Brian Koppleman and David Levien Talks About the Possibility of Poker

Rounders star Matt Damon said on July 28th, 2009 that a sequel to the film is a big possibility since everybody are committed to come back and the actors all had a wonderful working together. According to one half of the Brian Koppleman and David Levien tandem, who made the script for both Rounders and Oceans 13, a sequel may not be far off.

Levien said that they have been exchanging ideas about Rounders 2 lately. He added that he is happy to know that the original actors are interested to come back and do a sequel. One of the rumors surrounding the film is that Leonardo DiCaprio set to star in a Rounders sequel using a script written by Levien and Koppelman based on online casinos. Levien said that the plan is currently in the works but its connection to Rounders is vague at best.

Levien said that they just set-up project regarding industry of offshore web casinos with Leonardo DiCaprio attached with it. He added that they are still researching about the project. Levien said that he and Koppelman find Las Vegas, the poker and casino circuit and the characters that surround them very fascinating. Rounders is considered to be the most well-known poker movie ever made. It has been discussed and reviewed at poker tables and online poker forums than any other movie.

Those talks often center on how it was written and why these two gifted writers picked the game of poker as the subject of their first film. Levien said that he and Koppleman had been working on the rough draft of a screenplay about a pair of friends and deciding what to do with their life and they are not sure what world they were going to place it in.

Koppleman then called him at 3:00 in the morning and said that he just lost all of his money at an underground poker club and that is when it hit that they will use it as the setting for their movie. One of the underground poker clubs in question was the well-known Mayfair Poker Club in New York, home to poker pros howard lederer, Dan Harrington, erik seidel and others. Rumors regarding the different characters in Rounders and who they were based on have run rampant since the 1998 release of the movie.

One of those rumors is that the movie was based on actor Norm MacDonald and although he usually played at the Mayfair Club, Levien stated that Rounders had nothing to do with him. But Levien confirmed that the "Teddy KGB" character was based on a poker player known as "Eddie KGB" and that the "Joey Knish" character was based on a rounder known as "Joel Bagels" but he denounced all speculation surrounding Matt Damon's character "Mike McDermott.

August 23, 2009
Michael Orwell