Well I managed to update some of the subpages of SimplyBrad.com to give you more reliable information on things about ‘n around Mr Bradley.

For instance, I’ve updated the Bikes page with info (model, first spotted and where) along with a picture of all the bikes Brad has been spotted on since the year 2004. Quite a lot! But I don’t have info on all the bikes so if you know something I don’t: please email me.

Also updated:
• Radio
• Plan B
• Television – Series
• Guitar

Brad presented a Nick Drake Special on BBC radio 2, at 9pm on January 3, 2005 in London, UK. If you can provide more info, please contact me.

“I’m Brad Pitt and I’m a huge admirer of this english singer/singwriter who has influenced singers from REM to Radiohead to Norah Jones..”

At a time when expensive adult dramas keep striking out at the box office, it appears not even Brad Pitt and director Steven Soderbergh can entice a Hollywood studio to spend about $57 million on a baseball movie.

Pitt and Soderbergh, who were given a short window to set up their adaptation of the 2003 bestselling book “Moneyball” at a rival studio after Sony Pictures unexpectedly killed the project just three days before production was to begin today, have been turned down by Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures, which shared concerns about the film’s high budget and limited commercial appeal.

Sony movie chief Amy Pascal had given them the weekend to try and set the movie up at the two studios where they have the closest ties. Pitt’s production company is based at Paramount, and the actor and Soderbergh have made the “Ocean’s 11″ movies at Warner.

On Friday, as first reported by industry trade paper Daily Variety, Sony’s Pascal pulled the plug on the production after Soderbergh turned in a rewrite of the script by Steve Zaillian that she found unacceptable, according to people close to the situation. A person informed about the matter said that Pascal had liked Zaillian’s adaptation of Michael Lewis’ book about Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, but when Soderbergh’s rewrite came in last Wednesday, she was surprised that there were “substantial changes.”

Pascal met with Soderbergh in her Culver City office to see if he was willing to revise his take, but the two couldn’t agree on a vision for the film. They also disagreed over Soderbergh’s plan to shoot the film in a more improvisational documentary style, the person said.

She then made a last-minute decision to scrap the production, shocking those who were about to start shooting, said one individual involved in the project.

By Monday, Paramount and Warner Bros. had already decided to pass. Read more. Thanks Gabriella.

Brad Pitt’s new baseball movie is hitting Phoenix in the next day or two for a couple of days of filming.

Pitt plays a baseball executive in the film “Moneyball,” an adaptation of a best-selling book.

So will Pitt be here for the filming? Probably, says the film’s publicist, Spooky Stevens.

“Yes, but it’s not written in stone,” she said.

Stevens wasn’t willing to say much about what’s happening here. She said the production doesn’t disclose locations and wants to slip in and out of town quietly to keep down crowds that might slow their work. She said most of the shooting will take place in Los Angeles but the first two days are in Phoenix.

“Moneyball” is an adaptation of the book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.” It chronicles Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s major league baseball team. The book portrays him as obsessed with unusual statistics that help find overlooked players who produce contending teams with a cheap payroll. Read more.

I have to admit that when Michael DeLuca called me earlier this year, saying he was finally going to get “Moneyball” made into a movie, I figured he must’ve been smoking the proverbial Hollywood crack pipe.

Anyone who loves baseball has read Michael Lewis’ bestseller about how Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane almost single-handedly upended the traditional way baseball evaluates athletic talent. Beane was a prized young baseball player who ended up being picked by the New York Mets in the 1980 major league draft. To the old scouts, Beane was considered a phenom because, well, he looked like a phenom. With his slim, muscular athletic physique, he ran, threw the ball and swung the bat the way great baseball players were supposed to.

But Beane was a bust. He ended up playing only 148 games in the majors, hitting a pathetic .219. So when Beane became a talent evaluator, eventually emerging as the general manager of the Oakland A’s, he spent far more time studying arcane statistics like on-base percentage than he did worrying about whether a prospect was tall or lean or chiseled. Beane’s shrewd wheeling and dealing and his embrace of the stats-driven science of sabermetrics helped the under-financed A’s become a perennial contender in the American League West. Read more. Thanks Intothegrinder. Moneyball is set to start shooting June 11th.

The movie will have its Los Angeles premiere @ the Graumann Chinese Theatre come August 10, 2009! Thanks Raiderfan! Info has also been added to the side calendar.

Possible Additional Scene for ‘Inglourious Basterds’ Unraveled. Words are, the added scene for “Inglourious Basterds” will come from a scene director Quentin Tarantino shot but did not assemble for the 62nd Cannes Film Festival’s version. Having reported earlier that the helmer is returning to the editing room, Anne Thompson of Variety gave more details on the particular scene.

In her recent report, the blogger claimed that the scene will be added in front of the La Louisiane sequence. She wrote, “…it comes right before the La Louisiane sequence featuring Michael Fassbender and Diane Kruger as a British soldier under cover and a German movie star who wants to help him bring down the Third Reich.” Read more.

Scenes for the upcoming “Moneyball” movie will be shot at Oakland Coliseum sometime in July, though details are still being hammered out.

The movie, based on Michael Lewis’ book of the same name, will star Brad Pitt as General Manager Billy Beane, who was the focus of Lewis’ book chronicling the A’s unique methods for running a major league team.

Whether Pitt will be in Oakland for the filming is unknown. A’s officials haven’t received details on what scenes will be shot at the Coliseum. Several former A’s — including Scott Hatteberg, David Justice and Art Howe — will play themselves in the Columbia Pictures movie, scheduled to be released in 2011.

