Bill James gets animated

This is
getting pretty funny. I, like most, was a bit skeptical when I first heard the
Steven Soderbergh is planning to turn
Michael Lewis’s Moneyball into a
movie.
Unlike
many, however, I’m actually sorta looking forward to it. Soderbergh is
great, and I’m curious to see what he does with the thing.
But the
more I hear about it, the more weirdly intrigued I am.
Brad
Pitt as Billy Beane? A bit of a stretch, sure, but I can
see it — and I suppose one needs a few watts of star power if there’s gonna any
hope of making concepts like OPB, Range Factor, and Jeremy
Brown’s body type sing on the screen.
Demetri
Martin as Paul DePodesta??? Gotta say, that that one (so to speak) is completely
out of left field. But Demetri’s a smart guy. And I suppose he knows about
things like Games, Timing, and
Power.
But today
comes the best news yet.
Who plays Bill
James?
“My current
plan is to animate him,” Soderbergh tells MTV
News.
“We have
this sort of oracle character that appears throughout and declaims various issues
and he’s essentially supposed to be Bill James. He’s your host in a way…. The
background will be real but the person who is supposed to be him will be
animated.”
“It needs a
gimmick,” Soderberg explains. “It needs something to make it not Masterpiece Theatre.
His writer voice is so big, I thought to literalize it is going to actually
harm it. I need to make his voice funny and when he comes on you’re happy to
see it.”
OK. Officially
count me in for this.
In the mean
time, if Soderbergh hasn’t found a model for his Bill James cartoon, he could
do a lot worse than the drawing (above) by Phoenix illustrator Paul Hoppe, which accompanies my interview
with James last year.
And oh
yeah: if you haven’t signed up for billjamesonline
yet, you should do so. Three bucks a month.
Can’t be beat.