Sorkin Picks Up The Dropped Moneyball
|
|
By Dave Gonzales on
July 10, 2009
|
|
|
I'm going to see how many things I can remember about the odyssey of Moneyball just off the top of my head. I'll alert you when I'm forced to go back to my notes.
- Moneyball is a book about sabermetrics, or using stats and objective evidence to build a winning team on the cheap by running numbers.
- The central focus of the book is Oakland A's GA Billy Beane, who will be played by Brad Pitt in the film adaptation.
- Pitt signed on to the project when it was scripted by Steve Zaillian (who wrote Schindler's List - and my notes remind me - Hannibal, American Gangster).
- Columbia/Sony ditched the Devil Wears Prada director (notes: David Frankel) and signed on Steven Soderbergh to direct. Steven wanted to do his own draft, which he did, but it took a more realistic approach to the story, pulling out some of Zaillian's more cinematic elements.
-Amy Pascal, heading up the project for Columbia/Sony, panics and kills Soderbergh's Moneyball mere days before filming was set to begin. Estimates say Pascal has already spent $10 million on developing the script at this point, and we still don't know how much was lost putting the brakes on this movie so late.
- Soderbergh is out, Pitt is still on-board, and Sony has just tapped Aaron Sorkin to write a new draft. Sorkin is working off the Zaillian draft, not the Soderbergh draft.
Why all the stop-and-go? People aren't really that into baseball movies, and movie-goers aren't exactly chomping at the bit to learn about the reality behind sabermetrics. Rumor has it that Soderbergh was filming interviews with real-life ballplayers and asking current MLBers to play themselves on film. Pascal wants a movie she can sell, not a movie that accurately portrays the book or baseball.
Baseball movies just don't perform well over seas, and this one has Brad Pitt in it, so the budget can't much lower than the $60 million it was rumored Soderbergh was given.
Sorkin, on the flip side, is turning his draft around at break-neck speed, reportedly turning it in as early as next month. Sorkin's previous experience with athletics being Sports Night, a short-live but groundbreaking sitcom that ended up blending smoothly into a half-hour drama as early as the end of it's first season.
Sorkin is certainly the man to spice this thing up and make it witty and snappy, but that's still not going to help with international audiences.
Why is everyone so obsessed with getting Moneyball made? Aren't there better scripts that are ready to be movies floating around? One Columbia/Sony don't need to keep spending development millions on?
|
|
|
|
|
Tags: Moneyball, News |
|
|
|
|
