Spoiler warning: This article contains spoilers for “Marty Supreme,” now in theaters.
Josh Safdie‘s “Marty Supreme” is galvanized by an invigorating performance by Timothée Chalamet as the cocky young table tennis champion Marty Mauser. Safdie and his crew faithfully recreated the world of 1950s ping pong players in New York, Tokyo and beyond, then populated that milieu with a cast of memorable supporting characters from movie star Kay Stone, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, to her ruthless businessman husband, played by Mr. Wonderful himself, Kevin O’Leary.
The details of the parlors and matches are so carefully rendered that it’s no surprise that Safdie is very familiar with that world. In fact, his 2008 film “The Pleasure of Being Robbed” features a sequence set in a Chinatown table tennis parlor.
“The people who excelled at table tennis were often people who didn’t fit anywhere else,” says Safdie in the film’s press materials. “It wasn’t respected, so naturally it attracted weirdos, purists, obsessives.”
In addition to doing extensive historical research, the crew consulted experts, including Steve Grant, publisher of Table Tennis History magazine, who spoke to Variety about the inspiration for the film.
Was Marty Mauser based on a real person?
Marty Mauser, played by Chalamet, is based on a real table tennis champion of the 1950s, Marty Reisman, who died in 2012. Sports Illustrated called him “the game’s most celebrated hustler.” While the film is only loosely inspired by his story, the character definitely shares similarities with Reisman, Grant explains.
“He was very good at marketing himself,” Grant says, “That was his biggest skill. Of course, he was a very good player.” But like Marty Mauser, who plays pretty loose with the truth, Reisman likely inflated his stories, Grant says. Reisman’s book, “The Money Player,” is a “great book about his career back in the ’50s,” Grant explains. “But don’t take everything in it as the word of truth. He liked to exaggerate things.”
When Safdie came across an old copy of “The Money Player,” he sparked to the idea of a story based on Reisman. “When I read that the sport was filling stadiums in the U.K. and throughout Europe, I realized that it was entirely plausible for a kid in 1952 to actually believe he could parlay the game into a life of fame and glory,” Safdie said in the press materials.
How many of Marty Supreme’s stunts were real?
While many of Marty Mauser’s antics stretch credulity, the real Reisman, nicknamed “the needle” for his slight build and fast swing, was known for his showmanship and hustle. He could split a cigarette in half with a ping pong ball from across the net and would play blindfolded or sitting down if the stakes were high enough. As shown in the film, he and a partner did tour the world with the Harlem Globetrotters with a comedy ping pong routine in which they hit balls with frying pans and sneakers.
Variety’s announcement of “The Money Player” option
The real Reisman pulled off enough wild escapades to fill a whole other movie, according to an extensive Sports Illustrated profile — as he traveled the world, he was smuggling and selling goods, from nylon stockings to fine crystal, and challenging heads of state to high-stakes games. He really did fly on a military transport, as shown in the film, and did briefly work in a shoe store. Reisman told the magazine his book had sold to the movies, and he proposed that Robert De Niro could play him. But although it was optioned after publication, according to a 1974 Variety article, the project never got off the ground.
Did Reisman really lose the World Championship to a Japanese player?
Reisman traveled to India, not Japan as in the movie, to compete against Hiroji Satoh. As depicted in the film, he took a hard loss to Satoh, who was using a new sponge rubber-coated type of paddle. But the loss came in round 64, not the final. “The truth was he would have had to win five more matches in 1952 to win the title, and he was not the top favorite,” Grant explains.
Were there other Jewish table tennis champions?
“Fellow Jewish New Yorker Dick Miles won many championships in the 1940s and ’50s, well before Reisman won much of anything,” Grant explains. In fact, Jewish Europeans, especially Hungarians, dominated table tennis in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1950s, Asian and particularly Japanese players began to gain prominence in the sport.
Were any other characters based on real people?
While many of the film’s characters feel deeply authentic, most are fictional, with the exception of Koto Endo, played by real-life champion Koto Kawaguchi and based on Reisman’s competitor Satoh. There’s also basketball star George “The Ice Man” Gervin, who plays a character based on Herwald Lawrence, who owned a ping pong parlor that was the first Black-owned business in Times Square.
Playwright David Mamet has a cameo in the film and he has a historic ping pong connection. Mamet, who was a table tennis hustler himself in his college days, used to frequent Reisman’s table tennis gym on the Upper West Side, along with other notables including Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick.
