Is there still room for the subgenre known as the “gambling drama”? Especially tales set around card games? The weakest point of the last Bond film was indeed the eye-rolling Texas Hold’em sequences, and let’s not even bother mentioning Curtis Hanson’s failed romantic drama in the world of dice and bright lights.
My hunch is that if you have a story that spends very little time doing the gambling (I hope it is the case with Robert Luketic’s (a Columbia pictures project due for a March release of 21) and you allocate more time in the narrative strengths, then you might have a picture that should beat the odds. It's not the hands we are interested in, but the human drama. I've heard enough “all-ins” in move history – time to change it up a little.
Variety announces that Random House Films and Focus Features have optioned a gambling memoir that has yet to go to the printers. Lay the Favorite, Take the Dog is based on the gambling memoir by Beth Raymer, this traces the scribe's journey into the world of professional sports gambling. Raymer fell into professional gambling in Vegas, where she started working as a cocktail waitress in hopes of making fast cash. Her gambling led her to New York and the Caribbean, with gamblers soon becoming her second family. But when she fell in love, she had to re-evaluate her life.
The book will only be published by Random House's Spiegel & Grau division in spring 2009, so we have a while before this makes it to the bigscreen.
