nine months pass...
one year passes...
two weeks pass...
two weeks pass...
three weeks pass...
In Skittish Hollywood, Stars Can’t Save ‘Moneyball’
By MICHAEL CIEPLY, NY Times
LOS ANGELES — In a production office here, at least a couple of would-be film workers were still hanging around on Monday, hoping in vain to score with their troubled baseball movie “Moneyball.”
But they had swung, and missed.
The powers at Sony Pictures, which was supposed to finance the film, and the Creative Artists Agency, whose prize client Brad Pitt had agreed to star in it, were, meanwhile, wrapping up a rhubarb with the director Steven Soderbergh, a clutch of producers and each other. This followed Sony’s decision to halt the picture just days before shooting was to have begun in Los Angeles, Oakland and Phoenix last week.
The last-minute demise of a high-profile film project, especially one starring an A-list star like Mr. Pitt, is Hollywood’s equivalent of a bridge collapse. Painful, expensive, and damaging to all involved, the spectacle is rare. It happened with “Used Guys,” a high-priced comedy at 20th Century Fox in 2006.
But such disasters — this one is estimated to have cost Sony $10 million in development and pre-production costs — may become more common as an increasingly nervous film business comes to terms with a sharp decline in home video revenue, the diminishing power of even the most popular stars to muscle their projects into production and new uncertainty over complicated bets like “Moneyball.”
“They’re much more careful about doing a movie just because a star wants to do it,” said Eric Weissmann, a long-time entertainment lawyer who recalled the days when Warner Brothers made a film, “An Enemy of the People,” based on an Ibsen play, largely because Steve McQueen wanted to do it.
“Moneyball,” which is based on a 2003 nonfiction book by Michael Lewis, is supposed to tell the story of Billy Beane, the Oakland Athletics general manager who figured out how to build a winning team on the cheap with players who were undervalued by the conventional measures of success in baseball.
Not hugely expensive — the budget was estimated at around $57 million — but not a small indie project, either, the film was of a sophisticated type that needs the cachet of a Soderbergh, the star power of a Pitt and perhaps Academy Awards potential to overcome its somewhat cerebral quality and the difficulty of attracting foreign viewers for American-based sports pictures.
But some of those elements collided in the last few weeks, increasing doubts that Hollywood — where specialty divisions like Warner Independent Pictures and Paramount Vantage have been closed or diminished — is losing its ability to deliver tricky but appealing pictures like “Good Night, and Good Luck” or “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which earned Oscar nominations for George Clooney (as a director) and Mr. Pitt (as a star).
As of Tuesday, “Moneyball” was back in development, with Sony executives still hoping at some point to work with Mr. Pitt. But Mr. Soderbergh was off the project. And the studio was gearing up eventually to find someone who would direct something more like the version of the script written by the Oscar-winner Steven Zaillian than the rewritten version by Mr. Soderbergh that scuttled the project.
But that might bring problems of its own. One of the reasons Mr. Soderbergh made his script changes was to win the approval of Major League Baseball, which was not happy with some factual liberties in Mr. Zaillian’s version. Such approval is crucial in a reality-based baseball film that intends to use protected trademarks.
“Typically, on a film like this, we look at it for historical accuracy,” said Matthew Bourne, a public relations vice-president for Major League Baseball. “We’re been in touch with Soderbergh and Sony, and they’ve been receptive to our requests” Mr. Bourne said.
Representatives of Sony, Mr. Pitt, and Mr. Soderbergh all declined to discuss “Moneyball.” But accounts from more than a dozen people involved with the film, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid damaging professional relationships, described a process in which the heady thrill of a film rushing toward production was halted by a studio that was suddenly confronted by plans for something artier and more complex than it had bargained for.
A central player in the drama has been Amy Pascal, Sony’s co-chairman, and an executive known for taking a strong hand in the development of scripts. Ms. Pascal and her team became involved with “Moneyball” about six years ago, when a relatively untested producer, Rachael Horovitz, brought the book to Sony with a screenwriter, Stan Chervin, after virtually every other buyer in Hollywood had passed.
Stephen Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson — writers who had worked with Sony on pictures like “Ali” — also wrote a draft. Then Mr. Chervin returned to work with the director David Frankel, who opted to do “Marley & Me” instead.
Mr. Pitt, a fan of the book, meanwhile had become interested, putting the film on a fast track at Sony, which, hired Mr. Zaillian, another of the studio’s favorites, to do another rewrite, even as it agreed to bring on Mr. Soderbergh as the director.
While he has scored big with studio projects like the “Ocean’s Eleven” series with Mr. Pitt, Mr. Soderbergh remains one of Hollywood’s most self-consciously distinctive directors. He serves as his own cinematographer, often contributes to scripts and has worked lately on a series of challenging, low-budget films like his two-part “Che,” a Spanish-language movie that made its debut both in a small number of theaters and on pay-per-view.
Two weeks ago, a mismatch in both personal style and expectations proved fatal to “Moneyball.” Mr. Soderbergh, about a week before shooting, delivered his own revision of the script, which Sony executives saw as being far more documentary-like than Mr. Zaillian’s approach.
The executives, who had just seen disappointing results from “The Taking of Pelham 123” and “Year One,” rebelled.
It cannot have helped that the new script showed up just days after an announcement in Washington that Sony was about to begin an elaborate production by yet another studio favorite, the writer-director James L. Brooks, with Owen Wilson and Reese Witherspoon. The untitled new movie is a romantic comedy set in the world of — baseball.
The situation was particularly ticklish, given Mr. Pascal’s close professional relationship with Bryan Lourd, the Creative Artists partner who serves as one of Mr. Pitt’s agents. In a highly unusual arrangement, when the studio decided to pull the plug on Mr. Soderbergh’s film, it allowed representatives for him, Mr. Pitt and the producers a weekend-long window to shop the film to Paramount, where Mr. Pitt is closely allied with the studio chief, Brad Grey, and Warner, where both Mr. Pitt and Mr. Soderbergh have strong ties.
Both studios, however, immediately passed.
Through last week, the “Moneyball” team looked for a compromise that might restart the film, which was already weeks into its expensive prep period. But Fox, which also got a look, joined those who passed.
And by this week, the movie, at least in its current configuration, was dead. Mr. Pitt’s representatives had an eye out for his next picture. Mr. Soderbergh’s were looking for ways to assure that his valuable, if somewhat eccentric, career, would not be harmed by the debacle.
And those who looked forward to “Moneyball,” the film, were waiting to see whether Hollywood might still figure it out.
“There’s a movie in there,” Mr. Wilkinson said on Monday. “But it’s a very unusual movie.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
― Dr Morbius, Wednesday, 1 July 2009 15:15 (fourteen years ago) link