Board Bets

Friday, October 2, 2009

Billy Beane doesn't just draft baseball players (he also drafts women)




As an avid follower of the Moneyball Movie genesis (there's other posts about it floating around this blog without the proper tags for some reason...), I was absolutely devastated when I found out that the movie was initially canceled. Although the film seemed surreal (Brad Pitt, Steven Soderbergh, Dmitri Martin, Scott Hatteberg...what?) and although Moneyball seemed like it would be the absolutely last book ever turned into a movie, stranger things have been accomplished. Unfilmable movies like Watchmen and A Clockwork Orange became great films.

Alas, I digress. The movie has been re-greenlighted without Soderbergh on board. What shocks me, however, and provides the basis for this post, is that, as an avid Moneyball movie tracker, I missed this amazing article which revealed the existence of a Moneyball sex scene in the film's original draft!

A PDF of the script (which has since been taken down) was floating around the internet at the time, which
"...even includes a scene in which the Oakland GM hits up an Outback Steakhouse in Cleveland with Paul DePodesta and orders a Bloomin' Onion.

Later, Zaillian portrays Beane doing the most logical thing after eating a plate of fried onions with tangy sauce ... having sex with the waitress who served it to him."

Classic, right? The best part of The Big League Stew's article is the rationalization of why this scene was probably cut from the rewrite:
Perhaps Soderbergh deleted this scene and Pascal thought the absence of chain restaurant-related romance would hurt the film's test scores among women?
We wouldn't want a movie about baseball statistics and 30 year old men who live in their mom's basements to alienate the female audience with a sex scene now, would we?

1 comment:

Please be kind, rewind.