Film Journal January 2018

Michael Gibson © 2017 STX Financing, LLC.
Jessica Chastain
in Molly’s Game,
directed by
Aaron Sorkin
(inset).
© 2017 STX Financing, LLC. All rights reserved.
It’s a highly potent combination: the Oscar-winning screenwriter
Aaron Sorkin directing his first movie and the twice Oscar-nominated
actress Jessica Chastain starring in it.
The result is STX Entertainment’s Molly’s Game, based on the true
story of Molly Bloom, a charismatic young Olympic-hopeful skier who,
after a devastating injury, took a job running the world’s most exclusive
high-stakes underground poker game, where the players included Hollywood
royalty, sports stars and business titans.
Its path to the screen started with a book written by Bloom, whose
winning streak had come to a grinding halt when she become entangled
with Russian mobsters
and was arrested by
the FBI.
Sorkin was initially
reluctant to meet Molly,
nicknamed “the Poker
Princess” by the tabloids,
and did so solely as a
favor to an entertainment
lawyer he knew. “I
was not expecting to be
impressed. I thought I
was going to be meeting a
woman who was cashing
in on her decade-long
brush with celebrity and
that’s not something
I like,” he recalls during
a conversation in a
beachfront hotel in Santa
Monica. Calif. “I don’t
like gossip, I think it’s
bad for all of us. And I
certainly don’t like gossip
for money. So I went to
this meeting as a courtesy.”
Chastain with co-stars
Kevin Costner and Idris Elba.
But ten minutes into their first meeting, which would be followed
by many others, Sorkin knew he wanted to write her story and include
many of the facts she had omitted from the book. “Boy, did I want to
write it” he says. “This was like a blind date that you are not looking
forward to, but you leave knowing that this is going to be the person
you are going to spend the rest of your life with. Obviously I am not
talking about Molly the person, but Molly the story. It was love at
first sight and that had only happened once before, when I was having
lunch with Stacey Snider, who was then head of DreamWorks, and she
asked me if I’d heard about two guys claiming that Mark Zuckerberg
didn’t invent Facebook and that it was them. An hour after that, my
Linda Källérus © 2017 STX Financing, LLC.
Michael Gibson © 2017 STX Financing, LLC.
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