Rounders

John Dahl’s film came straight out of one room. Its writer Brian Koppelman first walked into Manhattan’s Mayfair Club on 15 December 1995 and met Joel Bagels Rosenberg that night. With David Levien he went back every night for weeks writing down what he heard; the script sold on 3 March 1997. Rosenberg, who carried that nickname because he ran a bagel delivery route, became Joey Knish, played by John Turturro. The vocabulary at the tables was not invented; it came out of those notebooks, out of the talk of a real club. Johnny Chan plays himself, and real footage of the 1988 World Series of Poker final is cut into the film; Chan had won the main event in 1987 and 1988. To promote the picture, Matt Damon and Edward Norton were taken to the 1998 World Series of Poker, where Chan, Phil Hellmuth, Huck Seed and Doyle Brunson coached them. Shooting began in December 1997, the month Miramax released Good Will Hunting. The box office was lukewarm; the audience that stuck came from the poker boom of the early 2000s. A good fit if you want the poker vocabulary carried straight over from a real card room. Not for anyone uneasy around gambling, since the hero closes the film by quitting law school and leaving for Las Vegas.