Joe Stapleton went to Los Angeles with the same dreams as many before him. He wanted to write. He wanted to create. He’s done a bit of stand-up.
And like many others before him, his chance to do so came through a personal connection and a lucky draw. In this case, it was with movie producer Lauren Mann , who was considering a nascent project called “The Card Counter.” Mann knew her friend of 10 years as a “poker guy,” a commentator and content-creator for PokerStars who had wiled away the pandemic playing online poker with his late friend Norm Macdonald almost every day for six months. So Mann forwarded him the script via email.
“And without her asking, I did a whole bunch of notes on the script, thinking that, ‘Hey, maybe this will get you some cachet with legendary screenwriter, Paul Schrader,’ which I didn’t really understand the gravity of at the time,” Stapleton said in an interview with PlayUSA . “But I thought, ‘Hey, keep these notes in your back pocket. If you make this movie, you’ll be able to show up on set and be like a rock star and be like, ‘Actually, this is the way.’ … And they were harsh notes.”
It was a manifest of please don’t do this , this is a cliché , this would never happen meant for Stapleton’s friend.
“Rather than do what I thought she was going to do, she pressed the old forward button, sent all of these notes to the legendary screenwriter, Paul Schrader, whose response was not to be defensive or to be upset, but was to say, ‘We got to have this guy on board’,” Stapleton recalls. “So that was a very fun and lucky turn of events.”
Stapleton was signed on as a creative consultant. The Card Counter is a redemption tale set against casinos, card rooms and Abu Ghraib
Now in theaters, “The Card Counter,” written and directed by Paul Schrader , surrounds ex-military interrogator William Tillich – played flawlessly by Oscar Isaac – who learned how to count cards during his eight years in prison […]
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