A review of the unmaking of 'Moneyball: The Movie'
Saturday, July 4th 2009, 6:18 PM
Chiu/AP
General manager Billy Beane (l.) introduces Jason Giambi on Jan. 7. The A's guru - and former Oakland manager Art Howe
(below) - were to be key players in "Moneyball: The Movie."
"Moneyball" strikes again. In the six years since the book was published and became a massive bestseller, its title has been the most loaded word in baseball, the mere mention of which could start bar-room brawls, or at least heated late-night arguments with plenty of red-faced shouting and banging of beer bottles.
If you think I'm exaggerating, ask any of the baseball scouts who went from honored symbols of baseball wisdom, fodder for some of Roger Angell's most finely wrought portraiture, to allegedly outmoded relics, made redundant by Sabermetrics and data crunching.
"Moneyball" has been exalted in some circles with a reverence both cloying and embarrassing and blamed by others for everything from the Steroid
Era to the demise of old-school, narrative-driven baseball storytelling in favor of trendy - and shallow - number-fetishizing.
Now it has apparently morphed into a bizarre, doomed movie project, one that we're assured is in limbo, probably indefinitely, all because of "script problems," the movie equivalent of a politician stepping down and citing "family reasons."
They've got to be kidding. Steven Soderbergh and Brad Pitt ought to team up and do whatever it takes to get this thing back on track again, and then they ought to go out and make a great baseball movie. Sadly, making great baseball movies seems to have become nearly an impossibility with callow, recession-panicked film executives apparently wanting to keep right on dumbing down Hollywood fare until we have nothing left but loud action movies with wooden acting (coming soon to a theater near you: "The Return of the Governator: He's Baaack!") or fizzy-cute romantic comedies that can safely be exported to Asia and Europe. (And yes, Sony may have shot itself in the foot by throwing "Moneyball: The Movie" into some sort of turnaround, but apparently they have what's being dubbed as a "romantic baseball comedy" in the works, Owen Wilson hard at it again, this time with Reese Witherspoon.)
The thing people seem to forget about "Moneyball," the original Michael Lewis book, was how much it left out. That, of course, was its brilliance. It's just like high-level product branding: The more you leave out, the more you can let people fill in the blanks themselves.
Lewis and Oakland GM Billy Beane hit it off, and Lewis had no access
problems, but his portrait of Beane in the book was kept as minimal as possible, with short shrift given, for example, to the defining experience of
Beane's career as a general manager, which was serving an extended apprenticeship under former Oakland A's general manager Sandy Alderson, who went on to serve as
one of the top executives in Major League Baseball.
I was the San Francisco Chronicle's A's beat writer from '94 to '99 and used to watch Beane follow Alderson around at spring training, dressed in a matching outfit, doing whatever Alderson did. Personally, I'd pay 10 bucks in a heartbeat to see Brad Pitt as Beane, dressed in shorts, plaid shirt and straw hat, meekly following around whatever actor was tagged to play Alderson - or better yet, Alderson himself. He served in the Marines during the Vietnam War and appeared in recruiting posters, ramrod straight in dress whites, as the embodiment of "the few, the proud."
Or what about another crucial relationship of Beane's time as A's general manager, that with former A's manager Art Howe?
"Moneyball" famously made Howe out to be both a rube and a clown, a kind of latter-day Dudley Do-Right with a jutting jaw and a "philosophical expression" permanently plastered on his face. It's actually funny to go back and reread some of these sections now, armed with the following crucial piece of information: Lewis talked often with Beane and calls the book the fruit of a "year-long open-ended conversation" with Beane and two deputies, but Lewis never once talked to Howe. He was perfectly happy to take Beane's version of a given conversation and run with it, to the point of ludicrousness.
"Billy had told Art how and where to stand during a game so that the players would be forced to look up to him, and take strength from his countenance, because when Art sat on the bench, as he preferred to do, he looked like a prisoner of war," Lewis wrote.
What fine, funny writing! One small problem: Beane may have said something to Howe about where to stand, and may have relayed this conversation to Lewis, who no doubt horse-laughed on cue and scribbled down the great material in his notebook. But Howe didn't change the way he managed. He stood when the A's were at bat and he sat when they were on defense, just as he always had.
