I’m not enough of a baseball fan to pitch a bunch of metaphors your way (though every molecule in my immense body is itching to find a way to work in “sac bunt”) but I’m startled by the news that Sony/Columbia Pictures’ Amy Pascal’s has put the kibosh on Steven Soderbergh’s Moneyball the day before the commencement of principle photography.
Moneyball, based on a book by Michael M. Lewis that NPR commentators have been talking about pretty much nonstop since 2003, chronicles the “new math” thinking of Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane and his unorthodox and inexpensive methods of building a solid baseball team.
I don’t know the specifics of what makes Moneyball tick (it has something to do with slugging percentages, and I can’t say I precisely know what those are) but I smell a fealty between its philosophy and Soderbergh’s heretofore mastery of the Hollywood system. Ever since his indie breakout of sex, lies and videotape, Soderbergh has maintained a solid “one for you, one for me” track record, weaving between microbudgeted experiments like Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience and mainstream (yet still, for the most part, good) films like Ocean’s Eleven and Erin Brockovich.
This admixture of box office and artistic cred convinced foreign governments to fund his chancy two-film epic Che and also got A list actors like George Clooney to reduce his normal take for films like The Good German. Fellow Oceans alumni Brad Pitt was all set to do the same with the stats-driven film Moneyball, until Pascal pulled the plug.
The official reason is that the script is that Soderbergh’s reinterpretation of Steven Zallian’s screenplay differed from what she originally championed. And she discovers this when? A day before cameras roll? Seems like something else is afoot. 
It may be wild speculation on my part, but could it be that Major League Baseball had a hand in killing this movie? Do they want the dirty secrets of their industry revealed in a major motion picture starring superstar Brad Pitt (and rising star Demetri Martin?) We have no reason to think so, but, as Steven Colbert would deftly point out, we have no reason to not think so.
What kind of dirt does MLB have on the Sony Corp? I dunno . . .maybe they are about to announce that all stadiums must re-equip with new scoreboards within the next two years, and that each of these scoreboards must have some sort of Sony gew-gaw in it? Or maybe it is a Japanese thing? The Japanese love baseball. . . more so even than the Dominicans. . .and they don’t want the patina of shame to sully their beloved sport.
Or maybe Soderbergh’s script really was insanely arty, and while $50 million (the reported budget) may not be high compared to Avatar, it is a lot of Soderbergh is bringing his Solaris game to the mound that day.
How painful must this be for Soderbergh. Months of prep work,
including already shot interview footage with actual baseball stars
meant to be sprinkled throughout the finished picture. There’s still an outside chance the movie will still get made – but it is unlikely. Columbia Pictures owns the book rights, so Soderbergh and Pitt can’t give the suits a big eff you, grab the RED system in Soderbergh’s garage and shoot the damned thing themselves. However, the man did recently create a four hour + epic about Che Guevara. Some of that may’ve rubbed off.
