Moneyball

[MacGuffin]

Soderbergh, Pitt roll with 'Moneyball'
Director, actor circle Columbia's adaptation
Source: Variety

Steven Soderbergh is in early talks to direct "Moneyball," the Columbia Pictures adaptation of the Michael Lewis book "Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game." Pic will star Brad Pitt and is being adapted by Steven Zaillian.

Soderbergh is looking to make the picture his next directing assignment. He had been expected to next direct "Cleo," the musical about the fatal romance between Egyptian queen Cleopatra and Roman general Marc Antony.

Soderbergh had lined up his "Traffic" star Catherine Zeta-Jones to play the title character, and had Hugh Jackman in his sights for Antony. Though he set his financing, Soderbergh decided to push back the film until next year, after Jackman dropped out because of scheduling problems.

Pitt, with whom Soderbergh has worked in all of the "Ocean's" films, has been circling "Moneyball" since last year, when Zaillian signed on to adapt the book. "Marley & Me" helmer David Frankel had been attached.

The book focuses on Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, as he used sophisticated computer analysis system to piece together a team that regularly contended for the World Series despite possessing a payroll dramatically lower than big-market rivals like the New York Yankees.

Michael De Luca and Rachael Horovitz are producing.

Soderbergh has always wanted to make a sports film, and sparked to the opportunity to re-team with Pitt.

Soderbergh, currently rolling out "Che," most recently completed "The Girlfriend Experience" for 2929, and the Warner Bros. comedy "The Informant," which stars Matt Damon.

[Kal]

Sounds interesting

[Gamblour.]

Oh interesting, I heard about this guy on a Fresh Air podcast or something like that a while ago. I guess it'll be another of those underdog sports movies.

[MacGuffin]

Demetri Martin catches 'Moneyball' role
Steven Soderbergh's pro baseball drama stars Brad Pitt
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Demetri Martin has been cast opposite Brad Pitt in "Moneyball," a pro baseball drama Steven Soderbergh is directing for Columbia.

Steven Zaillian wrote the screenplay, which adapts Michael Lewis' nonfiction book about Oakland A's GM Billy Beane, who assembled a contending ballclub despite a payroll much lower than other major-league teams.

Martin will play Paul DePodesta, a Harvard graduate who is into stats and probabilities and helps Beane (Pitt) develop his system.

A summer start is being eyed.

Michael De Luca and Rachel Horovitz are producing.

Matt Tolmach, Jonathan Kadin and DeVon Franklin are overseeing for the studio.

Martin, a rising actor and comedian, headlines Comedy Central's "Important Things With Demetri Martin," which sees him wearing actor, writer, composer and executive producer hats.

Last year, he scored a role in Ang Lee's "Taking Woodstock," an ensemble drama starring Liev Schreiber, Emile Hirsch and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

[MacGuffin]

EXCLUSIVE: Steven Soderbergh To Use Animated Bill James Character In 'Moneyball'
Source: MTV

Steven Soderbergh is making a big push toward realism in his new movie, "Moneyball," adapted from the best-selling Michael Lewis book that followed the Oakland A's and their general manager Billy Beane (to be played by Brad Pitt), who used an innovative, statistics-based approach to build the team's roster and win the 2002 MLB American League West Division title.

To that end, Soderbergh will be casting real life participants to play themselves, filming at American League ballparks around the country and inserting actual MLB game footage into the film. One area in which the Oscar-winning director will not be striving for realism, however, will be with Bill James, the stats guru who has a key role in Lewis' book and whose body of work Beane applied to his management of the A's.

"My current plan is to animate him," Soderberg revealed to MTV News while promoting his Tribeca Film Festival entry, "The Girlfriend Experience."

James has become something of a mythic individual for sports fans and baseball execs because of his early advancement of so-called sabermetrics, a conventional wisdom-defying approach to evaluating talent that favors statistics such as on-base percentage over traditionally promoted stats like batting average. Since Beane valued players differently than his peers, he was able to stack the A's relatively cheaply and beat the pants off big money, large market teams. James is currently a senior advisor to the Boston Red Sox.

