Category: moneyball

Production on “Moneyball” was set to start last month but studio topper Amy Pascal wound up pulling the plug on the pic just days before lensing was to begin when Soderbergh turned in a new version of the script that the studio didn’t want to make.

Pic was put into limited turnaround at the time, giving other studios the chance to pick it up.

But Sony is keeping hold of the project, and Sorkin’s changes will be more in line with the version the studio favored all along, which focuses on Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, who assembled a contending baseball club on a shoestring budget by employing a sophisticated computer-based analysis to draft players.

Soderbergh’s draft and production plans took a more documentary approach that the studio felt wouldn’t cross over commercially with moviegoers.

Sorkin is expected to be completed with his revamp by August.

Read more. Thanks SDR.

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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Time to back away from Moneyball for a while: the New York Times reports that Steven Soderbergh is totally off the project, only hours after the LA Times published an interview with Sony head Amy Pascal, who reiterated the studio’s reasons for bailing on the project. And both the Times and Movieline talked to Major League Baseball (MLB), which has been in the process of negotiating with Sony to approve the use of official logos and team names. The whole convoluted story is after the jump.

OK, so the original report was that Amy Pascal had scrapped the project only days before filming because Soderbergh had turned in a new draft that was a ‘radical departure’ from the previous one by Steve Zaillian. The problem, though, wasn’t that it was more crazy, but that it was too restrained. Zaillian’s draft had been more dramatic, more movie-like, and Soderbergh’s brought it back to reality. Perhaps too close to reality, as that’s what Pascal responded to. (What are the chances that Soderbergh’s draft went back to realism and the truth in order to ensure that MLB played along? Pretty good, though that might not be the only reason.) Read more.