Columbia Postpones Soderbergh's 'Moneyball'
Filed under: Sports, Deals, Brad Pitt
You know things are bad in Hollywood when a production gets shut down just three days before it's supposed to start filming -- and when the production in question stars Brad Pitt and is directed by Steven Soderbergh. The last three movies those guys made together all had the word Ocean's in the title. What gives?Well, according to Variety, Columbia Pictures chair Amy Pascal found the latest script revisions for Moneyball so different from what she'd originally greenlighted that she pulled the plug on Friday. Filming was supposed to start in Phoenix on Monday. This is the equivalent of canceling a flight while the plane is accelerating down the runway. Those script revisions must have really been something. Maybe Soderbergh had decided to turn it into a four-hour biography of Pancho Villa.
Moneyball is based on a nonfiction book that uses the 2002 Oakland A's baseball team as a case study for examining how less wealthy teams can compete with richer ones (like the Yankees) by hiring players whose statistics in certain areas -- but not the ones usually considered, like batting averages and RBIs -- indicate they'll perform well. Yes, it's a book about statistics. You can see why a movie would be a hard sell to begin with. But the book was a bestseller, appealing to baseball fans (who tend to love statistics) and readers who enjoy a good underdog story. Pitt was to play A's manager Billy Beane, whose theories about which players would be most valuable went against conventional wisdom but were ultimately vindicated.
Technically, the film is now in "turnaround," meaning Soderbergh and Pitt had the weekend to find another studio to back the project. Assuming they don't, Columbia still owns it, and can decide whether to replace Soderbergh (who co-wrote the screenplay with Steve Zaillian), to delay things until Pascal and Soderbergh can agree on the script, or to scrap the film altogether. Whatever happens, it won't be going in front of the cameras on Monday.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-22-2009 @ 8:20AM
Mimi said...
This piece gets something wrong. It wasn't the Zaillian script that Soderbergh wanted to direct. Soderbergh had apparently re-written the script [with Pitt's involvement, no doubt] Here's the quote from Variety... take note of the wording.
"The move came after Pascal read a rewrite that Soderbergh did to Steven Zaillian's script and found it very different from the earlier scripts she championed."
Pascal is a seasoned pro. She signed on her studio to film the Zaillian script. Soderbergh was playing games, holding out on the new script until the last moment, assuming he'd get his way as it was too late for the studio to bail. He was playing games with Pascal, only she called his bluff and pulled the plug.
Given Pitt's propensity for demanding significant script changes at the last minute to suit himself, you just know he was up to his pretty eyebrows in this baseball script with Soderbergh. He bailed on State of Play when changes wouldn't be made. Variety is off the mark in their article. State of Play's director has said he and Universal wanted to make the original script.... it was Pitt insisting on making significant changes, including glamorizing his reporter character.
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6-22-2009 @ 2:46PM
Brian said...
Billy Beane is the A's general manager, not manager. Very different things in baseball.
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6-23-2009 @ 1:48PM
Cormac T. said...
Mimi gets it completely wrong. In fact I haevn't read such misinformed nonsense in quite a while.
Pitt signed on to State of Play based on the original screenplay by Matthew Carnahan. Pitt was not some glamour boy in it. Did Mimi even read it? Pitt was so enthusiastic about the original script that he personally enlisted Macdonald to direct and corralled some of the cast such as Ed Norton and IIRC Robin Wright Penn.
In the ensuing 12 months or so, the studio hired three - count em - three screenwriters to do rewrites, each taking the script further from its original vision. Throughout this time Pitt told the studio that he was unhappy about the direction of the rewrites. This dissatisfaction was pretty well known around town.
When the studio presented Pitt with a last minute final version on the eve of the writers strike he rejected it. Pitt has script approval. It's as simple as that. SInce the studio refused to wait until the strike was over so they could get the writers to resolve their differences over the script, Pitt exercised his legal right to walk.
Because Pitt also has play-or-pay contracts he gets paid anyway. I'm sure this is why Universal was so mad and tried to smear Pitt in the trades with a whisper campaign and the lame talk of suing him. The incorrect notion that Crowe had anything to do with the failure to sue Pitt is tabloid nonsense. There was no law suit because Pitt had a contractual right to reject the script and to walk. The studio never had any grounds to sue him in the first place.
There is a reason why a few players in the industry get these incredibly favorable contracts and that's because they are moneymakers. Which is what Pitt is for the studios. But thanks to his SOP paycheck Pitt was able to do Terrence Malick's Tree of Life for practically nothing. So in the end Pitt was right about SOP and he got to work with a genuis director. So it worked out.
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6-29-2009 @ 8:05PM
GL said...
Perhaps the rewrites include how the concepts have fared in the years since.
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