Steven Soderbergh knows baseball. Born in Louisiana, the filmmaker was serious about baseball at at a young age growing up in Baton Rouge, but lost his arm mojo when he was 12. “I woke up one morning, and I didn’t have it,” he told Time Magazine in 2001. “And I knew that I wasn’t gonna be able to get it back. Whatever the thing was, it was just gone.”
In May of this year he told ESPN (via Anne Thompson) “My clearly stated goal is to set a new standard for realism in that [sports] world.”
Great. so how is it that he apparently screwed up the “Moneyball” script? When it was first reported by Variety that the baseball movie had been deep-sixed at the 11th hour by Sony prez Amy Pascal, the blame seemed to fall on Soderbergh who apparently delivered a last minute draft across her desk that evidently greatly deviated from the original draft by Academy Award winning screenwriter, Steve Zaillian (“Schindler’s List” – The irony is Zaillian also wrote “American Gangster,” which was ankled last minute before Antoine Fuqua was supposed to direct it, it was shelved and then Ridley Scott eventually took over and brought it to the screen).
And in many ways, the departed-from-the-original-script accusation is true. We know this because we’ve read Soderbergh’s draft. Hold on a minute…
Context: The main crux of “Moneyball,” is the concept of building a effective, valuable team with no dollars and using funny stats math, no, unconventional metrics, that Baseball as a larger entity laughs and scorns at; it was dismissed at the time as glorified Fantasy Baseball logic. A fool’s errand that wouldn’t work in the real world. But Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane (to be played by Brad Pitt) did exactly that and amassed a rag-tag team of circus freaks that on paper — at least to the conventional wisdom at the time — was a joke. The players he bought and traded for made other coaches and sports pundits scratch their heads. Was he mad? Beane had always been a maverick, a risk taker, but it wasn’t — at least according to the script — until he met Paul DePodesta, a Harvard grad who uses his statistical skills to change baseball scouting tactic and joined the A’s in 1999 as an assistant to the GM, that this offbeat, but cost-effective schema was put into effect. It worked in 2002, when following the sabermetric principles — using undervalued players, and putting the emphasis on walks and strong on-base averages — the A’s set an MLB-record of winning 20 consecutive games. They were first in the American League West after a dreadful season where pundits laughed them all. But this incredible turnaround launched the book, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” which documented their overachieving season.
Back to Soderbergh vs. Zaillian’s draft (from what we’ve read so far). The main difference right in the beginning is some of the sabermetrics context. In Zaillian’s December 2008 draft (presumably there’s been others between then and now), there’s a lot of engaging set-up of Beane finding the young DePodesta, taking him under his wing and making him a member of the club, to the grand scoffing skepticism of his coaches and various scouts. It sets up the major challenges ahead — a man who has nothing to lose because his team is so shit (Pitt’s Beane character), so he follows an unproven kid — and the cynicism and obstacles he has to face within his own clubhouse. This is totally missing in Soderbergh’s draft. The two met in the most undynamic, prosaic way, trade pleasantries and are off and running. The dialogue through the first 20-some pages is extremely expository; sometimes painful how it tells and doesn’t show.
A key scene in the beginning of “Moneyball,” is between Billy Beane and his wife Amy going to the airport on vacation. A desirable trade comes up all of a sudden and Beane — who’s cellphone is practically attached to his ear at all times — eventually bails on his wife and their Caribbean vacation to fly to a bar mitzvah and convince a GM about a player deal. Suffice to say a divorce is not far behind and it masterfully sets up everything you need to know about Beane as a human being; he’s obsessed with baseball and everyone, even his wife comes second. He’ll even crash a bar mitzvah, put on a yarmulke, and ask, “how long is this thing gonna last?” as he impatient waits for his man (dude has big brass stones on him).
We haven’t read all of Soderbergh’s “Moneyball,” yet so we’ll save judgement for later, but it seems pretty apparent that the reports that Amy Pascal (and potentially Brad Pitt) was shocked when she read his 6.22.o9 draft of the script and then put on the breaks, seem to be on the mark. There’s elements that aren’t even written out that must have made her nervous as well such as an “INTERVIEWS” section that vaguely reads, various people, “describing the intensity and potential of one Billy Beane, a star athlete in San Diego in the spring of 1980.”
Furthermore, his vague intentions are telegraphed at the beginning of the script with an intro (warning?) that reads, an important portion of the film will be written “in the editing room.” This intro says, this is not a “cop-out” but just a fact and it’s done entirely by design. Still, you can’t help but think as soon as that was read the warning signs went off.
But is the whole thing terrible? According to Scriptshadow who has read the whole thing, yes. They give it a grade of “trash,” also complaining heavily about the expository dialogue.
“I kept thinking I was at a museum listening to a tour guide, ‘Baseball is a game of numbers. Billy has discovered that. He will now try to apply it to his team.’ All the fun is gone here,” they wrote. The stats context that we painfully reiterated above and said was missing from Soderbergh’s draft? They agree, and say the backstory to the metrics thinking is “treated like an afterthought. It’s implied that there’s a spreadsheet involved but the explanation stops there.” This is well put. Shadow’s conclusion is “he turned a solid script into an incomprehensible mess. And that’s why his movie was shut down.”
Again, we’ll save our judgement for the end, and there are midway points in the script that seem verbatim from Zaillian’s draft, but obviously we agree on crucial points in the beginning of the script that probably can’t be salvaged later on.
We’ve been writing enough about it that people are coming out of the woodwork at us (which is nice to get noticed). For one the MLB-not approved theory seems to be, as you probably figured, total b.s. Update: we finished Soderbergh’s draft. It’s ok, but not great. Much more docu-drama at the expense of real drama. It’s like he looses a lot of great juicy, dramatic elements and, as mentioned, drops a lot of the interesting context to the metrics analysis (which is more interesting than you’d think). It simply doesn’t get much better than we’d already read, but “trash” is putting it a little harshly. It’s also not as “drastically” different as everyone says it is, but the changes are significant enough to cause worry.