25 years ago, in the spring of 1984, I flew to Las Vegas to make a documentary film of the World Poker Championships at Binion's Horsehoe Casino.
Old Benny Binion was still alive then, and there were still echoes of his Las Vegas to be found if you looked hard enough, the carved-out-of-the-desert, mobbed-up watering hole for gamblers, not the corporate, family-friendly tourist mecca it has become today.
maurice zolotow
Every story needs its teller, and we found ours in another old-timer who we stumbled across at the tournament, Hollywood author and journalist Maurice Zolotow, who was such an animated, hilarious and insightful character that he quickly took over and became the unofficial narrative voice of our film.
In Zolotow's manichean view of the poker universe, the world divided itself into two distinct camps.
First, there were the mostly Texas-born, depression-era Baptists who had little education within the four walls of a schoolhouse, but were masters of human psychology and bluffing, skills honed on the long dusty road hustling poker games and staying one step ahead of the law or the strong-arm men looking to roll a big game.
Pitted against them were a newer generation of young, mainly East-coast math whiz card counters and computer-heads who could calculate the odds to within .001 percent on drawing the card to complete the straight or flush, but had never seen into a man's soul to tell if he was lying.
A reductive view?
Perhaps, but it made a great narrative for our film as we followed old-school legends like Moss and Brunson and Strauss go up against The Kid from Brooklyn Stu Ungar, or David "Chip" Reese.
With help from Zolotow and Henri Bollinger, the public relations director for the tournament, we got access to film the floor at Binion's, and also to get some candid, one-on-one interviews with the poker stars.
One of my favorite interviews was with a rather wistful and nostalgic "Amarillo Slim", who from underneath his white ten-gallon cowboy hat and in-between smoke-curling exhalations of his long, brown cigarette mused about the killer instinct necessary to be a top poker player:
"It used to be I'd put a rattlesnake in your pocket and ask you for a match, but now I've kind of lost that....desire, whatever you want to call it."
TOMORROW: More on filming the 1984 World Series of Poker
william
25 years ago? You were so ahead of your time!
Posted by: dutchbaby | February 10, 2009 at 04:12 AM