There's an important baseball argument here: To a lot of the new breed, managers are overrated in importance. General managers in the Beane mold prefer
to have malleable, easy-to-control managers; the irony is that Art Howe was never that man. But here's the salient point: Beane's mentor, Alderson, was
without doubt the man in charge, but he also formed a fascinating partnership with Tony La Russa, a man no one has ever accused of being anything but
whip-smart and tough. Together they won a World Series and three American League pennants; despite Beane's dynamism and
visionary approach, his A's teams have only made it beyond the first round of the playoffs once, advancing to the 2006 ALCS against Detroit and getting swept in four.
The Soderbergh version of "Moneyball" was going to crack open a lot of these failures of the book. Unlike a lot of directors, Soderbergh has always operated with a passion for the truth. From his breakthrough movie, "sex, lies, and videotape," to more recent films like "Traffic," Soderbergh worked his butt off to get things right. Soderbergh, in preparations for "Moneyball: The Movie," sat down with Howe for several hours and talked to him in detail - and listened. The movie would have been a fresh, fascinating study of the Beane-Howe relationship, at least in part, and Howe for one would have welcomed that.
"Michael Lewis never interviewed me one time," Howe told me recently, reached by phone at home in Texas. "He had a slant. That was the unfairness of the book. That was my disappointment. Soderbergh wanted to tell the truth. He just wanted to have a true baseball story. I thought this might give me a chance to have my side of the story out there."
So the Soderbergh movie would have had Brad Pitt, fresh off a great performance in that aging-backward movie, doing his best at capturing one of the truly fascinating characters of our times, Billy Beane, with two intense relationships to convey, that with Beane's mentor, the tough and smart Alderson, and with his bête noire, Howe, and the movie could have been as baseball smart as any movie ever. Throw out Hollywood shtick. Throw out formula. Prove wrong all those bend-with-the-winds types in L.A.
Instead, the last-minute decision to halt shooting was apparently made precisely because Soderbergh wanted to be accurate and to tell the truth, and did not want to lard the movie up with appalling Hollywood bits dreamed up by some ace screenwriter who has never set foot in a baseball clubhouse, let alone learned when to side-step a sweaty towel - or jock strap - that has just been thrown at you.
The Los Angeles Times, in what reads like intentional self-parody, actually knocked Soderbergh for his eccentric, utterly impossible insistence on trying to tell a true story, instead of made-up Hollywood piffle.
"Soderbergh wouldn't talk to me about all this, but it seems clear that he became obsessed with authenticity, replacing many of (screen writer
Steve) Zaillian's inspired scripted set pieces with actual interviews with the real people who were involved in the events," wrote Patrick Goldstein. "The Soderbergh
aesthetic, according to one source close to the film, was simple: If it didn't happen in real life, it wasn't going to be in the movie. That might make
for an intriguing art film, but it clearly was no longer a film that any studio would spend $58 million to make, especially with baseball films having
virtually no appeal outside of the United
States."
So it's come to this? If a movie tries to offer an honest, true, thorough study of a subject of interest to millions it's pigeonholed as "art film"? Coming soon: "The Obama Story: How He Walked on Water" (So much better than "arty" films that think he might not be the Messiah.) and "The Women of the View: Watch Them Claw Each Other's Eyes Out in the Green Room."
Remember how Oliver Stone took flak for flagrantly making stuff up in movies like "Salvador" and "JFK." Apparently now he'd be chastised for not taking further license.
Memo to Mr. Soderbergh: You're a perennial-MVP-type film-maker, one who many years ago earned the right to exercise a modicum of creative control. These people you're dealing with are lunatics. They don't even know what's good about what they do and what they make. This fight matters. If the cretins win this one, who is to say how many more dominoes will fall? Please don't give up.
Here's a standing offer: If you want at some point to try to breathe new life into this project, sit down with some of the people who were there on the scene watching the young Billy Beane grow into greatness and become one of the most influential baseball GMs ever, people like Pedro Gomez of ESPN or Ron Washington, then an A's coach, now the Texas Rangers manager. Forever passed over for the role of skipper by the A's, he's now a successful big-league manager with a fresh contract in hand. He couldn't have participated if filming had proceeded as planned, but if it were to take place in the offseason, you would find Washington a great dispenser of down-and-dirty baseball wisdom and a man with a face - and a smile - straight out of a Jim Jarmusch film.
It's not too late. Give it a shot. A lot of people out here would love to see this movie.
Hey here's a caption for Nic's picture he posted:
