I'm going to abuse my power a little bit and bring this thread back up.
I was fortunate that a friend invited me to the U.S. premiere of The Luckiest Man in America on Saturday evening. No plot spoilers in this post, but here are my (extensive) thoughts on the movie.
The IndieWire review above calls it a "semi-fictionalized telling," and that feels like an understatement. Samir Oliveros took the sentence "a man named Michael Larson figured out how to beat the Press Your Luck game board and won $110,237" and injected a heavy dose of artistic liberty to create a movie. Which could be fine -- I think we all realize that rigidly adhering to the actual episode wouldn't make for a particularly dramatic film. After all, everybody in the audience already knows how the game ends.
As a hardcore game show fan, I found myself repeatedly puzzled by which elements of the PYL episode the movie chose to faithfully recreate and which it chose to change for dramatic license. Four of the actual questions were used, but the movie sometimes changed who buzzed in with the answer (one time, the change was for a moment that sort of pays off later in the movie; another time, there's no discernible reason). The prize icons on the board came straight from the show... with the exception of one luxury vacation that got a brief, unessential spotlight moment. Ed and Janie had the correct scores at the beginning of round two, but no effort was made to conceal the fact that the scoreboards were just 21st-century monitors with a generic "numbers made of dots" typeface (they even glowed when the studio lights were dimmed).
For devoted Press Your Luck fans, know going in that the big board, like so many other set elements depicted in the movie, has a knockoff feel to it. Probably the most jarring characteristic is that it's somewhat smaller than the real thing -- it was built specifically for this movie, but I'd estimate it was about the size of the recreation in 2006's Gameshow Marathon. The size discrepancy is notable only because the big board is the thing that Michael needed to tame in order to win all his money. The movie wants it to be an intimidating presence -- during early spins, it even rhythmically clacks with the sound of 18 slide projectors changing in unison* -- so it's a little disappointing to this PYL fan that a movie depicted a smaller-than-life experience. But yes, I concede that the average audience member won't notice or care.
As somebody who works on game shows for a living, I knew I was going to have trouble with some of the narrative liberties that would be taken so a movie with an actual plot could happen, and I know most viewers won't have that hangup. Still, it was difficult for me to watch this world where Standards and Practices just plain doesn't exist (initially, some attempts at oversight were depicted, but about halfway through the movie, contestants were allowed to wander wherever they want) and where nobody seems to have any particular inclination to keep a television show taping on time and on track. I understand interpreting the edited-in commercial breaks of the original broadcast as actual breaks in the taping -- that's when all the dramatic plot moments of the film occur -- but this movie abused the privilege.
Paul Walter Hauser does a very good impersonation of Michael Larson from his appearance on Press Your Luck, albeit with the awkwardness dialed up an extra notch. The actors playing Ed and Janie also deliver slightly heightened versions of the contestants we saw on TV. The guy cast as Peter Tomarken is just generally playing Man Who Hosts a Game Show. There's an unseen announcer, and they call him Rod Roddy, but it's simply a generic announcer voice.
But that's all nerdy game show geek stuff. Let's talk about what the general audience will expect. It's telling that the reviews linked above all frame the movie as the story of a man and how he beat the system to win unprecedented money. I think that's what audiences will go into the movie expecting... and that isn't what the movie is about. (The characters discover that Michael Larson "memorized the patterns," but no one ever explains what that means. A couple of times, the cinematography tried to replicate what Michael was seeing, but I am 100% certain that if a moviegoer didn't already know how he beat the game, they won't leave the theater understanding what specifically "memorizing the patterns" means.) Personally, I expected that the drama would come from the producers' and executives' reactions to the unexpected, expensive attack on their game... and while there is an entire B story that takes place in the world's most spacious TV control room, that isn't what the movie is about, either.
I didn't pick up on it until Samir Oliveros explained it in the interview that took place after the screening, but The Luckiest Man in America is apparently meant to be a drama (in the interview, Oliveros went as far as calling the story "romantic") not about winning big on a game show, but a drama that uses Michael Larson's appearance on Press Your Luck as the framework for an emotional, human story. Look at the (spoilery) Hollywood Reporter interview linked above -- Oliveros is peppered with nothing but questions about how amazing it was that a man figured out how to beat the system and live the American dream... until he finally jumps in with "At the end, also, the heart of the story is" (the remainder of the sentence omitted because it explains what the movie is really supposed to be about). And even then, the Hollywood Reporter interviewer ignores him and follows up with a second question about the American dream.
I wish I had known that going into the movie, and not only because I was expecting a story about the game itself. Even if I had been told ahead of time that this movie was about Michael Larson's emotional journey, because I'm a game show fan who knows the story of the real Michael Larson (thanks to the 2003 GSN documentary), I still wouldn't have picked up on what the movie was going for. Ultimately, Samir Oliveros simply took a double-length episode of Press Your Luck and created an entire dramatic (and very fictional) story to fill out the behind-the-scenes of what was broadcast on CBS in 1984. His attention is split between two different stories -- the story of "Bill Carruthers" and the story of "Michael Larson" (they're fictional characters who don't really reflect the people whose names they share) -- and both stories came almost entirely from Oliveros's imagination.
Watch the movie as the fictional story of the confident TV producer and the hard-luck guy who goes on a game show (which is how most people will approach it, minus the "fictional"), and there's a decent, though not exceptional, movie there. But The Luckiest Man in America is about Press Your Luck in the same way that Shakespeare in Love is about the real William Shakespeare or Pocahontas is about the real Pocahontas -- it alludes to the real-life thing, but it isn't trying to accurately represent it. What's disappointing is how many audience members won't realize how made-up it is.
* It took me years to realize this, so I don't fault the movie for not picking up on it, but the big board didn't make any slide-projector clacking sounds during the spin rounds. Each of the three slides in a square was in its own projector -- the light bulb inside the projector was simply silently turned on or off during each board change. The only times the contestants would hear the click of the slide projectors changing slides were when a prize was hit and when the board was changing to and from its "blank colored squares" state.
