Moneyball: The Pascal Version
The Internet has been tumid with speculation over the truth behind Columbia Pictures pulling the plug at the last minute on Steven Soderbergh’s Moneyball, but the LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein is the first one to actually speak to studio chief Amy Pascal. He wasn’t able to get Soderbergh’s side of the story, but he grabs a couple of quotes from Pascal and then fills in the blanks based on his own reading of the original Moneyball script. The result? Not a lot of new information, but interesting nonetheless.
The original story had Pascal getting cold feet a few days before Moneyball was set to go before the cameras because Soderbergh’s latest script revision deviated too much from the movie she’d originally greenlit. Goldstein’s quote backs that up:
“I’ve wanted to work with Steven forever, because he’s simply a great filmmaker, but 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…In terms of this project, he wanted to do the film in a different way than we did.”
According to Goldstein, “The script, written by Oscar winner Steve Zaillian, was a baseball movie, but it was loaded with great comic moments and dazzling dialogue.” He continues:
“Soderbergh wouldn’t talk to me about all this, but it seems clear that he became obsessed with authenticity, replacing many of Zaillian’s inspired scripted set-pieces with actual interviews with the real people who were involved in the events. The Soderbergh aesthetic, according to one source close to the film, was simple: If it didn’t happen in real life, it wasn’t going to be in the movie.”
And he again quotes Pascal:
“Steven wanted to tell the story through…interviews with the real people, as they commented on [Oakland A's general manager Billy] Beane, but there are lots of ways to tell a truth.”
If Goldstein is correct, Soderbergh wanted to make a $58 million art movie whereas Pascal wanted a crowd-pleasing baseball flick starring Brad Pitt. Both versions could be interesting movies, but unless the two parties find some middle ground, it sounds like neither one is going to happen for now.
Filed under: Development, News
Tags: Amy Pascal, Brad Pitt, Patrick Goldstein, Steven Soderbergh
“If Goldstein is correct, Soderbergh wanted to make a $58 million art movie whereas Pascal wanted a crowd-pleasing baseball flick starring Brad Pitt. ”
I prefer the art-house movie from Stephen!
LOL!!!
Odd, you’d think the studio would expect something like this from Soderbergh after the last 10 years. I guess they expected to hire the guy behind Oceans 11/12/13, Erin Brockovich, and Traffic, not the guy who made Bubble, Che, and The Girlfriend Experience.
Both movies sound interesting, actually, although I’m guessing Soderbergh made his changes because the original script was a might bit too conventional and boring.
I’ve been skeptical about this project all along. I have to assume talents like Zaillian and Soderbergh could find an interesting story with a bunch of baseball stat nerds, but I’m hard pressed to think of anything less dramatic than an Excel spreadsheet.
Plus, the Oakland A’s are in my all time Top 5 least favorite baseball teams.
Good point. Any movie that might incorporate the Rally Monkey for one iota of screen time is definitely dropping to the bottom of my must-see list.
But it was Soderbergh so I had to assume it would be good.
On the other hand, the accounts I’ve read of his version of the screenplay weren’t promising.
I don’t know. It probably doesn’t matter now.
Amy’s story that he turned in a radically different script a few days before shooting is bull. Everyone in various depts. on the film had drafts from several weeks before where it was always very clear that he was going to use real baseball players and interviews . Also he’d been shooting the interviews for a couple of months. Amy changed her mind and now 200 people are out of work with no notice. I think it would be a good idea to get some of the unions involved..because there’s a trail here of scripts and shooting that refutes her claim she was ’shocked by the new direction’..maybe if the unions get together and file a grievance some of us can get paid.
It does seem hard to swallow that one draft was a radical departure from what had come before unless she simply hadn’t been paying attention.
As an outsider, that’s the galling thing that they waited a few days before cameras were going to roll before cutting the cord. So you think she just got cold feet?
Yeah, no matter which is the case, it speaks to bad managerial decision-making. Either she chose poorly from the get-go, or she didn’t effectively let Soderbergh understand what was expected of him. I’m sure she knew that, no matter what, Pascal was going to look bad, and decided that shutting the movie down was the lesser damage situation.
Some are taking it as a knock against Soderbergh. I see it as Soderbergh being Soderbergh. Unlike Michael Mann, at least his artistic box office failures don’t cost $100 million.