April 4, 2025
A BITESIZE CHAT WITH
SAMIR OLIVEROS
In 1984, a down-on-his-luck HVAC technician with a get-rich-quick scheme obsession, that lived in an ice cream truck, made headlines when he appeared on the game show, Press Your Luck. Miraculously, this man won over $100,000, captivating audiences and driving CBS producers nuts. His name was Michael Larson, and what sounds like a miracle was actually deliberate and planned out, based on memorizing the game's patterns. Over 40 years later, Michael Larson's story is finally put to film in The Luckiest Man in America, directed by Samir Oliveros. I had the opportunity to speak to Oliveros to discuss the film and Michael Larson himself.
BB: I remember hearing about the story of Michael Larson and the Press Your Luck scandal when I was a teenager and being so interested in it; I just knew I had to catch the film when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. What was your relationship with the story of Michael Larson? Did this story come to you, so to speak, or was it one you were really interested in telling?
SO: It actually came to me when I was browsing through a thrift shop in LA. I like to do that because I like to browse through film negatives, photos, and old family memories because it's always a good inspiration for your characters when you're writing. I found this VHS tape and when I played it, it was a taping of Press Your Luck. I started researching about the show, and then I found out about the scandal and thought, “Oh, that must be an amazing movie,” and there was no movie. So that's when we decided to make it.
BB: Now, I know Michael Larson passed away, I believe in 1999, but I'm curious if you were in any way in touch with his family during the writing or the production of The Luckiest Man in America.
SO: We were in touch with Bill Carruthers Jr., who's the son of the creator of the show and was a creative consultant. He read a couple drafts and helped us with a lot of the production design decisions.
BB: What about Paul Walter Hauser? What was it in particular that stood out to you enough for him to play a role like Michael Larson?
SO: I think he manages to balance drama and comedy perfectly. I had seen him in Richard Jewell, and we needed somebody who could pull that off because what he does on screen and during the tapings is something that is extraordinary, but it's also funny when you see it. It's like, it gives you that nervous laughter in your stomach so we thought that somebody from comedy would be ideal, but who could also pull off those dramatic moments in the movie. Then at the time we were gonna start casting, they released Black Bird and I thought he was brilliant. That's why we thought he was the perfect Michael.
BB: You also casted Walton Goggins as Peter Tomarken. Was that your first choice while watching tapes of the show or was he someone that came to you after?
SO: I'm a huge fan of Goggins, so we always thought of him for that role. Then we went out to him and he loved the role. It was great. He was amazing. He became Peter Tomarken for four weeks.
BB: What did filming the Press Your Luck sequences look like? Was the set built from scratch? How many moving pieces were there in bringing the show to life?
SO: So, we had a perfect replica of the studio and my production designer was really focused on making sure that it was going to be identical. Because we were dramatizing some things for the movie, we wanted those known things to be very faithful to the original ones. There was a lot of focus on making sure that was gonna be exactly the same. Then, when we started shooting that stuff, it was amazing because at some point, Goggins just decided to just run the whole show. So, because we were shooting scene-by-scene, at one point he said, “Listen, let me run the entire taping in one go and let's see what happens.” I was super into that idea. That's when we let him do that and it was great because everyone else just felt the thrill and it felt like a taping of the game show. So, we were really happy with that idea. A lot of it made it into the movie, actually.
BB: Reading up on Michael Larson, there is a lot that happens after the scandal. Was there ever any intention of portraying anything that went down with him after this situation? Or were you just steadfast on the scandal being the story?
SO: At some point, we spoke about a Catch Me If You Can multi-city epic which we were gonna just do like a big biopic with all of that included. But then, when we started focusing on the game show, we realized that there was this very interesting pace that the script was falling into and we loved it and we were like, “Do you think that it would be possible to keep it into one single location? Can we tell the whole movie in this one 24-hour moment in time?” The more we condensed it, the more we felt like this was a great movie. Also, because of the amount of exposition that we were gonna withhold and how we started structuring the movie so that we were peeling him like an onion, getting to his emotional core towards the end of the movie. It was really exciting; it felt like a great challenge. So, that's why we decided to make this the movie.
BB: There is also an underdog story element to it. What was it about Michael Larson that you wanted to portray him, not as some schlub who cheated the system, but as a guy who succeeded in his own way?
SO: Because I believe that what he did was not wrong. I think what he did was just an unorthodox way of accomplishing his dream. He found a loophole and he exploited it. But at the end of the day, the guy had a good heart and what he wanted was just to get his family back together. The way in which he did it might have been questionable, but he was just a very driven guy and he just wanted to accomplish his dreams. I think that's very inspiring. We wanted to be able to have that complexity of character in which we see that gray area where we don't know if we're supposed to root for him or we're supposed to feel sorry for him. I think that's what makes for a good character.
Make sure to check out The Luckiest Man in America now in theatres.
Interview conducted on March 28th, 2024 by Adriano Caporusso.