Tonight, I saw the Brad Pitt film Moneyball, which was excellent. It was based on a true story about a guy named Billy Beane who was the general manager of the Oakland A's, and who worked with a young scout (played by Jonah Hill), and together, they changed the way baseball scouting and team building was done. This pertains to my blog because, although it wasn't discussed in the film, Billy Beane had posters of Joe Strummer and The Clash in his office.I wonder if that was based on reality. If so, it would make sense to me. Beane didn't care about how he was perceived, he cared about... not just winning, but changing things. It doesn't surprise me that a guy like that would be influenced by The Clash. Not just their music, but their philosophy. They weren't afraid to shake things up, and neither was Beane (at least as portrayed in this film).
Anyway, it was a great detail that added power to the film, at least for me.
2 comments:
I saw Billy Beane talk about those things on MLB's Studio 42. They were genuine Billy according to him.
Hi,
I'm not much of a baseball fan and so I knew little of Billy Beane before seeing Moneyball for the first time last night ... but I'm a huge Clash/Strummer fan going back thirty years.
I wondered about those posters in Billy Beane's office and so google'd any info I could find about the veracity of their placement in the movie.
Whether true-to-life and/or the spirit of the movie, here's my take on the thematic consistency between BB and JS:
Both were in it not for the money but to change the "game" for the better and took a lot heat for their very-public outsized iconoclasm and ambiguous, incomplete "success".
Ultimately, they both lost to implacable forces, ie. capitalism, but did so in a terribly heroic fashion and not without a few inspiring victories along the way ...
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