Aaron Sorkin's screen adaptation of Molly Bloom's memoir, "Molly's Game," will not trivialize the lives of the big-name celebrities who took part in Bloom's high-stakes underground poker game. The screenwriter, who will make his directorial debut with "Molly's Game," has gone to great lengths to obscure the identities of the famous players such as Ben Affleck, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire.
"A number of people in the game are bold face names, they're people who you would know. You can Google this and see the sort of tabloid version of the story, but there's a much better story under the tabloid version of the story," Sorkin said.
Bloom arrived in Los Angeles at age 26 from Colorado, her Olympic dreams dashed and her law aspirations put on hold. She quickly rose from cocktail waitress to building one of the most exclusive, high-stakes underground poker games in the world. The games would include Hollywood's elite, billionaires, financiers and big-name athletes and eventually led to her arrest in December 2013.
But when it came time to write a memoir about her experience, she refused to divulge gossipy secrets about the participants. Bloom paid for it too, taking a much lower advance than if she had dished about the likes of DiCaprio and Affleck.
"I don't want the movie to be about gossip," Sorkin said. "I wouldn't want it to [be], under any circumstances, but in this particular case, the reason why she is a movie hero, the reason why she's worth writing about in the first place, is that by the end of the whole thing - even if it meant saving her life, guaranteeing her own freedom, she wouldn't have to go to jail for four years, even if it meant the restoration of all the money the government took away from her- she would not name a single [person], she wouldn't tell a story. She could have. She wrote a book for which she could have gotten a $2 million advance. She got a $35,000 advance instead."
Sorkin teased the first two minutes of the film would be about Bloom's life before she came to Los Angeles. She was ranked third in North America in women's moguls (freestyle skiing), but a freak accident in the qualifying round kept her out of the 2002 Winter Olympics. She also was accepted into Harvard Law School.
"She came here to L.A. just to kind of shake off that thing that had happened, and maybe just be young in warm weather for a little while before she would go to law school," he said. "She ended up running for 12 years the world's most exclusive high stakes poker game, a game where there were movie stars, hedge fund managers, big name athletes, Saudi princes, and millions of dollars were changing hands in the course of a night. She became known as the biggest game runner in the world."
