Side does have it's game-changing point, the rise of the Refrigerator-type, but Moneyball was a more interesting book, just far less narrative. Hollywood likes personal stories, not mathematical ones. And Blind Side has far more interesting, fully-developed characters, in part because Lewis was personally acquainted with everyone in that book.
@ohnothimagain: Fist-pound. Soderbergh's script and ideas could be terrible, but unless the Joker gets bitten by a vampire and then plays shortstop, no one will care about the movie. Baseball stats porn sounds better than jokey-funtime-voiceover bullshit though. Yay Steven! I think!
jacobestes
Brad Pitt doesn't work much anymore... guess he doesn't have to.
Former A's GM Billy Beane? Did he get fired? I missed that news.
The only thing more boring than a baseball movie is the said drama swirling around the making of a baseball movie. Now if Billy Beane was gay... Oh wait...
TabithaIapetus
@skahammer: Agreed- both were task with taking a book whose entertainment value was in stats and mental exercises and make it actionable. Never works out right.
Nose Army!
Housebroken(mostly)
@The Cajun Boy: I ask you to consider that Moneyball is the more compelling story because it's about the dawning of a completely new way of conducting operations in an otherwise furiously entrenched business (professional baseball).
While The Blind Side simply illustrates one of the oldest ways of doing business in college-football recruiting: Getting outstanding athletes adopted by families that, in the absence of the kid's talent, would be unlikely ever to encounter him, much less have anything to do with him.
Both are great stories, I agree. But one is about changing the game, and the other is about business as usual. The former actually has much deeper conflicts to dramatize -- although whether they're actually dramatizable is a key question.
I read this sentence as "...the film was also set to star comedian Demetri Martin as former ballplayers Darryl Strawberry, Mookie Wilson, David Justice and Lenny Dykstra..."
The only conclusion I could draw was that Demetri's nose is built to suck cocaine.
Did they at least keep in the part about a team of 9 Scott Hattebergs?
An awful script. James voice-over? The words "ineluctable" "iota" and "animosities" being used in commercial screenplay dialogue? No one liked that script. No one was ever going to make it. Soderbergh is the scapegoat.
ohnothimagain
I like Lewis a lot but Liar's Poker has not aged well.
GORDONGARTRELLE
A rare problem in the movie business, but a problem unique to it all the same: Both Zaillian and Soderbergh are accomplished craftsmen who have earned the right to have their instincts trusted by others. When they clash, though, you can't just assume either one is right. And then you're left trying to evaluate words on a page according to how they would look dramatized on film.
The movie business is a tough one, folks. This is just one reason why.
Also, holla for Schizopolis. [crickets] OK, that one's just me then.
According to the New York Observer this film was canceled because Brad Pitt doesn't have the face of a baby.
uncivily obedient
@The Cajun Boy: There's a section in Blind Side that actually made me cry. And I don't give a rat's ass about football. It was one paragraph, describing four steps a player took during one game, and sketching out his entire life within those four steps.
Michael Lewis is a genius. I am in awe of his talent, and I don't say that very often.
I think the joke and the voiceover, the Zaillian stuff sounds awful. And after watching fictionalized "true stories" like American Gangster I'm sick of boring movies that are inaccurate. You're talking about a movie where the guy is telling you that the numbers, the facts, are all that count, meanwhile you're watching things that never happened?
jacobestes
@raincoaster: I agree completely. Blind Side is a much more compelling story in every way.
I'm with Michael Lewis on this. I loved Moneyball, but cannot imagine turning it into a movie. His football book, Blind Side, has waaaaaaaaaaay more potential in that sense, although it's not as good a book as Moneyball.
Moneyball is numerative, not narrative. Those changes the screenwriter made sound like solid additions to help the story move.
@GoalieLax: There's a difference between movie and documentary. If the fiction added to the enjoyment of the movie then I'm all for it, if they wanted to make a documentary they would've hired him to do one. I'd compare this to when they had Kevin Smith writing the script for "Superman Returns" then they brought in Tim Burton and threw out everything Smith did. Look at what came out in the end... Nothing against Soderbergh, but they brought him on to make fiction and he decided to do a 180.
Instead of Moneyball, how about someone make a movie of the steroid era?
Never got this as a movie in the first place, but I'm glad it was killed if some hollywood writer was adding in schlock to the truth.
I was actually looking forward to this, even if only because Demetri Martin was in it.