Because there's so much being said about David James movie, I decided to share this piece with all RGP now, since it will probably not see the light of day in Card Player until sometime in March. If some of the information in this article seems redundant, remember the Card Player audience is not the RGP audience. Most of Card Player's readers did not have access to all the information about this movie, so there's a lot of "catch-up" stuff in here. And by the way, while I've got your attention, Happy Holidays!

WHAT'S UP WITH DAVID JAMES' MOVIE, THE BIG BLIND?

Last year, in mid-April, 1999, there were big doings at Southern California's Lake Elsinore Casino. Way out there in what's really an unlikely location that traverses a number of small mountain passes on the inland route from Orange County to San Diego - in an area demographers and sociologists like to call "edge cities" - David James was filming a movie. He wrote, produced, and directed it. Called The Big Blind, the movie was an ensemble piece interweaving a number of parallel stories about poker players.

Many of the actors were recruited from within Southern California's poker community. Although the cast included well-known players, such as former World Champion Scotty Nguyen, it also featured others who weren't even well known to their mailman. I was supposed to be in the movie too, but the shooting schedule conflicted with my trip to Vienna, so I had to pass on the opportunity to grace the silver screen with my visage.

But because I'm a writer and David and I have known each other for some time, he was kind enough to solicit my comments on his script. I read it and liked it, and wished I could have been a part of it. But by the time I returned from Vienna, the filming was done. Since then I had seen neither hide nor hair of David James until he contacted me recently. His email was quite succinct, saying, "In case you had not noticed, I have disappeared from the poker scene and have been conspicuously absent from many major poker events and live action. For the record, I want to give you the exclusive update on my status as well as the status of The Big Blind."

• 1. A good script. No matter how well a bad script is shot and acted, it will still be bad. The Big Blind is a good script that was very well written.
• 2.Shooting and production. No matter how well a script is written, if the shooting is poor and the acting is bad, it will fail.
• 3. The edit. I am at that final stage - the edit. The order of the steps become increasingly more difficult and exponentially more important."

"I have the luxury," he told me, "of not having to actually cut film. It can all be done via computer. I am using a program called Adobe Premier that literally gives me the ability to take every piece of footage shot, up-load it into my computer, then piece each shot into scenes. I can also stitch each scene together exactly how I envision it. There are days I work for hours on end. Other days, if a portion of a scene does not work or flow, I work it out in my mind. When I am finished editing The Big Blind, it will be awesome."

David James financed his movie in a unique way: through his poker winnings. He had envisioned the movie for ten years prior to sitting down and writing the screenplay. When I first met him, he was playing very high limits, usually $75 - $150 and sometimes $150 - $300.

"Do you remember Hank," David mused wistfully. "He played at Hollywood Park a few years ago and was going through a lot of money, usually somewhere in the neighborhood of $15,000 to $20,000 per day." He went on to relate how he accumulated almost $165,000 from him over a ten-month period. "It was then," he said, "that I decided to finance the movie myself, and I was determined to do it through my poker profits."

That way, he realized, he would be sure that the film was done to his satisfaction and that he would be at the helm: something first-time filmmaker seldom achieve if the project is financed in more conventional ways. David put together a budget for his film, then determined how many hours of poker he would have to play at various limits to get it made. And when he sat at the table, he "would literally rationalize calls and raises based on what was needed to get the movie made." He told me that he would often think, "If I call this guy and lose the pot, it is a week's worth of camera rental!"

He maintains that this was the very process that kept him disciplined. Once he had won the money required to make the film, and had stashed it in various casino cages throughout Southern California, he began writing the movie while he played cards at Lake Elsinore Casino. He would sit and write scenes between hands, and when his opponents would ask what he was writing, James would just shrug his shoulders, smile, and say, "a movie about casino poker," which most people, of course, shrugged off with a "sure you are" attitude.

So there you have it. David James wrote The Big Blind, produced and directed it, and made it on his own terms, though it's still not finished. "I'm working diligently," David told me, "yet I'm in no hurry to meet anybody's deadline except my own. It will be done when I finish it, and then I plan to sell it to a distribution company and create my own future in the film making industry, which I will."

I've known David James for about seven years now. He's always been his own man: sharp, articulate, forthright, and a guy who achieves the goals he sets for himself. I have no idea when this film will be ready for release, but I have no doubts this film -- which is a quintessentially American fable -- will ultimately find an audience that's wider than the poker community.

Keep flopping aces,

Lou Krieger