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This story first appeared in the Oct. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
Major League Baseball is going scripted. The league is developing a miniseries about Babe Ruth with Allen Coulter attached as director and executive producer, sources tell THR.
MLB regularly has advised on baseball-centric Hollywood films, including 42, Moneyball, Million Dollar Arm and Clint Eastwood‘s Trouble With the Curve, but the Ruth mini is the first scripted project generated internally. Executives are looking to Coulter (The Sopranos, Terence Winter and Martin Scorsese‘s upcoming HBO rock drama Vinyl) to round out the dramatic scope of Ruth’s biography — including his lavish personal life and little-known details — in a way that also will appeal to non-sports fans.
Although he has been depicted multiple times, from 1948’s The Babe Ruth Story to 1992’s The Babe (with John Goodman as the famed Yankees slugger), the ability to render the Sultan of Swat more as an athletic figure and to re-create the dramatic baseball of the 1920s era in modern HD appealed to MLB executives. If the Ruth mini finds a network, look for the league to mine its 100-plus-year archives for more scripted projects.
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