Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003)

by Michael Lewis

One of the things that I’ve long championed in film is the necessity for screenwriters to reimagine non-fiction and make it more dramatic, keeping the basic premise, the main events, and the primary characters but not being bound by the constraints of absolute factual representation. Well, screenwriters Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin did a number on Michael Lewis’s book and created something incredibly dramatic and satisfying, so much so that they were nominated for best adapted screenplay at the Oscars that year. They really should have won for Moneyball, because they changed so much in a subtle way, while still keeping the essential truth of the piece, and the results are incredibly impressive.

Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, delves into philosophical questions about professional baseball, using as its example the 2002 season of the Oakland Athletics and its general manager, former big leaguer Billy Beane. The book chronicles the way that Beane surrounded himself with people who used the mathematical underpinning of ideas by baseball writer Bill James to acquire players who were undervalued by major league baseball and provide his small-market team with a way to compete against large-market teams like the New York Yankees who had deep pockets and the ability to buy whatever players they wanted regardless of price. Much of the book goes into depth about James and where his ideas came from and how misleading he realized most baseball statistics are in terms of accurately predicting player success.

Fans of the film, like me, will recognize the names: Jeremy Giambi, Chad Bradford, Scott “Pickin’ Machine” Hatteberg, David Justice, Kevin Youkilis and Jeremy Brown. The big events are there as well, the trade to get Ricardo Rincon, The Streak, and the loss in the playoffs. But one name you won’t find in the book is Peter Brand. This character is a fiction invented by the screenwriters, a combination of Paul DePodesta and J.P. Ricciardi, who were instrumental in evaluating players based on the new philosophy championed by Bill James. The book, however, is Billy Beane’s story all the way. And while he has assistance from his brain trust, he clearly knows what he wants, how to get it, and seems to need little in the way of instruction or help. The film is very different on that score, with the unknown “Peter Brand” giving Billy the answer to the question he has of how to compete in an unfair game.

The book is absolutely compelling. Lewis goes into great detail, not only about Billy Beane’s disappointing major league career but about all of the ballplayers who are featured. It certainly doesn’t have the dramatic arc of the film, but then it doesn’t need to. The book has a much different agenda of focusing on the James philosophy and how it ultimately succeeded, and the afterward by Lewis is incredibly eye opening. If you enjoyed the film I would highly recommend the book. The fact that it is very different is actually a plus. It not only goes into much more detail about the events, some of them radically changed, as well as the players but gives the reader a real appreciation for the work that went into creating a dramatic screenplay from the source material. Moneyball is a great read and a great insight into a little known episode in baseball history.

Enemies, a Love Story: The Oral History of Siskel & Ebert (2012)

by Josh Schollmeyer

Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were two of the luckiest guys on the planet. If you really think about it, they began as virtual unknowns, a couple of movie reviewers in Chicago, authors of film reviews that people read but rarely looked at the byline, if ever. Sure, Ebert had won a Pulitzer Prize, but how many other winners over the last forty years can you actually name . . . ? That’s what I thought. Enemies, a Love Story: The Oral History of Siskel & Ebert, charts the rise and fall of this mercurial pair who came from nowhere to become national celebrities, and the face of movie criticism, almost overnight.

Josh Schollmeyer is an executive editor at Playboy, and has been a feature writer for years, most notably as founder of The Chicagoan, and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The book was originally a lengthy article in The Chicagoan in which Schollmeyer conducted fifty interviews over the course of a year with individuals associated with the show. There is no narration, but quotes from individuals are deftly arranged to comprise a sprightly narrative on their own.

Few of the participants had any notion that a quirky idea that began at the local Chicago PBS station would blossom into a national sensation and become forever after part of our national consciousness. I remember vividly myself seeing the show when it first aired on my local PBS affiliate, and my whole family became instant fans. The article about the inside story of these two disparate writers who seemingly had nothing in common with each other, and at times even disliked each other, and yet were entirely dependent upon each other for the success of the show, is absolutely riveting.

