Over the last couple of weeks you’ve probably been reading about the last minute scrapping of Steven Soderbergh’s, Brad Pitt baseball starrer, Moneyball, by Sony Pictures. New revelations, tell a different story of this and of other victims of the mighty sword.
The story went that Soderbergh had delivered his last minute version of the Steven Zaillian script about a week before shooting was due to start and Sony’s co-chairman Amy Pascal hated it. She said it was a completely different working of the script she’d approved and canceled the $58m movie on the spot. Three days before shooting, 230 people were clearing their lockers.
It was said that Amy Pascal didn’t like the fact that Zaillian’s purely fictional structure of the true story of baseball manager Billy Beane, had suddenly been turned, by Soderbergh, into what was essentially a docu-drama including interviews with people who knew Beane and real baseball players who would be playing themselves. For her, $58m was too big a risk for non-traditional story telling of a subject that may not score internationally even with Pitt on the posters. Soderbergh however, wanted it to be 100% real and all true.
A crew insider has now revealed a different story. For many months people in the Art Department and Costume Department knew the film was to feature a lot of interviews and that real people from the story would be playing themselves. Indeed, they said using this style was Soderbergh’s intention from the start and he’d been shooting interviews for some months with Sony’s approval. He had also been submitting re-drafts of the script since early June, with notes indicating the movie would feature re-enactments and interviews, so what happened?
Well, It may have been that Pascal didn’t see the early revisions, the lower execs did and when she did, whoa there!! They’d already spent $10m on pre-production to get the project to where it was on that fateful day, so she wasn’t about to put everything on hold while they prepped a completely different movie. And some of those who have seen Soderbergh’s script have said it is indeed poor. So, in the words of Alan Sugar, or Donald Trump if you’re reading this in the US…..
No other studio has so far picked it up, and for the moment Sony isn’t looking for a new director so for now, the field is empty.
It seems crazy that projects get canceled part way through, does no one figure that the movie may not be worth doing at an earlier stage? Well, it’s happened on more than this occasion.
In 2007, Peter Jackson was executive producing the movie adaptation of Microsoft’s, Halo, to be directed by Neil Blomkamp and financed by Universal and Fox. During pre-production, the budget had reportedly risen from it’s original $135m to $200m and at the time when they had to pay $5m in rights fees to Microsoft and the writer, Universal called a meeting to air concerns about the inexperience of the director and asked the key creative’s to take a cut in their deal. They declined and the film was canceled.
But mystery surrounds the cancelling, on February 25 this year, of UK producer, Ruby Films’ $35m production of King Lear, starring Anthony Hopkins. Having announced the project at Cannes last year, stars including Gwyneth Paltrow, Keira Knightly and Naomi Watts came onto the project, and then suddenly, it’s over. Ruby Films wouldn’t reveal what happened other than to say, it’s now not going ahead. Immediate suggestions were that they couldn’t raise the finance, what with this cast??!!
On the horizon though, another version was appearing. 
Announced on February 3, the Al Pacino version of King Lear to be directed by Mike Radford. And, to scotch the suggestion that Ruby’s was scuppered through lack of cash, Radford’s is being financed from the UK and Northern Ireland.
It’s generally thought Hopkins was perfect for the role, much more so than Pacino, so was there fear of competition? Releasing two films of the same story has been shown to be unwise as indicated by Capote, the second of which sunk with little trace.
Maybe Ruby Films should have heeded the words of Lear, ‘I am tied to the stake, and I must stand the course’, but they didn’t and we may never know why.
Tags: Al Pacino, Amy Pascal, Anthony Hopkins, Brad Pitt, Halo, King Lear, Mike Radford, Moneyball, Peter Jackson, Ruby Films, Sony Pictures, Steve Zaillian, Steven Soderbergh