Mystery Man posts #3

Here’s another great example of Mystery Man at work: During the Moneyball controversy, MM took it upon himself to actually read the two drafts of the script — from Soderbergh and Zaillian [9/19]:

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.

MM was never one to mince words.