If you’ve been following these page you’ll know that there have been all sorts of problems with the movie Moneyball. The Brad Pitt starring movie was supposed to begin filming last week, but Sony pulled the plug with only three days to go, concerned that director/writer Steven Soderbergh’s new version of the script had taken things in an artier, less commercial direction. While Soderbergh and co. had a few days to set the film up with another studio, they didn’t manage it and the project went back to Sony and into limbo (CLICK HERE for more on the story).
The latest news, as reported by the New York Times, is that Soderbergh is now completely off the project, but the studio is still hoping to go forward with a film version of Michael Lewis’ book at some point, although with a version of the script more like Steven Zaillian original screenplay. They’re also hoping Brad Pitt will still be involved, although it’s not certain whether he’d be interested without Soderbergh.
However there is another problem. Apparently a lot of the rewrites were done to gain the approval of Major League Baseball, which wanted to ensure historical accuracy for this adapatation of how Oakland A’s baseball team manager, Billy Bean, used an unsual statistics system to build America’s cheapest and best baseball team. Without their blessing the film wouldn’t have been able to use any Major League logos or trademarked names. It’s been reported that Soderbergh became obsessed with this authentic aesthetic and had a maxim that if it didn’t happen in real life, it didn’t happen in the movie, which resulted is a much duller script. However Zaillian’s script is said to have played fast and loose with the truth, and needed to be altered to satisfy the Baseball authorities.
Although Sony has ploughed $10 million into pre-production, it’s difficult to imagine the movie re-emerging from this mess with a script that would please all parties, and so this may be it for Moneyball.