Sunday, September 18, 2005, 11:17 PM EST.
Betting 'Two for the Money' Success
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Inspired by a true story, Two For the Money is the itch screenwriter/executive
producer Dan Gilroy needed to scratch for some time. Gilroy had been searching for a
true gambling story, not the agonizing downward spiral of a degenerate gambler. In his
mind, James Caan had already mastered that character in The Gambler.
Gilroy knew it had to be about sports, but he never thought that unlocking the
heart of such a tale would come from a golf caddy. “Listen, do you want to hear a story
for a movie?” Gilroy recalls a young man telling him six years ago. “His story hooked
me,” Gilroy notes. Brandon Link was that caddy…and that story.
A former walk-on for UNLV basketball with an injured knee and few skills but
his athletic prowess, Link took a job selling products over the phone—working for an
audio text company. One day he filled in for a co-worker giving picks on the sports
gambling line. “He discovered he had a true facility for picking games,” says Gilroy.
His winning streak caught the attention of a New York sports advisory firm, and the rest
is history.
“The basis of this film’s story loosely follows what happened to that guy,” Gilroy
says. But the game was changed to football; the story was expanded, deepened and
embellished. “It was the sports services, the sports advisors, a glimpse into this
legitimate subculture on the fringe of this extremely large illegal enterprise that interested
me,” muses Gilroy. “It’s a movie about the people who ‘feed off’ guys who bet—the
men who make the $200 billion world of gambling spin ’round.”
Director D.J. Caruso, a lover of sports and an occasional dabbler in gambling,
found that Gilroy’s script “just spoke to me. I was looking for a drama, and this dealt
with the familiar themes of innocence being corrupted—what happens once that
innocence is corrupted and how that person gets back to where he began. I was intrigued
by Brandon’s journey and bringing the audience into the world of sports gambling. We
hear about it, but I’ve never seen a movie about it.”
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