Nobody wanted Million Dollar Baby, and then it won Best Picture
Paul Haggis spent four years trying to sell his boxing script. Even with Clint Eastwood attached to star and direct, studios said no, and Warner Bros. balked at a 30 million dollar budget. Eastwood filmed it in under forty days, and it won four Oscars, including Best Picture.
The 2004 drama grew out of Rope Burns, a 2000 short-story collection by F.X. Toole, a pseudonym used by Jerry Boyd, who worked boxing corners as a manager and cutman. Haggis wrote the screenplay on spec after losing his job on the television series Family Law. To get it made, Eastwood talked Tom Rosenberg of Lakeshore Entertainment into paying for half, with Warner Bros. covering the rest. Shooting ran through June and July 2004 in Los Angeles and on the studio's own stages.
Hilary Swank plays Maggie Fitzgerald, a waitress from the Ozarks who talks the gruff trainer Frankie Dunn, played by Eastwood, into coaching her. Morgan Freeman is Scrap, the former fighter who looks after the gym. Eastwood worried that Swank looked too slight to box, so she trained close to five hours a day and put on 19 pounds of muscle. Along the way blisters on her foot turned into a staph infection that could have killed her, and she kept it from Eastwood because she felt Maggie would have done the same.
The title came from a taunt Sonny Liston threw at Muhammad Ali before one of their fights. The film opened in eight cinemas in December 2004 and later took about 217 million dollars worldwide. Roger Ebert called it a masterpiece and his best film of the year. Of its seven Academy Award nominations it won four, with Swank and Freeman both taking acting Oscars.
The ending caused a row. In early 2005 disability rights activists protested in Chicago, Berkeley and other cities, arguing that the story treats life with a severe disability as not worth living. Michael Medved had a different complaint: the marketing sold the film as a female Rocky and hid how dark it was. Eastwood replied that the film was about the American dream, and that playing characters on screen did not mean he endorsed their choices.
Source: Million Dollar Baby