“They’ve done some pre-work already,” said David Rinetti, the A’s vice president of stadium operations. “They’ve taken photos so they can re-create sets of the clubhouse and Billy’s office area in the studio.”

The 1994 movie “Angels in the Outfield” had some scenes shot in the Coliseum. Parts of the stadium were painted blue to make it look like the home park of the Angels.

There won’t be many cosmetic changes needed for “Moneyball,” which covered the A’s 2002 season. The Coliseum basically looks the same as it did then. Source.

Quentin Tarantino’s film, ‘Inglourious Basterds, which stars Brad Pitt and is due in theaters on August 21, took the award for Best Actor, for Christoph Waltz’s performance. Cannes’ top prize, the Palme d’Or, went to German director Michael Haneke’s ‘The White Ribbon.’ Source.

Quentin Tarantino is so high on the Cannes experience that he worked at a breakneck pace to shoot and edit the 165-page epic-sized WWII drama “Inglourious Basterds” in eight months. And when the writer-director bows his film on Wednesday, he says, “I’m expecting this to be one of the high moments of my career.”
Reflecting on the pic over a hamburger at the Carlton Hotel, Tarantino said it was worth the struggle to debut his third film in competition. (Tarantino won the 1994 Palme D’Or for “Pulp Fiction” and also brought “Death Proof”).

“This is the cinematic Olympics,” Tarantino said. “What an exciting year for auteurs this year, with four Palme d’Or winners. If you’ve done a movie you’re proud of, that you might be defined by, then to me the dream is not necessarily to be there at Oscar time. That’s wonderful. But my dream is to always go to present the film at Cannes.

“There is nothing like it in cinema,” he said. “Nobody has seen your film. It’s a wet print, fresh out of the lab. The entire world film press is here, and they all see it, at one time. The greatest film critics in the world, who are still critics, and they’re all fighting and debating it. When you think back on your career, it comes down to these high moments. That level of excitement is unparalleled.”

Getting to the Croisette took discipline. The film had the same 10-week production schedule as “Pulp Fiction,” fast for a period war movie shot in Europe. Read more.

The official website was updated with lots of goodies! Quotes, pictures, soundtrack and others. Be sure to check it out.

From an interview with director Steven Soderbergh on Moneyball.

CS: So I’d guess that “Moneyball” is more serious?
Soderbergh: No, it’s gonna be funny. I think it’s gonna be dramatic, but I think it’s gonna be funnier than people expect. That’s another situation where I’m injecting a lot of real people playing the roles. Source.

The movie will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 20th. Prior to that there will be a photocall and pressconference. Brad is expected to attend. Thanks Rita and Gina.

PARIS — “This ain’t your daddy’s World War II movie,” Quentin Tarantino said with a grin, standing on a street corner here that had been scrubbed of 21st-century signposts to become the set of Inglourious Basterds, his new film about a band of Jewish-American soldiers on a scalp-hunting revenge quest against the Nazis.

Although it was mostly shot at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, Germany, the movie’s subtitle is Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France. So on a three-day sojourn in Paris in December, Tarantino and his bi-continental moviemaking coalition commandeered a 1904 bistro with peeling paint, Art Deco stained glass and a wall of windows overlooking an intersection of identifiably Parisian streets.

“We had to have a scene to sell the audience that we’re in France,” Tarantino said. “This is it.”

Inglourious Basterds, which is to have its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 20, is Tarantino’s first movie since Death Proof, half of Grindhouse, a double feature and box-office flop that he directed with Robert Rodriguez, and his first solo feature since Kill Bill Vol. 2 in 2004.

Tarantino calls Inglourious Basterds his “bunch of guys on a mission movie.” Judging by the script, it should have the crackling dialogue, irreverent humor and stylized violence that are hallmarks of his work.

“You’ve got to make a movie about something, and I’m a film guy, so I think in terms of genres,” he said. “So you get a good idea, and it just moves forward and then usually by the time you’re finished, it doesn’t resemble anything of what might have been the inspiration. It’s simply the spark that starts the fire.” Read more.

When Quentin Tarantino was just a video store clerk filled with filmmaking dreams, he and his pals shared a shorthand for the against-all-odds mission movie they would someday make: “This will be our ‘Inglorious Bastards!’ ” Tarantino and his friends would say.

Other aspiring filmmakers might have cited “The Dirty Dozen” or “The Magnificent Seven” for reference, but Tarantino — who always has been drawn to and has an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure B movies — preferred director Enzo Castellari’s 1978 Italian World War II film “Inglorious Bastards,” a sometimes campy drama about renegade soldiers shooting and blowing up Nazis in World War II France.

Tarantino’s new film — starring Brad Pitt, a mix of American and European character actors and some fish-out-of-water casting picks such as comedian Mike Myers and torture-porn director Eli Roth — borrows hardly anything from its Italian predecessor, and even the title of Tarantino’s Cannes Film Festival competition movie is a bit different: “Inglourious Basterds.”

But there is still a difficult mission in the film that opens Aug. 21; it is still World War II, and there are still guns and bombs.

Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine heads a group of eight Jewish soldiers (two of whom are German-born) spreading terror among the enemy in Nazi-occupied France. Their tactics, given the filmmaker’s soft spot for sadism, aren’t exactly subtle. Read more. Thanks Gabriella.