“Moneyball”: The movie that almost never was
I have been tracking the long, circuitous path from sale to theatrical release of the movie Moneyball almost since the inception of this blog, and it has been a fascinating journey to track. For my background on it, you can go to this post [July 2, 2009] and this post [June 17, 2011]. The Daily Beast has this excellent overview of a process that involved three different directors, three different writers, pulling the plug on the project a week before principal photography, reducing the budget, shifting focus, then finally making the movie.
With all that, it was easy to wonder whether the end product would be any good or not.
I’ve seen the movie and I’m happy to report it is terrific. And that seems to be the general consensus: For example on Rotten Tomatoes it is currently rated 95% [critics] / 92% [audience]. In its first 6 days of release, the movie has earned a healthy $24M and should have a good run here in the fall throughout Major League Baseball’s playoffs and World Series. I expect the movie will receive multiple Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations including Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, and if that happens, there’s a good chance it could hit the $100M B.O. mark.
What concerned me most was when I read several articles about the project years ago, including one in the LAT by Patrick Goldstein and each person involved in Moneyball had a different take on what the story was about:
How did this unlikely project make it to the starting gate? It all started when a woman named Rachael Horovitz decided that she needed some good books to read when she went to Tahiti in 2003 for a much-needed vacation. Having spent years working at Fine Line and Revolution, Horovitz decided to strike out on her own and become a producer. She fell in love with “Moneyball,” not so much for its inside take on baseball, but because it was such a compelling example of a workplace drama. “For me, the movie is a love story about a man and his job,” she explained the other day.
Version #1: A love story about a man and his job.
“Everyone at Sony was incredibly supportive,” Horovitz said. “Of course, they all asked the same question — how do you make a movie out of it? I kept telling everyone ‘This is a story anyone can relate to, because it’s basically a second chance story. It’s about a guy whose early failure could have doomed him to failure, but managed to turn it into a huge life lesson.’”
Version #2: It’s a second chance story.
“I personally identify with every movie I’m involved with, which I guess makes me a total narcissist,” [producer Michael DeLuca said with a laugh. “But it doesn’t take much of a stretch to see New Line as the Oakland A’s, always having to make do with less while catching a lot of crap from the establishment for the crazy, unorthodox things we did.“
Version #3: A guy who does crazy, unorthodox things.
But somewhere along the line between the efforts of screenwriters Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, producer and actor Brad Pitt, and direct Bennett Miller, they found a central theme of the story and stuck to it throughout. The importance of this is underscored in this interview Miller did with Anne Thompson:
Anne Thompson: Moneyball is unexpected from a studio movie. Which script did you first read?
Bennett Miller: I first read the script that was Sorkin’s first revision of Zaillian, and then I read Zaillian and then I read the book. Then I thought about if there was a movie somewhere. Then I met with Brad, and pitched him. Everybody’s gotta be making the same movie, otherwise you’re in a disaster, especially with these huge personalities. With them, Might can be your best friend or your worst enemy. If you’re sharing a common goal, purpose and vision, then great, and if not, it’s the last place anybody wants to be.
— —
AT: He [Billy Beane] didn’t go to Stanford, he wasn’t good in the batter’s box.
BM: He wanted to be a student. He was really smart. Nobody in his family had ever gone to college, and he wanted to be the first. His mother really did not want him to go [to The Mets]. She wouldn’t be in the room when he signed the contract. He was a first round draft pick! From the time he was fifteen, you’ve got adults who’ve spent their lives in baseball, they’ve seen everything, saying ,‘This is your future, this is your destiny,’ and he makes a decision based on that, and there’s a big check. Again, there’d be a big check at the end of the movie, and I thought, ‘well that’s one thing; there’s a check and a check, and a decision and a decision.’
The other thing: Michael describes Billy’s excitement when these new [sabermetric] concepts are introduced to him, as not just a way of winning, potentially, but as ideas that might explain him and his outcome, and why he might have failed. To me, he thinks he’s trying to win baseball games, but he’s really trying to remedy something in his own life.
AT: He couldn’t stand being a failure: why did all the baseball experts think he was meant to be something that despite all his gifts, he didn’t turn out to be? It didn’t work out. He didn’t trust those people.
BM: Well he wanted to prove them wrong, and that season became a kind of trial. And the outcome would be some kind of verdict that would have something to say about who he was. He’s trying to remedy something from his past and he wanted to put the game on its head, and there’s a little hostility in it.
AT: He was competitive.
BM: Extremely competitive. When I read it, I saw it as a really small story, in a way it used to be OK to make a small story, like a Cuckoo’s Nest, where it’s like, nobody knows about these people. But this is bigger in scale.
Central theme: A story about a guy trying to succeed where he once had failed. There are all sorts of sub-themes tied to that and layers of meaning, but there’s not a scene in the movie where the Protagonist’s shadow of his past doesn’t loom over his moods and his actions, an ongoing battle to defeat those inner ‘demons’
I don’t want to spoil the movie’s plot for you, so I’ll leave it at that, but I do want to note this bit of business from the Miller interview:
AT: The screenplay, how much was Zaillian, how much Sorkin?
BM: Both of these guys came on and off it. It went Sorkin, Zaillian, Sorkin, Zaillian — it was a little bit of back and forth.
AT: Well you’re working with two of the best screenwriters we know. What were the strengths of each one?
BM:A guy could do worse! Zaillian had a heavier, earthier, more internal, brooding, darker perspective. And Sorkin is masterful at comedic haiku that communicates volumes in a moment, in a beat, that he could take a scene that’s written and he could reduce it and put a line in and make it function in a different way. But ultimately what we’re talking about is a character, the public and private self, like Capote. These guys wrote appropriately to different sides of him. Zaillian wrote more to the internal, beneath the surface, and Sorkin managed to write very effectively for the more public, charismatic side of Billy.
I find this interesting as it speaks to that basic idea I have talked about here on this blog and in my teaching for years: The External World and Internal World, how there is never a moment in a script [or should not be] where things aren’t happening in both, never a moment with a character where their dialogue doesn’t have some shade of subtext or their actions don’t have some layers of unseen motivation or meaning. To have two of the most renowned screenwriters working on one project, where each is more focused on either the External or Internal Worlds… sounds like one helluva interesting process.
And you know what? That richness of character really comes through with Beane’s character, a winning combination of what the screenwriters wrote, Pitt acted, and Miller directed.
For further background, here is an interview with the author of the book “Moneyball” — Michael Lewis who himself is now doing some screenwriting.
UPDATE: Another interview (The Wrap) with Bennett Miller. Here’s an interesting take:
In other words, you didn’t see it as a baseball movie.
It’s really the classic, universal, timeless story: the search for wisdom. It’s “The Wizard of Oz,” it’s King Arthur. You’re misplaced from home, from the life you’re supposed to be living. There’s disharmony, and you can find yourself facing some impossible adventure or task with the understanding that if you do this, order will be restored and you’ll be returned.
Disunity to Unity, almost always the spine of the metamorphosis journey.
Comment Archive