Mystery Man: “Moneyball”
I’ve been tracking the Moneyball fiasco for a while: here, here, and here. But Mystery Man goes above and beyond the call of duty with his latest post.
In it, MM provides a thorough overview of the project’s history.
He also reviews the Steve Zaillian script — available here.
And the Steve Soderbergh script — available here.
MM’s bottom line on Zallian’s draft:
What do we have? We have 128 pages of Billy Beane playing hardball with his scouts, with the owner, with the coach, with Paul the economist, and he’s doing what he can to change the way people think about statistics to create a winning team. We have flashbacks to Billy’s past that only serve to show how the emphasis on Billy’s personal statistics during his brief attempt at playing baseball shaped his thinking as an executive and helped bring change to how the scout’s view statistics. To that, I say, “Okay, so what? That’s just exposition.” Billy goes through women as often as he goes through baseball players, which never changes, and from what I’ve read isn’t historically accurate either. So I have to ask, “How does that serve the story?” We’re occasionally shown Billy hanging out with his daughter, which likewise does nothing to advance the story but only serves to show a different side of Billy. Of course, I’m all for character depth and I do not believe it essential that every character arcs.
But in the end, you walk away feeling not as exhilarated as you had hoped because there’s an emphasis on the intellect over the emotion. That’s really evident toward the end when the story loses steam and fails to deliver the emotional goods as it should. The fact that Bill James occasionally pops up to explain statistics to us only illustrates my point that there’s too much emphasis on things other than the character’s journey.
MM’s take on Soderbergh’s draft is, uh, slightly worse:
I will defend Soderbergh only this far: I’m guessing that he instinctively picked-up on the weaknesses of Zaillian’s script, and he sought to, in an inventive way, make the experience more unique, emotional, personal, and generally, more realistic.
For that, I applaud him.
Having said that, Soderbergh fucked this script up beyond all redemption. He should’ve retitled it ‘FUBAR.’ He re-shaped this flawed story into something so unnecessarily convoluted. His script contains not only the same problems as Zaillian’s but also piles on more problems with weak, flat, phony dialogue and mountains of verbal exposition. Oh, the mountains of insufferable exposition, so high and so vast, they should be called “Soderberghs Himalayas.”
Ouch. Go to Mystery Man’s website and read MM’s entire analysis.
UPDATE: In comments, Carpet and I had a bit of a back-and-forth re Moneyball. He responded with this:
i agree, this movie [Moneyball] sounds like a money-loser any way you look at it. i’m just speaking against the simplistic idea that soderbergh’s script sucks. the totality of a visionary director’s vision has to be accounted for, and script it just one part of that.
by the way — i’m an editor, not a screenwriter. although i suppose i get to do the final rewrite, don’t i?
And Carpet is right on both accounts: A writer-director’s draft of a shooting script can be a totally different creature than a selling script. And editors do get the ‘final rewrite.’
That’s not to say that screenwriters don’t ‘edit’ the scripts we write: Every choice of where and when to enter and leave a scene, use of secondary slugs / shots to move the action, intercuts, and so are in essence a combination of camera placement / use and editing — at least in our, and hopefully, the reader’s minds-eye.
I had this lengthy post back in February that featured a long Variety article on editing in the digital era. In the post, I talk about one of the best ‘screenwriting’ books I’ve ever read: “In the Blink of an Eye” by the renowned editor Walter Murch. The post also has two lectures by Murch, plus some clips from a documentary “The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing.”
Speaking to Carpet’s broader point, one need only look at the making of the movie Annie Hall to see how important the edit process is. From the movie’s Wikipedia entry:
The film was originally intended to be a drama centered on a murder mystery with a comic and romantic subplot, and was filmed that way. According to Allen, the murder occurred after a scene that remains in the film, the sequence in which Annie and Alvy miss the Ingmar Bergman film Face to Face.[2] After shooting had completed, the film’s editor persuaded Woody Allen to cut the mystery plot and make the film a romantic comedy.”
The movie turned from a drama / murder mystery into a rom-com after it was shot — in the editing process.
So yes Carpet, you’re right: The director and editor get the final ‘rewrite’ on a movie. But it’s fair to say that screenwriters have a role that no one else has in the production of a movie: We are involved in the genesis of the movie’s story universe.
All part of filmmaking’s collaborative process — and we each have our part to play. What’s more, we can learn from each others craft. Certainly screenwriters can learn a ton from studying what editors do.
I’ve got a great example of how even a simple editorial choice can transform good script pages into a great movie sequence. It’s from The Shawshank Redemption. And I’ll post that on Monday.
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