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Get ready for the sports waterworks, folks. Back in June, Jenni Miller wrote about the latest horse racing drama to cook up -- Secretariat, with Diane Lane attached to play the thoroughbred's owner, Penny Chenery. Now the major players are in place, and there's no doubt that Disney is prepping this is a big sports drama. The Hollywood Reporter posts that Dylan Walsh, John Malkovich, and Scott Glenn have joined the production, which began shooting this week.

Secretariat was the horse that broke a 25-year Triple Crown dry spell, setting world records and winning the final Belmont Stakes with an eye-goggling 31-length win (in other words, so far ahead that the horses behind look teeny). He's pretty much the horse amongst race fans, and is known for having the biggest recorded heart (22 lbs). But it all started with a coin toss.

THR says Glenn will play "a southern-bred aristocrat who loses the horse in a coin toss," although that's not quite how it plays out. Glenn must be Ogden Phipps, and as the story goes, there were coin tosses to discern who would get what horse. Phipps won the toss, but Penny Chenery scored an unborn foal in the deal who turned out to be Secretariat. Walsh will play Penny's husband, "a successful attorney who is accustomed to his wife being at his beck and call," and who is, undoubtedly, in line for a wake-up call. Finally, John Malkovich will play a trainer who underestimates the horse's power (Lucien Laurin?).

And they're off!

One thing you hear a lot about the great HBO series The Wire is some variation on "it ruined all other cop shows for me." And it's true. The Wire was so smart about policework, so painfully realistic without sacrificing drama, that it made damn near everything else, with the obligatory gun-and-badge-scene clichés and pat little whodunnits, seem downright silly; ridiculous. Creators and writers David Simon and Ed Burns called the bluff of an entire genre. They stripped away the Hollywood varnish and made their peers look goofy, clueless, like so many deer staring at headlights.

Michael Lewis's The Blind Side isn't quite like that, but it's close. Certainly I will henceforth have trouble restraining gales of laughter at the naiveté of football movies about scrappy underdog quarterbacks who overcome the odds and lead their teams to victory. Or about the glory of college football. Or about players who make it to the NFL through sheer pluck and determination.

Even more so than The Wire to lame cop dramas, The Blind Side is an explicit rebuke to such stories. Straight up, Lewis (who also wrote Moneyball) says: it doesn't work that way. First of all, the quarterback isn't even that important. A coach with a handle on strategy and talent elsewhere on the roster, can, within reason, make damn near anyone look good throwing the ball. Second: who makes it to the NFL is determined, 99% of the time, not by persistence and heart, but by genetics. Size. Much more than you might think, shape. Innate athleticism that cannot be taught or learned. Depressingly, the selection process for great football prospects often resembles a state fair where people admire the girth and gait of cattle and "hmm" and point thoughtfully.

When one F.X. Toole adaptation grabs a bunch of Oscars, what will happen to the next one?

Million Dollar Baby -- winner of Best Movie, Director, Supporting Actor, and Lead Actress -- was adapted from Toole's short story collection Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner, and now The Hollywood Reporter posts that Pound for Pound is getting the big-screen indie treatment with the starring help of Billy Bob Thornton.

A full -- but unfinished -- posthumous novel this time around, Pound follows Dan Cooley, an ex-boxing contender who has outlived both his wife and children, and focuses on his grandson, who then gets killed. "As Cooley vacillates between booze-fueled suicidal thoughts and fantasies of homicidal vengeance, Hispanic teenager Eduardo 'Chicky' Garza y Duffy begins his troubled ascent in the amateur boxing world." In classic sports movie form, they will be able to offer each other redemption.

It's going to be quite interesting watching Billy Bob play an ex-boxer, but he's definitely the right fit for an aging, bitter, and boozy dude. As for the film, it's going to be written and directed by Ron Shelton, the man behind Bull Durham, White Men Can't Jump, and Play it to the Bone. Could this be a return to Bull Durham form? That film was his first directorial stint, and grabbed the filmmaker his only Oscar nod.

If you were absolutely heartbroken at the loss of Sony's Moneyball, cheer up! It's still alive and swinging. Variety reports that the project has been revived with some new talent, though now it's in desperate need of a new director.

