* The Moneyball film: Not dead, just resting

As per this piece from The Playlist blog.

These questions were aimed at Pitt on a red carpet stop (a horrible, soulless place to conduct a mini, 30-second interview) so don’t expect anything too earth shattering. But he was asked if he thinks the “Moneyball project can be salvaged and go into extra innings.

“My gut says yes,” is his response. Perhaps he didn’t want to say too much because of all the controversy and noise around the project, but he did allude to the problems and negative press it received earlier this year. “It’s a weird climate right now,” he said. “But we’re still trying to re-mount it. I hope we get to do it soon.” Not much, but we believe it’s the first time he’s addressed or talked about the project post-debacle.

BTW, that rumored Vanity Fair article that would allegedly get into the whole “Moneyball imbroglio? We’ve heard it’s false, not happening and was never a reality. Would be a shame if that turns out to be true. We were dying to read it.

* Review: Moneyball

From HowtoWatchSports.com.

Upshot:

The story, non-fiction, is about Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane and how he outsmarted the rest of Major League Baseball to build a competitive team on a tiny salary budget.

It talks about Beane’s failures as a player in the big leagues, and his rise to glory as a GM. Along the way it digs into the stories of some of Beane’s prized players, who helped the A’s improbably win 100 games while they might not have made any other big league roster.

But in a few months I won’t remember any of that, because Moneyball is not about baseball.

It’s about thinking about baseball.

* Is the honeymoon finally over for Moneyball?

It is if you believe this piece in The New York Times.

* Moneyball inspires an unlikely group

Such as Microsoft, according to this piece making the rounds.

Microsoft’s Intellectual Property Group is building a financial model designed to value and predict prices for technology patents, allowing the company to better forecast and budget for intellectual property-related costs — all inspired by a best-selling book about baseball….

“I got this idea from reading ‘Moneyball,’” [ Horacio Gutierrez] said, referring to a book about baseball written by Michael Lewis, author of “Liar’s Poker.”

Gutierrez was inspired by the book’s description of the approach used by Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane to choose players for his team, while still operating within a limited budget.

* “He’s not dead; he’s just resting….”

From the famous Monty Python “Parrot Sketch.”

Why do I bring this up? because Moneyball, the movie, may not be dead after all.

Sony Pictures Entertainment has quietly moved to salvage its troubled movie project “Moneyball” by hiring the prominent screenwriter Aaron Sorkin for a quick rewrite, while looking to add Scott Rudin, known for his turns on the Oscar circuit, to the film’s roster of producers.

It will be interesting to see how script revisions will differ from the draft I previously mentioned. Because that was drek.

* No wonder they canned Moneyball

Given the draft of the script.

I’ll watch anything about baseball. Cartoons, documentaries, lousy films (Jackie Robinson was a great ballplayer, but a poor actor). But this draft of the aborted Brad Pitt vehicle would sorely try my patience (Groucho Marx: “Don’t mind if I do. You must try mine sometime.”).

Moneyball, the non-fiction neo-classic by Michael Lewis about Billy Beane, former failed-ballplayer turned general manager of the Oakland Athletics, was a great book but I never understood how anyone could possibly believe it could be turned into a feature film, regardless of star power.

The movie version, again judging solely from the script, is such a cliched story: Beane is an iconoclast who bucks the system to turn his team around, making them a contender for the American League pennant. He has a nebishy sidekick (supposedly to have been played by Dmitri Martin, a hot-comedian-du-jour), a computer geek and advocate of statistical guru Bill James (another system bucker). Together they battle conventional wisdom spouted by crew-cut wearing veteran baseball scouts and develop a new and unorthodox way of evaluating ballplayers, which, according to said scouts will never work. Along the way they pick up a broken down player on whom everyone else has pretty much given up; if he was a drunk he could be the Dennis Hopper character in Hoosiers.

This is a combination of Bad News Bears and Major League. According to the draft – and I don’t know if this was the final one; there was lots of speculation about problems with the script — there are lots of overdone effects, including voice overs, freeze frames, and slow motions included to drive the point home.

* Moneyball and the big screen…or not

I must admit, I agree with the SF Chronicle’s Gwen Knapp in her column where she avers that the book was not meant to be a feature film.

In fact, the fate of the movie might have been more dramatic than any material “Moneyball” could have provided. What would have constituted the big moments in the film? Billy Beane in a confrontation with old-time scouts, holding up a laptop and saying: “Gentlemen, this is the future?”

You certainly weren’t going to see the players sitting around the clubhouse pondering their disadvantages of small-market status and getting a “Win one for the Gipper” speech from Art Howe.

And here’s another county heard from, TV comedy writer Ted Levine (M*A*SH, Cheers, The Simpsons, etc.):

What puzzles me is how this project got on the fast track in the first place. First off, it’s a baseball movie. They usually tank overseas (as my international readers who are probably thinking of bailing just reading the word baseball can attest). And it’s from a non-fiction book. Here’s what I imagine was the pitch. You tell me if you’d buy this.

One more piece, slightly more favorable, which includes a link to a draft of the actual script.

* The Money(ball) Pitt

We so much for that. It seems that the screen version of Moneyball, which was all set to begin filming, has been canned, according to this story in Variety.

The move came after Pascal read a rewrite that [Steven] Soderbergh did to Steven Zaillian’s script and found it very different from the earlier scripts she championed. Pascal was uncomfortable enough with how the vision had changed that she applied the brakes.

The Browbeat section of Slate weighed in on this yesterday:

This news raises the possibility of two grim outcomes: 1) that Moneyball may never get made and 2) that if it does get made, it may not be any good. Although interviews with Dykstra are always entertaining, the plan to include documentary footage worries those of us who are big fans of blockbuster Soderbergh…and less enamored of his arty, experimental alter ego…. We’d assumed that Moneyball, the tale of a general manager leading a poor, underdog team to unprecedented success, would be a kind of Ballpark Eleven: A heist movie about a team of likeable smartypantses (including Pitt as Beane, comedian Demitri Martin as number-cruncher Paul De Podesta, and charming ballplayer Scott Hatteberg as himself) sticking it to the smug baseball establishment. But perhaps Pascal got spooked because Soderbergh has something more unorthodox in mind: A star-studded feature film intercut with a semi-documentary meditation on Beane himself. We may never know!

Sorry, I don’t get it. How much “vision” can you change? It’s non-fiction, for Pete’s sake. And not ancient history, either, where you can try to slip something by the viewers.

Thanks to Bookshelf reader Andy Glassman for the heads-up on this one.

* Moneyball (the movie) backstory

From — where else — the Los Angeles Times.

* “Hello, central casting? Get me Hatteberg!”

From the June 1 issue of Sports Illustrated, this quote by Scott Hatteberg, who was featured in Micheal Lewis’ book Moneyball, soon to be a major (?) motion picture:

Former A’s first baseman, on being cast as himself in the film Moneyball: “I don’t know how you can screw up playing yourself, but I’m afraid I will.”