The Luckiest Man in America (2025)
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Director: Samir Oliveros Run Time: 90 min. Rating: PG-13 Release Year: 2025
Starring: David Strathairn, Maisie Williams, Paul Walter Hauser, Shamier Anderson, Walton Goggins
Country: United States
Language: English
About the film:
World Premiere – 2024 Cannes Film Festival. This stranger-than-fiction drama resurrects a hugely popular 1980s game show and the “luckiest man in America” who broke it. Directed by Samir Oliveros (Bad Lucky Goat) and featuring performances from Paul Walter Hauser (Richard Jewell), Walton Goggins, and David Strathairn, The Luckiest Man in America illuminates a forgotten turning point in television history, when a network executive took a gamble and inadvertently made an obsessive eccentric into a folk hero.
Michael Larson (Hauser) shouldn’t even be there. An unemployed ice cream truck driver from Lebanon, Ohio, Michael only made it into auditions for Press Your Luck because he stole someone else’s appointment. The show’s casting director (an excellent Shamier Anderson) thinks Michael is a creep, but co-creator Bill Carruthers (Strathairn) likes Michael’s chutzpah and sees him as a Middle-American everyman the audience can cheer for — the dark horse is in.
Michael fumbles through the first several minutes of play, but once host Peter Tomarken (Goggins) moves onto the second “spin” section of Press Your Luck, where contestants try to get a randomly lit electronic game board to stop on a winning tile, Michael suddenly can’t lose. In fact, he quickly breaks the show’s record — before breaking its savings account. Is Michael cheating? Or does he understand something about Press Your Luck that no one has seen before?
About the filmmaker:
Samir Oliveros was born in Bogota, Colombia in June 1990. He studied film direction at the School Of Visual Arts in NY. After graduation, he launched a kickstarter campaign that was succesfully funded with just over 60K dollars, to shoot his first feature BAD LUCKY GOAT was shot in Old Providence in the Colombian Caribbean and screened at SXSW Festival.
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