"Moneyball:" It's Right on the Money for Top-Notch Movie-Going Entertainment

"Moneyball" is a movie about baseball that Brad Pitt wanted to make. But to say that "Moneyball is a movie about baseball is like saying The Sopranos was a series about the waste-management business," as the article on the film in September 26, 2011 Sports Illustrated put it.

It's a wonder the film got made at all, since Pitt was really not a baseball player back in his days at Springfield (Mo.) Kickapoo High School. Wrestling. Diving. Football. But no baseball for Brad Pitt in his sports-playing days.

When Pitt read Michael Lewis' (The Blind Side) book about baseball, he realized it was not really a book about baseball as much as it was a movie about believing in yourself and having the courage to buck the system to prove that you can do it...whatever "it" is. There's even a scripted line from the scouts, who are critiquing the prospects for next year's team: "He's gotta' be successful to be confident, and that's when you've got something." Years ago, Steven Tyler described his own success as lead singer of Aerosmith as "Fake it till you make it."

The concept of success breeding success is something I promoted for 20 years as the CEO of a Sylvan Learning Center (#3301) I founded in the small town of Bettendorf, Iowa. I could relate instantly to the success theme and the gamble that Oakland "A's" team manager Billy Beane has made in deciding to revolutionize the game of baseball by integrating statistics to determine the under-rated players to draft. The team is looking for bargain basement recruiting deals that will become players who will turn out to be winners. The script notes that it gives the team the appearance of "an island of lost toys," as some of the players win ugly. They are undervalued, but, using statistical analysis, Beane and his young wunderkind assistant go after those players aggressively, to fill a large hole in their roster caused by the raiding of their talent by teams with deeper pockets. Three players, in particular. must be replaced, and they were the "A's" star players.[*It's sad to note that now ALL the major league teams use this method and the advantage that Billy Beane figured out is, therefore, gone...with the wins.]

Beane de-emphasized the role of dugout managers such as the character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman (Art Howe) and, instead, plucked "Google Boy," as the plot dubs him, a young whipper-snapper named Peter Brent in the movie (real character name: Paul Podesta, Beane's fresh-out-of-Harvard assistant) a recent graduate of Yale. Peter (Jonah Hill in a serious role) tells Beane "Baseball thinking is medieval."

Beane buys in to the premise that statistics can help turn his struggling team ("We're the last runt at the bowl.") into a winner. The Oakland "A's" at the time had a budget of approximately $38 million to compete with the $121 million of teams like the New York Yankees. In Jonah Hill's character of Peter Brent, Beane sees a way to even the playing field. He'll embrace this new philosophy of baseball and rock the boat, much to the chagrin of those in it, but, as he says to his young assistant using Texas Hold 'Em terminology, "Just you and me, Pete. We're all in."

When Brad Pitt read the book, he recognized the universal themes underlying the story of a team that went on to set the American League record for most consecutive wins in a season (20 games). In 103 years, the record had never been broken, but the Oakland "A's broke it in 2002, using what the grizzled veteran scouts termed "statistical gimmicks."

Not unlike "Road to Perdition," where the universal father/son theme resonated with the Zanucks and spurred the film to be made from a graphic novel written by Muscatine, Iowa native Max Collins, Brad Pitt wanted to play Billy Beane, a man he sees as someone tilting against windmills and fighting the good fight against odds that often seem overwhelming. Risking it all. Standing up for what he believes in. Being loyal to his principles and his team. The onscreen Beane says, "I made one decision based on money, and I said I'd never do it again," [alluding to his earlier player days, when he turned down a full-ride scholarship to Stanford to turn pro right out of high school.] and, as a player, Beane never lived up to his early promise. Although Beane's success with the "A's" in 2002 as General Manager ultimately earns him the offer of a $12 and 1/2 million-dollar contract with the Boston Red Sox, after wavering a bit, he turns it down to stay at Oakland.

As the script says, "We are card counters at the blackjack table. We're going to turn the tables on the casino." With "adapt or die" as the motto, Beane locks horns with virtually everyone, including his dugout manager, his scouts, his players, his family, his bosses and himself.

The script by award-winning writer Aaron Sorkin ("The Social Network") and Steven Zallion ("Schindler's List") is clever, funny and meaningful, but much of it wrote itself when genuine baseball scouts gathered to share their wisdom. Some of the people in the room when Pitt holds a scouting meeting are real baseball scouts, but you'll also recognize Aaron Pierce from "24" (Glenn Morshower, 49 episodes) or Chief Jerry Reilly from "Rescue Me" (Jack McGee, 44 episodes, 2004-2007). You may also notice that the actor playing Scott Hatteberg, Chris Pratt, is from "Parks & Recreation" where he plays Andy Dwyer (48 episodes, 2009-2011).

The most substantial role for a former TV series regular went to Kerris Dorsey ("Brothers & Sisters," 91 episodes 2006-2011), who plays Billy Beane's daughter Casey. She played Paige Whedon on "Brothers & Sisters" until the show was recently canceled. It is Casey's song about being "a little girl lost in the middle," which she performs for her dad, that frames the movie. Singing "I'm just a little girl lost in the middle" (a la Jimmy Eat World's "The Middle"), Casey's pure alto speaks to her dad, who encourages her to share her vocal talent and perform for others.Late in the film, Pitt is seen in his car replaying the recording Casey has made for him. The message speaks to him now more than ever.