"We have this sort of oracle character that appears throughout and declaims various issues and he's essentially supposed to be Bill James," Soderberg said. "He's your host in a way.... The background will be real but the person who is supposed to be him will be animated."

Why the switch between realism and animated fantasy in this case? "It needs a gimmick," Soderberg explains. "It needs something to make it not Masterpiece Theatre. His writer voice is so big, I thought to literalize it is going to actually harm it. I need to make his voice funny and when he comes on you're happy to see it."

[MacGuffin]

Columbia balks with 'Moneyball'
Pulls Brad Pitt baseball drama set to shoot this week
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Just days away from the start of shooting, Columbia has taken Steven Soderbergh's baseball drama "Moneyball" starring Brad Pitt off the field.

Pulling the plug this close to production is extremely rare for studios but sources said Columbia's co-chairman Amy Pascal wasn't comfortable with the script, which had changed considerably since the movie was greenlit.

The decision, which was made Friday, mystified many since the pic was crewed up and scheduled to start shooting this week, with some wondering how issues with the script could give a studio cold feet so late in the game.

Soderbergh wrote the screenplay -- the most recent version, drawing from Steven Zaillian's previous drafts, is barely a week old -- adapting Michael Lewis' nonfiction book about the Oakland Athletics and their GM Billy Beane, who assembled a contending ballclub despite a payroll much lower than most other teams.

Pitt and comedian Demetri Martin were the major actors cast, with other roles to be played by actual baseball players. Soderbergh also shot interviews with real baseball figures, which were going to be interspersed between the narrative.

Pascal had not seen the interviews and some insiders suggest there was a disconnect about the kind of baseball drama the exec and the filmmaker wanted to make. Pascal was leery, the sources said, fearing the film lacked emotion.

Pascal is a big fan of the book and allowed Soderbergh to shop the project over the weekend to Warner Bros., which once housed Soderbergh's shingle Section Eight, and Paramount, home to Pitt's Plan B. The companies would have to act fast as the production and its staff can only sit idle so long. If no one snags the package, Columbia could take another crack at it, and try to sync up Soderbergh's and the studio's vision.

[SiliasRuby]

God Damn It! This sucks.

[MacGuffin]

Sony's Amy Pascal speaks out about 'Moneyball'
Source: Los Angeles Times

It's never an easy decision when a studio head has to pull the plug on a big movie, as Amy Pascal did last week when she shut down "Moneyball," a $58-million Steven Soderbergh film that was set to star Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland A's who almost singlehandedly reinvented the way baseball scouts and develops young talent.

The movie, based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, wasn't just in pre-production. It was literally five days away from filming when Soderbergh turned in a new version of the script that Pascal and her Sony team found unacceptable. The decision was so abrupt that the film's producer, Michael DeLuca, got the call about it while on his honeymoon in Paris. As a courtesy to the talent, Pascal gave them an opportunity to try and set the film up elsewhere, but no other studio has shown any interest. So the movie remains at Sony, but will it ever get made? Will Pitt stick with the project? And what exactly went wrong?

Although stories about the film's abrupt demise have appeared everywhere -- with Variety getting the original scoop -- Pascal hasn't talked about the decision until now. To hear her tell it, Soderbergh delivered a script that was inventive but a radical departure from the film Sony thought he was going to make. It was, put simply, more of a dramatic re-creation than a feature film.

"I've wanted to work with Steven forever, because he's simply a great filmmaker," Pascal told me today. "But the draft he turned in wasn't at all what we'd signed up for. He wanted to make a dramatic reenactment of events with real people playing themselves. I'd still work with Steven in a minute, but in terms of this project, he wanted to do the film in a different way than we did."

Soderbergh's last-minute revisions represented a huge change from the shooting script I read when I was working on a story about the film during its pre-production. The script, written by Oscar winner Steve Zaillian, was a baseball movie, but it was loaded with great comic moments and dazzling dialogue that captured the frenetic energy of Beane, a strikingly good-looking former phenom who washed out after a brief stint in the majors, only to resurface as a general manager who operated more like "Entourage's" Ari Gold than the buttoned-down insiders who normally run big-league teams. Beane was a born hustler, always wheeling and dealing, staying one step ahead of his rivals as he scouted unlikely unknown minor leaguers to replace the high-priced free agents a small-market team like the Oakland A's couldn't afford.

