The Luckiest Man in America takes a stranger than fiction story then fills it with too much fiction. The story of Michael Larson has been known for years. At one time, Bill Murray was considering doing a biopic based on it.
Back in 1983, Press Your Luck premiered. It was a daytime game show in which three contestants answered basic trivia questions for spins on a Big Board of prizes. However, there were Whammies, these mischievous red devil creatures that would take all a contestants winning if they landed on it. Savage Steve Holland, who would go on to direct teen comedies like Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer, was one of the animators of the whammies visuals that would air superimposed on the contestants who laughed nervously as they realized they lost a nice trip to Cancun.
As was the case with a lot of game shows, there was a limited budget. So, the patterns on the board which would flash money and game prizes could be detected if someone paid close attention. It was the same with the video games that were in arcades. All you really had to learn was the pattern. Was it cheating?
Larson (played here by Paul Walter Hauser) learned the pattern on the Big Board by buying a VCR and taping each episode so he could watch them over and over and learn the patterns. Bill Carruthers (played here by David Strathairn), created the show and directed the episodes. He couldn’t have probably guessed in 1983, the home video market would take off. VCR machines were still very, very expensive for the time and movie studios were fighting against their existence on grounds of copyright violations.
Larson who drove an ice cream truck didn’t look like the smartest man ever. He had just turned 35 when he filmed the episode as a contestant but looked a lot older by 15-20 years with his grey hairs and receding hair line. Yet, he had been divorced twice and arrested three times for scams and schemes to make quick money.
Yet, you won’t find any of this out in this movie which is mostly set over a 24-hour period in which Larson goes to interview as a contestant, then is chosen because Carruthers thinks at first he has a unique personality. It would’ve been a lot better if director Samir Oliveros, who co-wrote it with Maggie Briggs, focused more on Larson’s life than his time on the game show.
The problem is they have to pad a lot of the movie’s 90-minute run time with a lot of incidents that just did not happen at all. It’s not a big game but as a teenager myself I appeared on High Q, a regional teen trivia show filmed at WSB studios in Atlanta. Taping lasted about half an hour. It’s very unlikely Larson, Carruthers, host Peter Tomarken (Walton Goggins), and fellow contestants, Ed Long (Brian Geraghty) and Janie Leets (Patti Harrison), would’ve been able to do much of what they do in their movie.
They go to the restroom, have meetings in private, make phone calls, and even during one silly scene, Larson wanders off the set and through the parking lot where he arrives on the set of a talk-show and is interviewed by Leon Hart (Johnny Knoxville). Maisie Williams has the role of Sylvia, a production assistant who like Kate Winslet in Steve Jobs. keeps appearing on screen to let us know that there’s still more going on.
Hauser plays Larson the same way he has played characters in I, Tonya, Cobra Kai, Queenpins and BlacKKKlansman. He’s a goofy aloof fat guy waddling around and mocked by people. He’s basically just been treated like Chris Farley with better critical acclaim. Another problem with this movie is almost everyone is portrayed as a jerk. Janie is constantly mocking and berating Larson when cameras aren’t rolling. Sylvia has to take the brunt of ugliness from contestants in the green room who can’t go on because the taping is too long.
Carruthers fights with other studio executives and they point fingers at each other in the control room. How many more fucking times do we have to see this in movies about movie and TV productions?! Jesus Christ! Write some different material! This stopped being original after the first season of The Larry Sanders Show. Worse is the character Chuck (Shamier Anderson) who wears a tight yellow shirt to show off his imposing physique and a Lincoln Hayes-style afro. The character is really racist especially during a scene in which Chuck tries to intimidate Larson with violence during a break in taping.
Larson was no Eagle Scout. But he found a loophole in a system and exploited it. When the rich and powerful people do it, they don’t even get a slap on the wrist. The powers that be at CBS tried to keep Larson from collecting his winnings which totaled over $110,000 in 1984 dollars, about three times that amount now. Sadly it wasn’t enough. He fell for other scams and lost about half his take home in a break-in.
Two years after the episodes aired, he had lost all the money and was charged with other fraudulent schemes. He went into hiding relocating from his native Ohio to Florida where he live in secret until his death from throat cancer. Maybe it was too much of a tragic story. But if you think The Luckiest Man Alive is one of those feel-good movies, it isn’t.
There’s not one likeable character in this movie even though Ed, a Baptist pastor in real-life, is shown to be supportive and empathetic toward Larson. Yet if the real Janie is still alive, I would recommend she sue the filmmakers for turning her into too much of a nagging bitch. She makes the Vivian Cash portrayal in Walk the Line look like Pollyanna.
Then there is also a life-size Whammie that has an ominous creepy vibe as it lurks around backstage as Larson is obviously afraid of it. This is a stupid concept. I can understand the movie production may have had limited funding but they could’ve done a better story.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 