One of Billy Beane's scouts (Grady, played by Ken Medlock), whom he ultimately must fire for insubordination, tells Beane (Pitt), "You're going to have to explain to your kid why you're working at Dick's Sporting Goods," when Beane keeps pushing his statistically-driven agenda in the face of opposition from nearly everyone. But Beane has bought into Bill James' book on baseball statistics, 1977 Baseball Abstract: Featuring 18 Categories of Statistical Information That You Just Can't Find Anywhere Else. And even before that 1977 book, there was Earnshaw Cook's Percentage Baseball, a 1964 Johns Hopkins engineering professor's treatise on sabermetrics.Beane has seen the future, and it is much different than the past. Rather than standing firm against it, he is embracing it and insisting that his club embrace it with him.

Brad Pitt saw Billy Beane as "the voice of reason speaking against the establishment." Speaking truth to power is not popular, but it made for some great 70s films, which I chronicled in "It Came from the '70s," a book with 50 representative films of the era.(www.ItCamefromtheSeventies.com).

Pitt and Miller also appreciate movies of the seventies, and Pitt explained the difference between today's films and the films of that great movie-making era this way: "In scripts today, someone has a big epiphany, learns a lesson, then comes out the other side different. In these older films I'm talking about, the beast at the end of the movie was the same beast in the beginning of the movie. What changed was the world around them, by just a couple of degrees. Nothing monumental. I think that's true about us. We fine-tune ourselves, but big change is not real." (Austin Murphy's Sports Illustrated article "Brad Pitt Deals", September 26, 2011).

As the third director on the film, Bennett Miller said, "It ("Moneyball") seemed like a shoot-the-moon project because it was complex and messed up in 1,000 different ways." Stephen Soderbergh had parted ways with the project when his idea for a more documentary-style approach was rejected due to cost constraints. The film languished in development hell for 8 years. Pitt, who has given 2 Oscar-worthy performances this year (the other as the father in Terence Malick's "The Tree of Life") says, "What we were trying to do is tell an unconventional story in the Trojan horse of a conventional baseball movie."

Michael Lewis, in the 2003 best-selling book on which the film is based wrote, "At the bottom of the Oakland experiment was a willingness to rethink baseball: how it is managed, how it is played, who is best suited to play it, and why." Lewis has said, "I always thought of it (Moneyball) as the biography of an idea, and I wrote it as a biography of an idea. And you can't make a movie of an idea"

But you can if you're Brad Pitt, the 800-lb. gorilla of leading men.

Pitt saw the same themes that Rachael Horovitz recognized after 12 years working for Hollywood studios: Taking a new path. Having belief in one's self to risk and move forward. Loyalty to one's principles in the face of the temptation to abandon them. Horovitz picked up "Moneyball" in 2003 as a free-lance producer and, fortunately for her, "As long as Brad Pitt wanted to make this movie, it was going to get made."

Seventies Heroes & Themes

When Pitt talks about the film, he references 70s anti-heroes like R.P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection and Steve McQueen, in pretty much every movie he ever made. That was the premise of an entire book I wrote (It Came from the'70s: From The Godfather to Apocalypse Now). Seventies movies were the best era for film since the 30s, precisely because of those universal themes and those unforgettable performances. The contrast with today's computer-generated blow-up-more-cars approach to movie-making is stark. What appealed to me about those films also appealed to Brad Pitt (and Bennett Miller). I spent 8 years of my life compiling It Came from the '70s as a retrospective of that decade's movies from 15 scrapbooks of my reviews saved for 43 years, so I'm ready for more films like 2011's "Moneyball," a throwback film to that golden era of movie-making.

"Moneyball" is a movie with a heart, a brain, a spine and a funny-bone. Some of the funny was provided by the scouts. A sample: "This is the kind of guy who, when he walks into the room, his dick has already been there for 2 minutes." Beane on the "A's" standing amongst other teams: "There's rich teams, poor teams, 50 feet of crap, and then there's us." Beane to a scout who mentions that one player "has a good face," "It's not like we're looking for Fabio." "He's freaky---and not in a good way," And---one truism articulated by Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) that explains why Beane was prepared to risk it all to find a way to make his team competitive---"If we try to play like the Yankees in here (i.e., while selecting new players to draft), we're going to lose to the Yankees out there." And there is the hilarious trip to recruit Scott Hatteberg, when Beane and his assistant Wash inform Hatteberg, a catcher who has nerve damage to his elbow, that he is going to be taught to play first base. (Recounted in the Sports Illustrated article.)

The Mickey Mantle quote with which the film kicks off is apropos: "It's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life." (Oct. 15, 2001). Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" is used in one opening day montage, a philosophical fit. The entire film worked, for me, because, as Director Bennett Miller said of his cinematic sensibilities and those of his star, "Both of us were drawn to some of the same films from the '70s where you don't have to have a character that stops the asteroid from hitting the Earth."

Pitt is excellent in the lead role. Jonah Hill turns in a nicely-restrained supporting performance as Google Boy (Will Hill be as funny now that he's creepily cadaverous?), and Philip Seymour Hoffman is also very good as bullpen manager Art Howe, a man at odds with the boss. Stephen Bishop also does justice to David Justice, (to milk the pun.)