Soderbergh wouldn't talk to me about all this, but it seems clear that he became obsessed with authenticity, replacing many of Zaillian's inspired scripted set-pieces with actual interviews with the real people who were involved in the events. The Soderbergh aesthetic, according to one source close to the film, was simple: If it didn't happen in real life, it wasn't going to be in the movie. That might make for an intriguing art film, but it clearly was no longer a film that any studio would spend $58 million to make, especially with baseball films having virtually no appeal outside of the U.S.

"Steven wanted to tell the story through these interviews with the real people, as they commented on Beane," Pascal explains. "But there are lots of ways to tell a true story. We were just more comfortable with what we thought was a wonderful draft from Steve Zaillian."

What did Soderbergh do that managed to get Sony to pull the plug on a go movie? Keep reading:


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.

The Sony production team and Soderbergh ended up having a summit meeting after everyone had read Soderbergh's draft of the script. Pascal wouldn't discuss what was said, but other sources close to the project say that Soderbergh asked the Sony executives to trust him, saying that even if what they wanted wasn't on the printed page, he would find a way to capture the drama and the humor of the story when he was on the set, filming interactions with the real-life baseball people.

Studios get nervous when directors say "Trust me." Sony was especially concerned, wondering if the end result would be one of Soderbergh's "experimental" films, like "Bubble" or "The Girlfriend Experience," not one of his more polished gems, like "Out of Sight" or "Ocean's Eleven." For now, the project remains in limbo, with Sony having sunk nearly $10 million into the film already. The studio still needs to find out whether Pitt, who is intensely loyal to Soderbergh, will stay with the project. As Pascal put it: "We really hope we can still make this with Brad Pitt."

Sony would also have to find a new director who is not only a good fit for the material but would pass muster with Pitt, who has director approval on his films. To find a director with enough stature or buzz to attract Pitt won't be easy. The most likely options would be for the studio to go in more of a comic direction -- possibilities being Jay Roach or Jason Reitman -- or toward a more dramatic choice, like Gary Ross or even George Clooney, who is putting the finishing touches on a two-year production deal with the studio. (My own pick would be someone with a sharp, subversive edge, like Pete Berg.)

Pascal insists there's no bad blood between her and Soderbergh, saying the two plan to meet in the coming days to discuss other possible projects. In the meanwhile, she remains an ardent believer in the film. "We love this movie, we always have and we still want to make it. It's a completely innovative way to tell a baseball story. It's about wanting to believe in magic, which is what baseball is all about."

I'd still say that makes "Moneyball" a longshot. Or to put it in baseball terms, this is a project that will need to stage a big late-inning rally to put a win up on the scoreboard.

[matt35mm]

Wow, that Zaillian draft sounds not very good at all.

[polkablues]

I love how the article presumes that Soderbergh wanted to cut out that one joke just because it wasn't a real-life quote, when it seems more likely that he wanted to cut it because it's a terrible, obvious joke.

[Gamblour.]

The Zaillian script just seems very safe (no pun intended) and straight forward. And who the fuck wrote this article? Why are they pontificating and sprinkling in the names of shitty directors to helm the project? Jay Roach? Pete Berg? What the fuck are you talking about? And who really cares what shots in the dark you have?

I think the irony here is that this movie is about making a great team out of cheap, unheard of players, and because of Brad Pitt's price tag, the budget is $58 million and too big to let Soderbergh try something that sounds pretty damn interesting.

[MacGuffin]

Sony still game for 'Moneyball'
Soderbergh out as director; Pitt still attached
Source: Variety

Sony is still game on making the baseball pic "Moneyball," tapping Aaron Sorkin to polish an early script by Steve Zaillian.

Brad Pitt is still attached to star in Columbia Pictures' adaptation of Michael Lewis' nonfiction bestseller "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game," but Steven Soderbergh will no longer direct the pic.

