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.
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