Michael Lewis Tagged Articles at Cinematical

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.

Brad Pitt's got a busy schedule. Not only has he attached himself to George Miller's outer-space adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey, but he's also planning to star in an adaptation of Michael Lewis's non-fiction Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Moneyball is an insider account of the way Billy Beane put together the 2002 Oakland Athletics, using the power of scouting and sabremetrics to overcome a financial disadvantage. (The A's went 103-59 that year, winning the division but losing in the first round of the playoffs to the Minnesota Twins.) It's kind of a nerdy book, as you can imagine -- the A's defy the odds... through the magic of computerized statistical analysis! -- but it does have the classic underdog framework that has done wonders for a lot of sports movies. Pitt would be great for the role of Beane, who was 40 years old when the events of the book took place.

David Frankel will direct the film as his follow-up to The Devil Wears Prada and this holiday season's Marley & Me. Steven Zaillian, whose last job was American Gangster, will write the screenplay. It's a good story, if not a terribly cinematic one; I'm curious to see what they do with it.

We've been warned about global warming. The weather is a-changing. The polar icecaps will melt away. The world as we know it will change forever. But maybe it's not for the reasons we think ... We've got a new cautionary environmental tale on the way, but this time, it's in the realms of thriller territory. The Thaw is coming -- where the melting of the polar ice caps releases something creepy.

And now The Hollywood Reporter posts that Aaron Ashmore has signed on for a gig in the film, which is already starring Martha MacIsaac and Val Kilmer. If you've watched Veronica Mars, you'll remember Aaron as the seemingly nice O-niner Troy Vandergraff, whose secrets made Veronica none too happy. (Or Jimmy Olsen, if you're a Smallville fan.) Now he's playing a college student who is part of an Arctic research crew besieged by a killer parasite that has come from the depths of the polar ice caps.

This ditty comes from the team behind Ill Fated, Michael Lewis and Mark A. Lewis, with the latter directing the feature. Production begins in Vancouver today.

Are you ready for MORE football? 20th Century Fox thinks you are, as they've gone and snatched up the rights to Michael Lewis' (Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game) latest book, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. Released yesterday, the book garnered interest from a few other players including New Line and Mandalay. In the end, Fox won out with a deal for $200,000 against $1.5 million.

Blind Side, which revolves around the growing race for bigger (and when I say bigger, I mean BIGGER) football players, is one of several Lewis books that have been optioned over the years, with none of them moving ahead to production. However, with football as popular as it is right now on the big screen, Lewis feels this one definitely has a shot. The main plot focuses on a 16-year-old African American whose father was murdered and whose mother turned to crack. Though, at 344 pounds, the boy knew how to move and, thus, was taken in by a wealthy white couple who groomed him to be one of the top high school football prospects in the country.

Lewis notes, "Of all the books I've written, this is by far the most likely to be made into a movie." Whaddya say folks, how about we throw Eddie Murphy in a fat suit and watch this sucker fly?