Money Worries Kill A-List Film at Last Minute

Roberto Pfeil / AP U.S. actor Brad Pitt poses for the photographers in Berlin on Wednesday, Dec 15, 2004, prior to a press conference for the Germany-Premiere of his new film "Ocean's Twelve". (AP Photo/Roberto Pfeil)

In a film production office here, at least a couple of employees were still hanging around on Monday, hoping in vain to score with their troubled baseball movie “Moneyball.”

But they had swung, and missed.

Just days before shooting was to begin, Sony Pictures pulled the plug on “Moneyball,” a major film project starring Brad Pitt and being directed by Steven Soderbergh. The last-minute demise of a prestige picture is a rare spectacle in Hollywood — one that is painful, expensive and damaging to all involved. This one is estimated to have cost Sony $10 million in script development and costs like scouting locations.

But such disasters may become more common as an increasingly nervous film business comes to terms with a sharp decline in home video revenue and with the diminishing leverage of even the most popular A-list stars, like Mr. Pitt.

“They’re much more careful about doing a movie just because a star wants to do it,” said Eric Weissmann, a longtime 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.

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 the condition of anonymity to avoid damaging professional relationships, described a process in which the heady rush toward production was halted by a studio suddenly confronted by plans for something artier and more complex than bargained for.

The swift mothballing of “Moneyball” may also increase doubts that Hollywood can still deliver tricky but appealing pictures like “Michael Clayton,” “Good Night, and Good Luck” or “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Studio divisions that specialized in sophisticated films, like Warner Independent Pictures and Paramount Vantage, have recently been closed or diminished.

A central player in the behind-the-scenes drama over “Moneyball” was Amy Pascal, Sony Pictures’ 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 idea to Sony with a screenwriter, Stan Chervin, after virtually every other buyer in Hollywood had passed.

“Moneyball,” which is based on a 2003 nonfiction book by Michael Lewis, tells the story of Billy Beane, the Oakland Athletics general manager who figured out how to build a winning team on the cheap with players undervalued by the conventional measures of success in baseball.

With a budget estimated at about $57 million, it was not hugely expensive but not a small indie project, either. The film was of a sophisticated type that needed the cachet of a Soderbergh, the star power of a Pitt and perhaps Academy Award potential to overcome its somewhat cerebral quality and the difficulty of attracting foreign viewers for a movie about America’s pastime.

Two writers who had worked with Sony on “Ali,” Stephen Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson, did script work after Mr. Chervin’s version, which tried to warm up the story by focusing on the relationship between Mr. Beane and his daughter. Mr. Chervin returned to the project to work with the director David Frankel, who chose to do “Marley & Me” instead.

Mr. Pitt, a fan of the book, had become interested, putting the film on a fast track at Sony. The studio hired Steven Zaillian, a reliable screenwriter who had won an Oscar for “Schindler’s List,” to do another rewrite, even as it agreed to bring on Mr. Soderbergh as the director.

Although 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 cable TV.

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Two weeks ago, a mismatch in personal style and expectations collided. Mr. Soderbergh, a week before filming was to begin, delivered his own revision of the script.

One reason 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 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 vice president of Major League Baseball for public relations. “We’ve been in touch with Soderbergh and Sony, and they’ve been receptive to our requests.”

What baseball saw as accurate, Sony executives saw as being too much a documentary. Mr. Soderbergh, for instance, planned to film interviews with some of the people who were connected to the film’s story.

The executives, who had just seen disappointing results from “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3” and “Year One,” rebelled. Ms. Pascal and Matt Tolmach, co-president of Sony’s film operation, personally told Mr. Soderbergh of their dissatisfaction.

The situation was particularly ticklish, given Ms. 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, it allowed representatives for Mr. Soderbergh, Mr. Pitt and the producers a weekend to offer the film to Paramount and Warner. Both studios, however, immediately passed.

Through last week, the “Moneyball” team looked for a compromise that might restart the film. But Fox, which also got a look, decided to pass as well.

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.

As of Tuesday, “Moneyball” was back in development, with Sony executives still hoping at some point to work with Mr. Pitt and to find a director more interested in Mr. Zaillian’s version.

“There’s a movie in there,” Mr. Wilkinson said on Monday. “But it’s a very unusual movie.”

This story originally appeared in the The New York Times