Bettmann Archive; Courtesy of A24
Key Points
Marty Supreme stars Timothée Chalamet as an audacious ping-pong prodigy in the early 1950s.
Josh Safdie's film is nominated for three Golden Globes, including Best Motion Picture — Drama.
The movie was partially inspired by The Money Player, the autobiography of real-life ping-pong champ Marty Reisman.
Table tennis is a sport, not a game, in Josh Safdie'sMarty Supreme.
Like many of the director's previous films, includingGood Time(2017) andUncut Gems(2019),Marty Supremehinges on its wrecking-ball protagonist, a figure so charismatic and careless that they can't help but shatter everyone in their orbit.
Here, we have Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a ping-pong prodigy with the soul of a hustler who believes he's destined for greatness. Whether he achieves it is up to interpretation, but the film is making waves, exceeding box office expectations andnabbing three Golden Globe nominations, including one for Best Motion Picture — Drama.
Any movie built on such a captivating (and polarizing) character is bound to have folks wondering if they're based on a real-life figure.Marty Supremeisn't a biopic, but as Safdie has said in numerous interviews, the film was inspired byThe Money Player: The Confessions of America's Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler, a 1974 autobiography from ping-pong champ Marty Reisman.
"[Having] read that book, which was about a table tennis player who believed in this thing and had a dream that no one respected, it instantly was like, OK, well, this... world can be a great conduit to kind of explore those themes," Safdie explained toNPR.
So, how much of Reisman made his way into Mauser? Let's discuss it below.
Who was Marty Reisman?
Michael Gold/Getty
Marty Reisman was born in Manhattan in 1930, the son of a Russian immigrant who left his taxi-driving, poker-playing father when Reisman was just 10. He took up table tennis shortly thereafter and was the city junior champion by the age of 13.
As noted in a1977Sports Illustratedprofile, Reisman was labeled the "bad boy of ping-pong" by the time he was 16, when he won the national junior title. In 1948, he was part of the three-man U.S. team at the world championships in London. As he traveled the world competing, he made cash on the side by exporting and selling contraband.
"Smuggling never bothered me," Reisman told the outlet. "Table tennis players have to survive on their wiles. A player who depended on exhibition fees could starve. The top players were either gamblers, smugglers or both. I had already won more than 175 trophies but I couldn't eat them."
Reisman, skinny and 6-feet tall, came to be known as "the Needle," due both to his physical appearance and forehand "kill shot," which the London press dubbed "the Atomic Blast." That kill shot helped him win the British Open Table Tennis Tournament, which Reisman named "second in international importance to the World Championships" in his autobiography. He was the first American to do so.
Like the film's Marty Mauser, Reisman put his showmanship on display as an opening act for the Harlem Globetrotters. Later, he'd run underground table tennis clubs that were frequented by celebrities such as Dustin Hoffman, Kurt Vonnegut, and another offbeat prodigy in chess champ Bobby Fischer, as reported in Reisman'sNew York Timesobituary. Famed writer and director David Mamet, who cameos inMarty Supreme, is also said to have attended Marty's clubs.
In 2010, two years before his death at 82 from complications of heart and lung ailments, Reisman foundedTable Tennis Nation.
All told, he earned 22 major table tennis titles, including one at the age of 67, making him the oldest player to win a national championship in a racket sport.
He was married twice and had a daughter, Debbie, from his first marriage.
IsMarty Supremebased on a true story?
WhileMarty Supremeis only loosely inspired by Reisman, there are several sequences and character details plucked from his life. Reisman, for example, worked as a shoe salesman, much like Marty. He didn't quit (or loot the safe), however. Instead, he was fired for consistently showing up late, according toSports Illustrated.
Reisman's verve and competitive spirit, for example, mirror Marty's relentless drive. "Though I need it to get the adrenaline flowing, the money is nothing, the excitement everything," Reisman toldSports Illustrated. "I never played a game for fun in my life."
Marty's brashness is on full display in the film when, while traveling for a competition, he ditches the pitiful London hotel where all of the competitors are staying for a room at the high-end Ritz. As detailed in his autobiography, Reisman pulled a similar trick.
"[We had been] staying at the Royal Hotel, which had more fleas than royalty. Our rooms were closet-size and smelled of decayed wallpaper," he wrote. "During the British Open championship, theLondon Timeshad called me the 'Danny Kayeof table tennis.' Well, I reasoned, the Royal was no place for Danny Kaye."
He and a friend moved into the much more expensive Cumberland Hotel and, as Marty does in the film, charged expenses to the English Table Tennis Association.
As previously noted, Reisman also toured with the Harlem Globetrotters, where he performed skits that included playing with frying tunes to the tune of "Mary Had a Little Lamb." During those shows, perSports Illustrated, he perfected his signature trick of "standing a cigarette on end at the far side of the table and then blithely breaking it in two with a forehand smash."
"I had the time of my life touring with the Harlem Globe Trotters," he wrote in his autobiography. "For a while people even stopped sneering at the fact that table tennis was all I did."
While there's no evidence that Reisman played against a sea lion, as Marty does in the film, the real-life legend did once play a chimpanzee. "That ape had a lot of native ability," Reisman toldSports Illustrated.
Is Milton Rockwell based on a real person?
Courtesy of A24
WhileKevin O'Leary's wealthy Milton Rockwell is a fictional character created for the film, his success in the pen industry appears to be a nod to Reisman's trick of selling ballpoint pens overseas in a bid to make extra cash.
"They cost fifty cents each and were a way of meeting expenses. Ballpoints were new in Europe and I was able to get five dollars apiece for them," he wrote in his autobiography.
Is the story about bees and Auschwitz true?
One of the more memorable detours inMarty Supremeinvolves Marty's friend and colleague Béla (Géza Röhrig) telling a story about his time as a prisoner at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. During a bomb disposal mission, he rubbed honey from a beehive all over his skin and later let his famished fellow prisoners lick it off his body.
As Safdie toldThe Guardian, this is a true story about a Hungarian Jew and table tennis player named Alojzy Ehrlich. "I learned more about the Holocaust in that little story than from some movies that are only about the Holocaust," he said.
Where can I watchMarty Supreme?
Marty Supremeis currently playing in theaters.
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