"And since when does an authentic film translate as an 'art' film?"
What really happened to Soderbergh's "Moneyball"?
ADDED: "We've noticed that studios like it when true stories are told through blatant fabrication!"
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17 comments:
Moneyball is better than Catcher In the Rye too.
All art films are high grade soaps. Beat rh to it.
We will know when it is ever done by someone. Accurate movies really are a "Social Construct". Raw news reel camera shots, or unedited TV feeds, are "Accurate". Everything else tells us a story since Beowolf was first written down. Dan Rather assures us that "phoney but accurate" has its own category like a counterfeit of anything real. So why do we want the best evidence all the time in court? Command #9 is still leeching into our law from that God Book therby establishing a religion.
Why buy moneyball tickets when Treasury I-bonds (savings bonds) are paying 0%?
When I read Moneyball a couple of years ago it never even occurred to me that anyone would try to make it into a movie. It's difficult to think of a story less amenable to movie treatment.
Besides, sports movies are notorious for doing poorly at the box office.
Peter
I don't know about an 'art' film but it certainly sounds like it was becoming more and more of a niche film. A paen to Billy Beane might have seemed like a good idea five years ago but now? And $58 mil to create a movie about the Beane's life? How could that possibly be profitable?
I'm guessing that the studio wanted to pull this plug a long time ago and that the 'art' reasoning was just an excuse to let them do so.
What happened is that someone at Sony woke up before they produced an epic flop. Moneyball would have appealed to hardcore baseball fans and no one else. The subject matter is so technical and "inside baseball" that a documentary would really be more appropriate.
Good call by Sony.
why in god's name would anyone want to make a movie out of this book? have you read the book? niche film? how the hell do you spend 58 million dollars on a book based on baseball statistics and the draft about people no one has ever heard of or cares about, except hard core fans ? sounds like a real cliff hanger. there's no mystery here someone with some common sense asked what the hell are we doing?
Baseball is my favorite sport. A few years ago, a friend recommended I read "Moneyball". I had heard it had to do with a new way of valuing players and quantifying respective player trade values or some such.
I do financial stuff for a living and I thought this melding of my favorite sport (fun stuff) with my work life would be a very tedious book for me.
I can't imagine who would want to see the movie based on that book.
Hoolywood apparently needs creative writers.
"What exactly is wrong with making a movie accurate?"
A good question for someone to ask Oliver Stone.
Crimso -
Or Michael Moore...
I would have liked it if Defiance had been more accurate.
I have seen movies based on fiction books that seemed real to me in their characters and the situations, such as "Empire of the Sun", and I have seen true stories from good research reports totally re-written into stereotype trash in the movie, such as "Murder in Coweta County". It makes one appreciate the occaisional good one a lot.
Having worked in the film industry and produced my own educational film, I go with the "the script totally sucked" theory. Despite his public acclaim Soderberg is a not an opener at the box office; his last few movies have worked in spite of extremely weak script, not because of them. So SONY decided that they'd rather spend $50 to $100 million on something else.
"What exactly is wrong with making a movie accurate?"
In one of his books William Goldman discusses this. He writes a scene of what it would really be like for the lead to find parking spot in LA across from the courthouse. Needless to say it pretty much makes the case that accuracy in movies sucks. (It also suggests that anyone who claims to be accurate in a movie is full of shit.)
The hoopla isn't really about Sony deciding not to finance a likely flop; that happens every day in Hollywood. It's that having come to their senses they're blaming Soderbergh for their previously atrocious judgement.
They green-lighted this project with full knowledge of Soderbergh's intentions, but now they're pretending he surprised them.
Hollywood executives are lying, backstabbing assholes. Who knew?
Well, William Goldman beat me to it (via Joe) but, what's wrong with accuracy is that it's boring. It dilutes dramatic tension. It leaves us with unfulfilled expectations.
Drama isn't true, it's about truths.
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