It Could Happen to You

The true story is much shorter than the film. In March 1984, at Sal's Pizzeria in Yonkers, a regular customer and police officer named Robert Cunningham asked Phyllis Penzo, a waitress there for twenty-four years, to help pick his lottery numbers. She gave him three, he added three, and he joked that instead of a tip he would split the winnings. The next day he arrived with a six-million-dollar ticket and kept his word, handing her three million. The film departs from there. Penzo put it plainly to Entertainment Weekly: theirs was a luck story, and the filmmakers turned it into a love story. The real officer stayed married to his wife; the greedy spouse and the romance are inventions. Nicolas Cage plays the officer, Bridget Fonda the waitress and Rosie Perez his wife. Andrew Bergman directed. Who it is for: viewers who enjoy fairy-tale New York romantic comedy that is openly optimistic. Who it is not for: anyone expecting fidelity to the real events. The film takes about five minutes from them and invents the rest, at a sugar level to match.