Weeks after the dramatic last-minute shelving of the Moneyball movie, Sony Pictures has unshelved it. The movie is back on again, this time with Aaron Sorkin writing the screenplay. Brad Pitt is still expected to play Billy Beane.That probably means we'll get all sorts of great scenes with Beane and Paul DePodesta talking in way-too-smart-for-real-life dialogue as they hurriedly walk from place to place. Sorkin, right, is the writer responsible for The West Wing and Sports Night and films A Few Good Men and The American President.
He's also working right now on a movie about ... Facebook.
Seriously.
It's called The Social Network" I have no idea how you make a movie about Facebook entertaining, but if you can do that, you can certainly make a movie about Scott Hatteberg's on-base percentage entertaining as well.
As you'll recall, there was quite a bit of drama involved with the first effort to get the movie made. Steve Zaillian wrote the first screenplay, which the folks at Sony loved. It was a dramatic interpretation of the events in the best-selling book. Problem is, a lot of the stuff in Zaillian's script didn't actually happen.
That was an issue not only for Major League Baseball, which had to approve the script to allow use of its ballparks and trademarks, but it was an issue for director Stephen Soderbergh. So Soderbergh rewrote Zaillian's script and turned the thing into a documentary, accurate down to the name of Billy Beane's dog.
Only it was boring, at least in the eyes of Sony boss Amy Pascal.
So now Soderbergh is gone from the project. Sorkin is in, and he's supposed to have a revised script, based on Zaillian's work, by August.
Maybe this one will mention the fact that those gritty little 2002 A's also happened to have the Cy Young (Barry Zito) and MVP (Miguel Tejada), not just Hatteberg and Chad Bradford.
Nah.
