On Movies: Brad Pitt, right on the 'Moneyball'

TORONTO - Brad Pitt knows the parallels are obvious: baseball and the movie biz - two industries where the complex algorithms of stats and star power, home runs and box-office hits, are endlessly worked on and worried over. Old ways of doing business, based on gut instinct and high-priced players, give way to leaner, meaner, formula-driven concepts - on the playing field, and on the screen.

"Especially in today's economically challenged times, you see the tendency of the studios to try to mitigate losses and therefore manage it in a way that's based on numbers," Pitt says. "And the numbers are oddly correct, but at the same time that way of doing business limits the material. It's all based on what's been done before, instead of something new - which I'm much more interested in."

In Moneyball, Pitt tries something new - and comes away with one of the strongest performances of his career. Yes, in a sense this is an old-fashioned baseball movie - Pitt plays real-life Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, forced to rebuild his team after his roster is gutted in a buying frenzy.

But it's a baseball movie like no other, offering an insider's perspective on how coaches and players relate - or don't. And it documents a pivotal moment in Major League Baseball, when Beane, at the start of the 2002 season, adopted a radical new strategy, seeking out low-salaried players with high on-base stats. Aiding and abetting him on his Sabermetrics mission - which begins pitifully, and ends in a record-breaking winning streak and a playoff berth - was a numbers-crunching Yale economics nerd, played with glorious uptightness by Jonah Hill. Moneyball opens Friday.

"I love process films, films that draw back the curtain and show you how things are done," says Pitt, who also produced Moneyball - adapted from Michael Lewis' 2003 bestseller, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game - and stuck with the project through several false starts, and several directors. "Remember Dr. Strangelove? Strangelove is one of my all-time favorites, and just the time [Stanley] Kubrick takes showing them going through the code sequences, what it takes for Slim Pickens to drop the bomb - I jones on that."