It Lives!

If you're a regular reader of this blog (sad) you know I've closely followed the development of the baseball-themed movie Moneyball...based on the acclaimed Michael Lewis book (author of the recently adapted sleeper hit The Blind Side). I got to spy Lewis and his wife, former MTV Vee-Jay Tabitha Soren, at the party premiere for The Blind Side last month (thanks, Rich). THAT'S how closely I follow this story. I stalked Tabitha and her daughter at the ESPN Sportszone in Times Square in hopes of learning more about the future of Moneyball, but I learned nothing from the experience beyond the fact that neither of them can shoot toy guns worth a damn.

It's been a rocky road for this bizarre project as you can read about here and here, but the big news this week is that it's back on! Yes, just six months after Sony Pictures halted production on the Steven Soderbergh project at the proverbial eleventh hour, the studio has rewritten the script and found themselves a new director. Given that the most recent incarnation of the project was heavily influenced by Soderbergh and his numerous rewrites of the original script from Steven Zaillian, one would have expected Sony Pictures to redo the project with a much more mainstream approach. While that's probably true to some extent, I can find little fault with hiring Aaron Sorkin to do the rewrite and then hiring Bennett Miller to be the new director. Miller was the Oscar-nominated director behind Capote (2005), and Sorkin is pretty much the greatest TV/film writer of our generation.

Many questions still remain about Moneyball...not the least of which is how good will it be, but between Zaillian, Sorkin, Soderburgh, Miller and Brad Pitt, you have one of the more intriguing creative pastiches in recent memory. I'm tentatively thrilled with these developments. Stay tuned...