Backstory: The screenwriting saga of “Moneyball”
Long-time GITS readers know I tracked the laborious route Moneyball took from script to screen pretty closely, a few of my posts here, here, and here.
The Hollywood Reporter recently had an informative backgrounder that shed quite a bit of light on the process and interestingly enough, much of the Sturm und Drang arose around the movie’s screenplay. Some excerpts:
But she [Sony President of production Amy Pascal] couldn’t go along with Soderbergh’s last-minute rewrite of the script by Steven Zaillian, which had been built on an earlier script by Stan Chervin. Soderbergh planned to take a semi-documentary approach to what was already a sports story with questionable commercial appeal — at a studio budget approaching $60 million.
“It was just a case of honest creative differences because that script didn’t reflect all of our hopes and Sony’s hopes and ambitions developed prior to Soderbergh coming on,” says producer Michael De Luca, who had been working on the project since 2004 with producer Rachael Horovitz, who had acquired rights to Michael Lewis’ best-selling novel in 2003.
With $10 million already invested, Sony offered to let Pitt and Soderbergh take the movie in turnaround to another studio if they could make a deal for the $60 million production before it unraveled — which meant in a matter of days. After a frantic weekend of activity led by Pitt’s and Soderbergh’s agents, however, there were no takers.
Moneyball had struck out; few films had ever come back from such a shutdown.
So to recap: The original producer Horovitz acquired the rights to Lewis’ novel in 2003. Pascal pulled the plug on the project in June 2009. Six years. Then crash-and-burn literally weeks before the commencement of principal photography.
That was a gutty call by Pascal. When a studio is $10M ‘pregnant’ with a project, sometimes they will feel compelled to make the movie rather than eat those steep development costs.
Pascal decided Moneyball would need additional leadership and work on the script to get it back on track. At the time, Sony was in production on The Social Network, on which De Luca was also a producer. Pascal asked Network producer Scott Rudin and writer Aaron Sorkin to get involved with the baseball-themed story, and Pitt agreed to produce as well as star. “This was really complex, unconventional material,” says Pitt, “so the more guns, the better. The more bright minds we have on this, the better.”
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Before accepting the assignment, Sorkin called Zaillian, who was on vacation in Rome when his phone rang. “I was standing on a side street just around the corner from the Pantheon,” says Zaillian, recalling that Sorkin said “he was being asked to write some new scenes. And I said: ‘That’s better than dismantling the script. Try not to do that, if you can.’ What I remembered most about the conversation was when I asked him what he’d do if I was calling to tell him what he was telling me. Without much hesitation, he said, ‘I’d burn the studio down.’
Sorkin: Ever the wordsmith, even on a phone call. “I’d burn the studio down.” Classic.
Even after Sorkin’s return to L.A., the work continued. “Brad would ride his motorcycle over to my house being chased by a couple carloads of paparazzi,” recalls Sorkin. “I wanted Brad to do most of the talking. He’d speak generally about his love of character-driven movies from the ‘70s.”
Pitt had been a fan of Lewis’ book but wasn’t sure at first if he wanted to star after reading Chervin’s early script. “They were trying for something more commercial, more comedic,” says Pitt. “In reading the book and doing my research, I became obsessed with the deeper meaning within the book and a value system that was out of whack.”
Pitt meant that big-city teams have much more money for top players than small-market teams. He committed after a new script was written by Zaillian, which gave him the character he wanted to play: “It was a character I hadn’t seen in a long time that was verbose, competitive and sharp.”
What seemed to have happened to help focus the story was a shared vision of the Protagonist as an underdog against an entrenched system. The character would almost by definition have to be “verbose, competitive, and sharp” in order to take on the system and bend back the innate power of the sport’s conventional wisdom.
“Passing a script back and forth, obviously, isn’t the most enjoyable way to work and is usually a recipe for disaster,” Zaillian says of their tag-team approach. “Important things can get lost in the shuffle. But at the end of the day, difficult as it was, it worked.”
“Steve and I were now working at the same time,” says Sorkin, “concentrating on different runs of scenes. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but the point was, ‘Whatever it takes to cross the finish line.’ We were both courting the same girl, but we’d both invested way too much at that point to let ego stop us.”
That shared vision combined with director Bennett Miller’s take that Moneyball was not a sports movie comes through in the film. And for all the hassles getting that movie made, it works really well.
Takeaway: When writing a spec script, you need to go into the story deeply enough so you have a coherent vision of what it is you are trying to do. In a recent conversation I had with Academy Award winning screenwriter David Seidler, he told me much the same as to how he approached adaptations: “I usually go on the basis of what was is it about that person’s life that so grabbed me, that created such a resonance in me, I felt compelled to tell their story. If you can isolate that and put it down in one or two succinct sentences, that becomes the thin red line. Anything that services that thin red line is potentially in the movie. And anything, no matter how fascinating, that doesn’t service the forward movement of that thin red line, I’m sorry, but it’s got to go.”
This is the case whether we are writing a story that is an adaptation of a real person’s life or working with a wholly original set of characters. Like Brad Pitt and the screenwriters did with Billy Beane in Moneyball, and Seidler did with Bertie and Lionel in The King’s Speech, we need to find a vision, a take on the essence of the story — those “one or two succinct sentences” — and hew to that with every choice we make in crafting the script.
NOTE: I’m hoping to be able to feature soon a Q&A with Stan Chervin, the first screenwriter on Moneyball.
For more of the Hollywood Reporter article, an excellent read, go here.
