ShareThisTORONTO - Three decades before Billy Beane would reinvent baseball and be portrayed on the big screen by Brad Pitt, he was a high-school kid bound for college.
As Michael Lewis recounted in his book "Moneyball," Beane wanted to attend Stanford University on a joint baseball and football scholarship. But when a scout for the New York Mets made him an offer he couldn't refuse -- but probably should have -- he signed.
"Just like that, a life changed. One day Billy Beane could have been anything, the next he was just another minor league baseball player, and not even a rich one," Lewis wrote. Beane's parents took the advice of a family friend and invested his $125,000 bonus in a real-estate partnership that went bust.
His once-promising playing career followed suit and Beane eventually became the general manager of the Oakland A's, and that is why director Bennett Miller says "Moneyball" is about baseball and yet it's not.
"I saw it as a film about a guy who thinks he's trying to win baseball games and the truth is, something else is happening. Something deeper is happening," Miller told a press conference during the Toronto International Film Festival.
"This is a guy whose life did not turn out the way it was supposed to, the way it had been described to him that he had a destiny that he was going to be great. He was going to be a superstar.
"It took him more than a decade toiling in failure before he accepted that things were not going to happen and now he was in a position where he could accept that this is his life or he could begin to question what had happened," Miller said.
The GM challenges everything he knows about how baseball teams are assembled, about himself and about decisions he's made.
"It ends up being a story much bigger than a sports story," the director said. Still, Miller took great pains to be truthful about the Oakland A's, even as he explored what lurked beneath.
Sports Illustrated, which made Pitt one of the rare actors to grace its cover, decrees that "Moneyball" transcends the sports-movie genre.
"'Moneyball is a movie about baseball the way 'The Sopranos' was a series about the waste-management business,' " SI's Austin Murphy writes.
Forced to reinvent his team, but without the fat payrolls of his larger-market brethren, Beane went bargain hunting for players who had been rejected by others but could get on base. He acquired players based on a statistical system worked out by an Ivy League economics wiz.
Asked if the "Moneyball" strategy can or should be applied to the Hollywood star system, the leading man cracked, "Not if they hired me." Pitt, after all, is more like multimillionaire Alex Rodriguez than a player making a 10th of his salary.
Pitt, a boyhood fan of "The Bad News Bears" who also has a special place in his heart for 1979's "North Dallas Forty" ("I think it was the first R-rated movie I snuck into"), acknowledged that "Moneyball" isn't a simple tale.
Looking more like a rocker than a baseball GM with center-parted hair brushing his collar and a light mustache and beard, the actor told the media, "It's complicated material; it's not your conventional story or storyline with a conventional character arc.
"So it took a lot of shots at it and a lot of people getting their fingerprints on it and trying to hammer out what this thing would be. Ultimately, I couldn't let go of this story of these guys who, by necessity, were trapped in an unfair game, an unfair situation," he said of the low-budget Oakland A's who couldn't come close to matching what the big markets were paying.
"They had to think differently, they had to reinvent themselves and, in doing so, they ran up against great bias and a vitriolic wall that really tested who they were. And I think, at the end of the day, it's a story about our values, about how we value other people, what we value as success, what we value as failure."
And how that value system can be warped by bias and prejudice.
"There's so many themes; I can go on about '70s films I thought this related to," he said, referring to "The French Connection," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "All the President's Men." As he would tell Sports Illustrated, it was Popeye Doyle's obsessiveness, McMurphy's ability to thumb his nose at the establishment and the "Woodstein" chemistry that appealed to him.
"It took Bennett Miller, I think, to crack this unconventional story."
Miller, whose "Capote" landed him in the 2005 Oscar race for Best Director with Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Paul Haggis and winner Ang Lee, said moviemaking has undervalued material and approaches just like baseball.
Standard studio thinking says people like comedy and producers can do comedy, or patrons flock to action pictures and marketers know how to sell those pictures.
"I also think it's true that there's a huge market for films that mean something to people, and I think that there's a huge Alaska-size resource to drill into," the director added.
(Email movie editor Barbara Vancheri at bvancheri(at)post-gazette.com. Read her blog: www.post-gazette.com/madaboutmovies.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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