Production on "Moneyball" was set to start last month, but studio topper Amy Pascal wound up pulling the plug on the pic just days before lensing was to begin when Soderbergh turned in a new version of the script the studio didn't want to make.

Pic was put into limited turnaround at the time, giving other studios the chance to pick it up.

But Sony is keeping hold of the project, and Sorkin's changes will be more in line with the version the studio favored all along, with the focus on Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, who assembled a contending baseball club on a shoestring budget by employing a sophisticated computer-based analysis to draft players.

Soderbergh's draft and production plans took a more documentary approach that the studio felt wouldn't cross over commercially with moviegoers.

Sorkin is expected to be completed with his revamp by August.

Sony is high on Sorkin after recently picking up his script "The Social Network," which revolves around the formation of Facebook. David Fincher is attached to direct that pic.

"Moneyball" also fits in well with Sorkin's previous experience as the creator and writer of ABC's drama "Sports Night."

Michael DeLuca, based on the Sony lot, is producing both "Moneyball" and "The Social Network."

Sony initially optioned Lewis' book in 2004. Stan Chervin penned the initial draft of the script.

[tpfkabi]

I'm confused - how did I get a notification without a post?

[MacGuffin]

Brad Pitt Predicts Ninth Inning Rally For 'Moneyball'
Source: MTV

A few months ago, it was one of the most talked about projects in Hollywood. Then "Moneyball" fell prey to script conflicts, a studio that pulled the plug days before cameras were to start rolling and a world-class director -- Steven Soderbergh -- who quit in protest. Since then, the smoke and noise seems to have faded, along with the film itself.

But Brad Pitt is still convinced that he'll soon suit up and play ball.

"My gut says yes," the star said of "Moneyball" on Monday, when we caught up with him on the red carpet at the premiere of his August 21st Quentin Tarantino flick "Inglourious Basterds."

For those who weren't keeping up on the news reports earlier this summer, "Moneyball" is based on the bestselling book about Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane. He effectively transformed the game of baseball in the late '90s with his outside-the-box methods for assembling a winning small-market team. Frequent Pitt collaborator Soderbergh (director of the "Ocean's" heist series) had a grand vision for the statistics-heavy baseball geek bible. It's a vision which included casting real players in key roles, having Pitt play Beane and even employing a little bit of animation.

Now, the film finds itself with a near-$60 million budget, a plot about baseball statistics and no director. But the world's biggest movie star told us that he's still very much attached, and he expects "Moneyball" to rally for a ninth inning comeback.

"It's a weird climate right now," Pitt explained, blaming the economy for making it difficult to land financing for such a risky project.

"But we're still trying to re-mount it," he insisted, saying that he very much wants to portray Beane. "I hope we get to do it soon."

[MacGuffin]

Bennett Miller to direct 'Moneyball'
'Capote' helmer in talks with Col for Brad Pitt starrer
Source: Variety

Columbia Pictures is handing the ball to helmer Bennett Miller for its pic "Moneyball."

The "Capote" director is in negotiations to take the helm of the Brad Pitt starrer.

Real-life story is based on Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, who defied conventional wisdom and even his own scouts by fielding a baseball team of castoffs to create the ultimate underdogs en route to one of the most unlikely winning streaks in the history of professional sports.

Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin penned the script, which is based on Michael Lewis' best-selling tome. Stan Chervin wrote an earlier draft.

Steven Soderbergh had been attached to direct the pic, which is considered a tricky sell overseas given baseball's limited appeal outside of the U.S. Columbia has been working to get the project back on track after studio topper Amy Pascal pulled the plug on the film just days before lensing was going to begin after reading Soderbergh's rewrite.

With indie-weaned Miller in the director's chair, project's budget will likely be downsized, though no decision has been made yet.

Insiders say that after Soderbergh fell off the project, studio targeted two indie directors for the job: Miller and "(500) Days of Summer" helmer Marc Webb.

"Moneyball" is being produced by Michael De Luca, Scott Rudin and Rachael Horovitz. Matt Tolmach and Jonathan Kadin are overseeing for the studio.