Tina Brown, the founding editor of the real Vanity Fair, didn’t like Marty Reisman much.
She says on Substack that he was a “maddening rando” who stuck like “a burr” to the side of her late husband, famed editor Harold Evans, who liked to play ping pong with him.
Nevertheless, other people seem to like Marty a lot. The movie based loosely on his life, called “Marty Supreme,” is a hit. (Vanity Fair should have featured him when he was alive, he probably knew some of the dictators and murderers they wrote about!)
Josh Safdie’s brilliant film, starring Timothee Chalamet as the renamed Marty Mauser, has made $28 million since its limited release on December 19th.
Most of that has been over this weekend.
“Marty Supreme” from A24 cost $70 million, not including the massive marketing campaign that’s gone on for several weeks.
Audiences in the big cities, especially New York and Los Angeles, are mad for “Marty,” even if Brown didn’t like him.
Chalamet is headed to an Oscar nomination and maybe a win if the Academy can get past the viral videos, $250 Marty jackets, and Kylie Jenner.
There could be a sequel to “Marty” if Chalamet ages in the next few years. The current movie is based on a book — stupidly out of print — that Reisman wrote in the 70s called “The Money Player: The confessions of America’s greatest table tennis champion and hustler.” The one copy left on Amazon is selling for $1,999.
Reisman got to know Evans when he was peddling the sequel, which seems to be as yet unpublished. Evans turned it down, but someone would certainly scoop it up now, and a second movie would be of some interest.
My friend Mark Simone, top rated NY radio personality at 710WOR, knew Marty and used to eat with him at the legendary Patsy’s on Eighth Avenue in the 1980s. (The picture here is of Mark — with a Tom Selleck mustache — and Marty on the right. Yes, that’s also legendary comedian Jackie Mason, who apparently loved Marty.) He tells me that Reisman was quite the character, if not a little annoying (no surprise).
More than a few people knew Reisman in real life, and if you Google him you’ll see plenty of recollections of the “maddening rando.”
