Moneyball still sits in Sony limbo

The L.A. Times has a fairly informative article up discussing what went wrong with the Moneyball script. It also essentially states that as of now – which should be the second week of production based on the original schedule – Moneyball still sits in limbo, waiting to see if another studio will pick it up.

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?

What went wrong indeed?

The article basically sums up what we had already surmised so far, that Soderbergh handed in a last-minute revised script that Pascal considered to be far too different from the original story she had agreed to, and that it wouldn’t work for her.

Pascal herself said that she had been very excited to work with Soderbergh, that she had wanted to work with him for a very long time, but that “[...] 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.”

I’m not a studio insider, I’ve never written or directed a script, so I don’t know how it works but I’m a little confused as to how they could have come to an agreement, an arrangement, only to have the director essentially re-write the entire storyline and present it mere days before shooting. I would have thought that all the pre-production arrangements would have laid everything very solidly in “stone” so to speak.

The biggest problem, it seems according to the article, is that Soderbergh wanted the movie to be 100% authentic. Authenticity sounds like a good idea when you’re dealing with a true story but he didn’t want to have any one thing but the absolute truth. The issue with that is that it limits the movie; they couldn’t have shown any scenes, say, with Brad Pitt as Billy Beane at home to give us an idea of his life. Soderbergh wanted everything to be absolute historical fact which makes for a good documentary for those who are hardcore baseball fans but a fairly dull $58 million film.

Reading the article helped me to understand the stand-still right now. What do you think of these details?

Image: Newscom

(Thanks Ligaya!)