Comparing the Moneyball scripts
Posted By Jeff Fletcher on June 27, 2009 9:47 am
First of all, you may wonder why I seemed so obsessed with this Moneyball movie. I’ve wondered that myself. I think it’s because it’s the first time there’s ever been a movie made (or even proposed) about people I know and events I witnessed first-hand. Also, there’s something pretty cool about getting to see a script for a movie before it’s made.
Anyway, I’ve now read both Moneyball scripts. There is the Steven Zaillian script, dated December 2008. There is the Steven Soderbergh revision, dated June 2009, which is the one that was rejected, scuttling the whole project. We’ll just call them the Zaillian script and the Soderbergh script. Unfortunately I can’t post either one for you to read, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Besides, if you’re a little resourceful, you can probably find copies on your own.
In short, the Zaillian script was much less accurate, but much more dramatic. It was, well, a movie. It had all the character elements and dramatic elements that you’d expect from a movie, even if they didn’t necessarily exist in real life. The Soderbergh script was much more accurate, down to the name of Billy Beane’s dog. However, it read much more like a documentary.
You really only need to read the beginning of each script to see the difference (although I promise you I really did read both start to finish). In the Zaillian script, we get the big opening scene with Billy suffering in the weight room in Oakland while the A’s are losing the 2001 division series in New York, then Billy talking on his cell phone while in line at the airport to go on vacation with his girlfriend. He’s so engrossed in the call that he leaves the phone open while it’s going through the metal detector, and continues the call on the other side. At the last minute he ditches his girlfriend for the trip, and heads to Beverly Hills to crash the Bar Mitzvah of the son of Jason Giambi’s agent. Then Billy goes to Cleveland to try to get Ricardo Rincon from the Indians, only to meet the young whiz kid Paul DePodesta. After Beane and DePodesta go to dinner, where Beane also meets a waitress he will later hook up with, Beane is convinced he wants DePodesta to show him all the magic of sabermetrics to rebuild the A’s.
Those are all great, interesting scenes. Of course, the accuracy of them is only slightly higher than zero percent.
- Beane was in New York when the A’s lost to the Yankees in 2001. As much as Billy talks about never traveling with the team, he always travels with the team in the playoffs.
- Beane was married at the time, so there was no girlfriend. (I’d like to think.)
- I don’t know this for sure, but I feel fairly certain that Beane did not heavily pursue Jason Giambi in the winter of 2001, since it seemed a foregone conclusion he wouldn’t be able to afford him. He had already rejected $90 million before the season. Also, Beane would never go to a Bar Mitzvah to talk to an agent.
- Beane would never fly to Cleveland just to get Ricardo Rincon. That’s what cell phones are for.
- Mark Shapiro is a pretty smart guy himself, not some puppet who was sitting there having DePodesta tell him what to do.
- Finally, the big one: DePodesta already worked for the A’s in the winter of 2001. He came in 1998. And Beane knew plenty about using statistical analysis before the winter of 2001. He did work for Sandy Alderson, you know.
So what we’ve got here is the whole setup to the movie being based on fiction, or at least a selective use of the facts. That said, it’s still entertaining. It’s more entertaining than the way things really happened.
The Soderburgh script corrects all of these things, but it’s just boring. It delves into intricate details that don’t help the story at all: like a whole thing with DePodesta talking to hitting coach Thad Bosley about improving John Mabry’s swing. Thad Bosley? John Mabry? There’s a passage in there about Beane refusing to let the Red Sox talk to Ken Macha for their managerial opening. Yeah, that happened,but it has nothing to do with the story.
The story, the one that’s dramatic enough to be entertaining to non-baseball fans, is about someone trying to do something different, going against conventional wisdom, and succeeding. Of course, in the case of the A’s, you have to exaggerate some of that to make it more dramatic. That’s how most sports movies work. As I’ve said a million times, the A’s didn’t have some cowboys-and-indians atmosphere with the scouts on one side of the room and statistics guys on the other. For the most part, they worked together. Also, the A’s didn’t win because of the Scott Hattebergs and Chad Bradfords. If my memory serves, the 2002 A’s also had the MVP (Miguel Tejada) and Cy Young winner (Barry Zito), along with Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Eric Chavez. These weren’t the Bad News Bears.
So the thing is, do you want to make an entertaining movie, or do you want to make a documentary?
If you’ve got Brad Pitt, I’d go for the movie.
[...] Scripts – Jeff Fletcher breaks down the two Moneyball scripts. Steve Zaillian’s is fascinating but factually inaccurate. Steven Soderbergh’s is factually [...]
I’m going to watch this as a baseball fan when it comes out, but it is helpful to know the facts that you just laid out because I would have accepted the way that they portray DePodesta, etc. If I wasn’t a baseball fan, I’m not sure how interested I’d be in seeing a movie like this if it was portrayed accurately.
I think with some rewrites the original script could be made into something a little more historically accurate and still entertaining. The Soderbergh script sounds pretty dull even if accurate to the events. Its pretty much impossible not to have some dramatic license when working from real life because real life generally isn’t that interesting. The whole thing with Beane and the waitresses and revolving girlfriends isn’t important to the story and could be taken out. There are ways they could better incorporate DePodesta into the story than the contrived meeting with Shapiro.
The stuff with David Justice and Scott Hatteberg is interesting, especially Hatteberg because its a story a lot of people can relate to on a human level even if they’ve never played baseball. The thing I thought that really tied the book together was Beane the GM understanding that Beane the player and others like him had no business being major leaguers regardless of physical talent and that in this regard the traditional scouting culture was failing. I think that they could expand that stuff and keep it interesting for a wider audience, especially since its a human story as much as a baseball story.
I think they could go back a little further to the decline of the great late 80′s teams and the recollection of A’s management of what needed to be done and maybe spend a few minutes of screen time on that to lead up to how the Moneyball culture in Oakland came about and its current most successful incarnation in the late 90′s early 00′s.
Great comparison, great post.
Here’s the breaker for me between the two scripts. In Zillian’s, Jeremy Giambi is always watching the Natural on DVD. In Soderbergh’s, he watches Happy Gilmore. That sums it up for me.
Even if the facts aren’t true, I rather watch the first movie with Brad Pitt trading players and women at about the same pace. It’s Hollywood, not Oakland. The second script is much more Oakland.
Either way, I hope the movie gets made.