In 2003, not long after Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game was published, studios opened their doors to pitches for screenplays based on Michael Lewis’s already acclaimed bestseller. In one sense, the story had Hollywood written all over it—“a classic underdogs-vs.-establishment tale,” as Variety called it, that played out on two levels. The narrative follows the Oakland A’s during their near-miracle 2002 season, when they—one of the lowest-spending teams in baseball at the time—posted a 20-game winning streak and won a preposterous 103 games, thanks to statistical formulas dreamed up in the late 1970s by baseball guru Bill James, but used for the first time successfully by the A’s general manager, Billy Beane. The counterintuitive, but brilliant, idea was to boost a poor team’s chances of winning by assembling a roster of players whose hidden value showed up under this novel statistical microscope(which James called sabermetrics). The emotional journey of the book is Beane’s own story: a failed baseball player with a maverick streak who dared to challenge decades of baseball tradition and ended up changing the entire culture of the sport.
Despite Lewis’s literary success, the East Bay journalist was far from a hot ticket in the movie world in 2003. His bestselling first book, Liar’s Poker, about the time he spent on Wall Street, never made it beyond the script stage. Another book, Next: The Future Just Happened, had an undistinguished outing as a TV documentary. The Blind Side, which was to be his breakthrough film hit, hadn’t been written yet. Add to that the fact that baseball films are generally duds at the box office, with little if any international appeal, and you had a Hollywood heat index that was tepid at best. Still, Moneyball fell between the extremes of “buzz so great that a bidding war ensues” and “no buzz at all, so agents and authors have to beat the bushes in the hope of generating one.” Studios were intrigued, but the screenwriter’s “take” would have to be right.
That’s where things get sticky for anyone who thinks movies “based on a true story” should tell the truth. The rules for such films are a lot more slippery than those for the books that inspired them. Most people assume that feature films, for example, are more trustworthy than TV movies, which often seem hackneyed and littered with clichés. Actually, the reverse is almost certainly true, since television networks have their own legal and ethical standards, so although the material may be schlock, the events depicted in a TV movie probably happened more or less as represented. And the Motion Picture Association of America’s only concern is how many times a character might say the f-word on-screen—not whether or not he or she ever said it in real life.
Of course, directors, actors, and studio execs want a good relationship with the subjects of the stories they dramatize, if only to avoid libel and to honor any contracts with the subjects—and also so they can rely on them to promote the movie once it comes out. But even so, it’s hard not to make things up when you’ve got to cram a messy true story into a neat two hours and include a clear character arc and a satisfying climax. We want movies to seduce us, to make us fall in love with the characters and their stories. Even if a tale is mired in tragedy, it needs to be mired in a way that’s aesthetically pleasing. Google a photo of the real Belle Starr sometime, and you’ll see that Gene Tierney she was not. And Billy Beane is a handsome, charismatic man, but he can’t compare with Brad Pitt, who portrays him in the movie. In biz shorthand, “Pretty plays.” Any Moneyball script that would satisfy baseball fans and movie lovers would have to balance such demands.
Starting in 2004, the evolution of the screenplay proceeded in typical Hollywood fashion: One writer after another was brought in to either polish or rewrite it entirely. In the movie business, writers tend to be treated the way the Pony Express treated horses: Ride them until they drop, and then get another, who might make the movie funnier, sexier, more exciting, or just plain better. It’s not clear how many writers or drafts Moneyball had, but four writers, including three of Hollywood’s elite, shaped the project more than any others.
I’ve read one version by each of them, versions I ferreted out online, where some screenplays meant to be confidential end up as PDFs. (Leaking scripts is common in Hollywood, but none of these was slipped to me.) Honestly, I’ve yet to read one that was bad. They’re not even wildly different from one another. But the changes from one to the next make for a fascinating case study of how Hollywood deals with true-life material and will have particular meaning to Bay Area folks, who know this baseball history and have a stake in seeing it represented accurately. Could Hollywood do justice to Billy Beane’s complicated personality and the reality of what has happened to the A’s since 2002, the time of the triumphant story told in the book?
Spoiler alert: This is not the type of question Hollywood decision-makers tend to ask.
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