Schollmeyer himself is a major advocate for web-based writing and, as such, the book is available as an electronic article. I picked mine up on Amazon for my Kindle. But it was originally published and is still available on the Now & Then e-reader site. It’s inexpensive and gripping. I read the entire article in one sitting while waiting for a plane at the airport. For anyone interested in this cultural phenomenon, Enemies, a Love Story: The Oral History of Siskel & Ebert is a must read.

Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (1996)

This is a book I wanted to enjoy a lot more than I did. There was a tremendous book by the same editor, Mark C. Carnes, that came out in 2001 and was much more satisfying called Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past. What made the later book better, I think, is that novelists have more of a desire to get the history right, whereas Hollywood in the golden era felt no such compunction. As a result, I think a lot of the contributors to Past Imperfect shied away from making their essays an assault on the films’ avalanche of inaccuracies and the whole exercise suffers slightly as a result. There’s also the issue of age and the need for a new edition in which more modern historical films could be included.

Another problem with the book, especially in comparison with Novel History, is the format. It’s a large format that includes stills from films and woodcuts and photos from history to help illustrate each essay. The problem is there are so many sidebars in each essay with information that I wanted to be integrated into the text. It gives the book a feel of a high school text book as a result and makes the reading of each essay rather more disjointed than it should be. The opening conversation between historian Eric Foner and director John Sayles is a nice way to begin, identifying the problems of making historically accurate films, and this is followed by arguably the best essay of the bunch, Stephen Jay Gould on Jurassic Park. From there, however, the quality slips.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the essays. They’re good, just not great. Probably my favorite is Richard Slotkin’s essay on Charge of the Light Brigade. He begins with a paragraph that deals with a great perspective on viewing historical films, namely how period films typically contain a subtext for the audience of the day that is an attempt to manipulate their views of a current social conflict, in this particular case German remilitarization prior to World War II. Another delight was Gore Vidal’s review of Sullivan's Travels, which he disliked and yet still had some enjoyable insights. In the end, there’s more to like than dislike despite the books own imperfections. Past Imperfect is a great starting point for understanding the way historians think about film and how we should think about viewing these films today.

Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema (2010)

Like many people, my first introduction to Gary Giddins came through jazz, specifically his books on Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong. Later, I became more familiar with him through his appearances on Ken Burns’ Jazz. It’s only been recently that I discovered his books of film reviews for the Village Voice and various other publications in New York. Of course Giddins is educated, erudite, well read and well schooled in film history, and his reviews are a delight to read.

The reviews in Warning Shadows deal almost exclusively with DVD reissues of classics, thus the “Home Alone” subtitle. He starts the book with a nice essay on issues of technology and film history. Though not quite a Luddite, like most critics he mourns the diminished audience for films as well as the size of the screens. Then the book moves on to sections dealing with directors and stars, and an extensive final section on various film genres, including literary adaptations and biopics. With seventy-one separate reviews it’s quite extensive. And the emphasis on the DVD is nice because he focuses not only on the quality of the film, but of the medium itself, including extras and bonus features.

Giddins has a conversational style that is engaging, and yet he doesn’t talk down to his readers. One of the nice aspects to his reviews are the comparisons and contrasts that he gives when talking about single stars or directors, often discussing a wide range of various releases, box sets, and so on, for each artist. This is often quite insightful and gives him the ability to fit the current reissues into a larger context of an entire career. He is also quite opinionated--in a good way--about what film are poor and those that might have been a better choice for re-release. He is also unafraid of taking to task the production of the discs themselves, the film transfer, the sound quality, etc.

Gary Giddins is flat-out fun to read. The first book I read of his was a collection of LP reviews for the Village Voice called Riding on a Blue Note. He has written extensively on jazz, as well as popular music, including a biography of Bing Crosby. His most recent book, Natural Selection, combines his love for all of his interests and I’ll be reviewing that at a later date. But for a guide to reissues of great films of the past, you could do a lot worse than picking up a copy of Warning Shadows.