The good news is that the man in charge of repairing it all is none other than Aaron Sorkin, who is riding high at Sony thanks to The Social Nework. Everyone's favorite screenwriter is taking a crack at Steve Zaillian's original script, and is expected to have it finished by August. Sorkin is steering it back to the film the studio wanted all along: a nice sports film that focuses on Billy Beane, the Oakland A's, underdogs, and statistics. It's also retained the services of Brad Pitt, who is still attached to play Beane.

The bad but not altogether unexpected news is that Steven Soderbergh is off the project. His draft took a more documentary approach that Sony was certain would fail with moviegoers. I guess we'll never know, but I can't really blame Sony for being afraid of an approach that used an animated Bill James character. At least the director has a million other projects he can turn to for comfort. Will it be Making Jack Falcone? Liberace? Cleo? None of the above and out of nowhere? Very possibly.

Hot chicks! Cool nicknames! Broken bones! Director Bob Ray spent five years documenting a fledgling, all-female roller derby league in Austin, Texas, and the result is Hell on Wheels, an energetic, snappy flick that's both entertaining and informative. Our friends at SnagFilms have made it available for free online viewing.

Dan Policarpo (AKA Roller Derby Dan) birthed the idea of a 21st Century version of roller derby, whose initial popularity peaked decades ago. Women readily responded, and Policarpo picked four that he felt would be good team captains: Heather, Anya, Nancy, and April. After he exited, the four decided to forge ahead with plans for a league, forming Bad Girl Good Woman Productions, even though they had no business experience. After two years of struggle, the first bout is held in front of 350 fans. Soon after that, the four decide to incorporate, which provokes a heated response from the players, who felt that they should have a voice in the business. Eventually things come to a head, a new league is formed (Texas Rollergirls) and emotions become heated.

"You not only get to follow women struggling with the world of business, you get to watch some kickass roller derby," wrote Jette Kernion in her review when the film debuted at SXSW in 2007. "Hell on Wheels follows all sides of the league controversies and offers us glimpses into the lives of the women involved."

After the jump: Watch Hell on Wheels!

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.

Click image below to view entire poster

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for Big Fan, one of my favorite films from this past Sundance Film Festival and a must-see for anyone who's ever taken their fandom a bit too far. Written and directed by The Wrestler screenwriter Robert Siegel, Big Fan stars Patton Oswalt as a lonely New York Giants fan living out his days as an overnight parking lot attendant on Staten Island whose obsession with his favorite football team leads to an unfortunate (and embarrassing) incident involving his favorite player -- forcing our big fan to choose between his team and the rest of his life.

From my Sundance review: "... this isn't a film about sports, it's a film about fandom -- about being so in love with something you go overboard and neglect your friends, your family and your life in order to feed your addiction. This isn't a comedy about the goofy football fan who gets off on chanting and screaming his team's name; it's instead a cold, lonely drama (with brief moments of awkward humor) about the neurotic football fan who'd give up everything (and I mean everything) to see his team make the playoffs."

For more on Big Fan, check out our Sundance interviews with Patton Oswalt and Robert Siegel, and check out the full poster by clicking the image below. Big Fan will hit theaters later this year.

Like it or not, the Karate Kid reboot continues to fight its way forward. First came Jaden Smith, then Jackie Chan, and then a spanky new name in The Kung Fu Kid. Now The Hollywood Reporter's Risky Biz Blog reports that the the film is getting some Happyness in the form of screenwriter Steven Conrad. Yes, the same man who wrote little Jaden and Papa Will's Pursuit of Happyness.

Chris Murphy was originally slipped into the screenwriter gig, but now Conrad has taken over the story. Instead of fightin' in the U.S. of A., the action travels overseas to Beijing, where a young kid named Dre (Smith) moves with his single mom (Taraji P. Henson ofHustle & Flow and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). Beyond the culture shock, this tyke must deal with jerky little bullies -- ones who will probably get a taste of justice after the kid finds a fighting mentor in a man named Mr. Han (Jackie Chan).

Conrad must be working fast, because the project will start filming next month. Now the only question that remains: what tone will this have? Feel-good teen fare? Sappy melodrama mixed with tormented tykes finding inner strength? Could it possibly have a whiff of humor a la The Promotion?