Pascal talks more Moneyball

It’s never an easy decision when a studio head has to pull the plug on a big movie, as Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal did last week when she shut down “Moneyball,” a $58 million Steven Soderbergh film that was set to star Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland Athletics who almost single-handedly reinvented the way baseball scouts and develops young talent.

The movie, based on the best-selling book by Michael Lewis, wasn’t just in preproduction — it was five days away from filming when Soderbergh turned in a new version of the script that Pascal and her Sony team found unacceptable. The decision was so abrupt that the film’s producer, Michael DeLuca, got the call about it while on his honeymoon in Paris. As a courtesy to the stars, Pascal gave them an opportunity to try and set the film up elsewhere, but no other studio has shown any interest. So the movie remains at Sony, but will it ever get made?

Although stories about the film’s abrupt demise have appeared everywhere — with Variety getting the original scoop — Pascal hasn’t talked about the decision until now. To hear her tell it, Soderbergh delivered a script that was inventive but a radical departure from the film Sony thought he was going to make. It was, put simply, more of a re-creation than a feature film.

“I’ve wanted to work with Steven forever because he’s simply a great filmmaker,” Pascal said last week. “But the draft he turned in wasn’t at all what we’d signed up for. He wanted to make a dramatic re-enactment of events with real people playing themselves. I’d still work with Steven in a minute, but in terms of this project, he wanted to do the film in a different way than we did.”

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