I’m amazed this movie was ever planned in the first place, frankly. Where’s the plot? Where’s the drama? It was a great read but I don’t think anyone was able to imagine how it would work as a movie. My question in a situation like this is, do Pitt and Demetri Martin and all the other actors and crew members get paid? Do they receive some kind of compensation? All those folks have pretty strong unions, as I understand it, so I’m sure they’re going to get something. That said, the studio is probably losing a fair(ish) amount of coinage by simply pulling the plug. Those must have been some seriously whacky script alterations.

“Greenlit”?  I might’ve been able to handle “greenlighted” but “greenlit”?  Really?

But really, this is probably for the best.  The book was great but I don’t have any clue how it could’ve been made into a halfway decent movie while still resembling the book.

How great would it have been if the movie had gone forward and they had been able to convince Joe Morgan to do a cameo?

Wait, the point of Moneyball was that Billy Beane needs to relax, right?

And OBP?

Where the small market team of no-names who continually are in the post season hunt, but continually fall short finally make it the big game and fail to draw a single walk.

[T]here are already too many people that claim to have read it and don’t get the point

Wow. That didn’t take long.

I suppose my attempt at humor failed.

What I’ve heard about the project, meaning what headlines I saw this morning, the script has been shot to hell and back, and Soderbergh was going off the rails conceptually. Something about an animated Bill James explaining Win Shares, I guess.

Wooden, it was that Jeremy Brown was fat, right? Like, thighs-could-start-a-fire fat?

There is a good look at the problems facing this film here:

http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2009/06/what_is_really.html

I think this guy hits in on the head when he points out
“I am 98% sure that the simplified line being floated out there that Amy Pascal was either asserting herself or just couldn’t find it in her heart to back the script changes is not the full story.

he goes on to point out-

“Sony eats $15 million to $20 million on the movie if they shut it down. It will never come back to life, most likely, but if it does, not a dollar they spent aside from the book buy will go towards the film itself. If the film did just $160m worldwide, that’s $88 million in rentals against $58m in production and, say, $80 million in marketing. A $50 million shortfall that should more than be made up by DVD and other post-theatricals. But it’s really a $30 million shortfall from where they are today, so the choice to put the movie into “limited turnaround” is a choice to lose money on a project that is all but guaranteed to make money at this budget price.”

Alot of people don’t realize just how unprofessional the film industry really is in terms of analysis these decisions. The fear of looking bad most often wins out over the more financially sound decision-making. Only in this world is a $100M+ investment seen as less of a risk than a $50M investment. It is just really ironic that it is happening with a film adaption of this particular book. Market inefficiencies anyone?

Fascinating stuff. Us NorCal guys get all worked up whenever a film promises to come up here and glorify one of our own. Then the SoCal guys go and ruin it for us by cancelling the filming, or something. Guess we’ll have to go backdate some tech stock options instead.

One of the only good things about being (originally) from Central California was not having to define myself as either “NorCal” or “SoCal”...

Oh, and not saying “hella”... I’m pretty grateful for not being in a culture that loved to use that word…

Hey man, let me latch on to the few silver linings that I can find. There’s not much, you know. Not much at all.