They arrived quietly, just before the lights dimmed.
A mother and her two grown sons took their seats, bracing themselves as the opening credits rolled and Timothée Chalamet appeared on screen as the charismatic yet troubling Marty Supreme.
What followed was not just a film screening, but an emotional ordeal.
Laughter, disbelief, sadness and tears all surfaced during the two-hour runtime. This wasn’t just a story to them.
It was personal. The man at the centre of it all was their father and grandfather — table tennis legend Marty Reisman.
A Film That’s Winning Awards and Box Office Battles
Released in the UK on Boxing Day, the film has been riding a wave of buzz.
Chalamet has already picked up a Golden Globe and landed an Oscar nomination for the role.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s return to acting as Marty’s older love interest added even more intrigue, as did Chalamet’s high-profile red carpet appearances with girlfriend Kylie Jenner.
Financially, the film is flying: more than $72 million at the US box office so far, overtaking One Battle After Another starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and tracking towards a projected $180 million worldwide.
The On-Screen Marty Is Not the Man They Knew
Directed by Josh Safdie, the movie paints Marty — renamed Marty Mauser — as a ruthless, often unpleasant hustler in 1950s New York, willing to cheat, steal and manipulate his way to success.
Critics have described the character as “sociopathic.”
One actor in the film bluntly labelled him an “a**hole.”
But for the Reisman family, this portrayal feels alien and deeply unfair.
Roger Reisman, Marty’s grandson, says watching his grandfather depicted this way was “surreal.”
Sitting beside his mother Debbie and brother Josh in a Washington State cinema, he felt compelled to speak out.
Together, they say the film stripped away the warmth, humour and integrity of the man they loved.
A Story Told Without the Family’s Voice
One fact continues to sting: the family had no involvement whatsoever in the making of the film.
No consultation. No permission. No compensation. Yet they insist the movie borrows heavily from Marty Reisman’s own autobiography, The Money Player.
Real locations, career milestones, physical traits like his poor eyesight and round glasses — all unmistakably his. And yet, his book isn’t credited.
Josh, 43, a youth sports coach, believes the exclusion was deliberate.
“Maybe there were things they wanted to portray that they knew we wouldn’t approve of,” he says.
“Maybe they didn’t want to share the creative process — or the profits.”
Fiction, Disclaimers and a Lot of Hurt Feelings
Instead of engaging with the family, the filmmakers leaned on legal disclaimers, labelling the film as “loosely inspired by” real events.
To the Reismans, that feels like a convenient shield.
They believe Hollywood took Marty’s name, story and struggles, then walked away from the emotional fallout.
Their frustration is not just about money. It’s about respect.
As they put it, the film “profited while externalising harm.”
Affairs, Violence and Scenes That Never Happened
One of the family’s biggest objections lies in the fictional relationships at the heart of the film.
The movie shows Marty juggling multiple affairs, impregnating a woman while she’s married to someone else, and having a humiliating sexual dynamic with a married actress.
The family flatly denies any of this happened.
Roger is clear: “There were no affairs. No pregnancies under those circumstances.
No movie star lovers.” Marty, he says, was married to their grandmother before their only daughter was born.
The Paddle Scene That Still Haunts Them
If there’s one moment they can’t shake, it’s the scene where Marty is spanked with a table tennis paddle by an angry husband.
For Josh, that moment crossed a line. “That paddle was his livelihood. It took him around the world.
To turn it into an instrument of humiliation was unbelievable,” he says. “He would have been mortified.”
Debbie agrees. “That was awful,” she says quietly. “Just awful.”
Remembering the Real Marty Reisman
Away from Hollywood’s lens, Marty Reisman’s real life reads like something out of a gritty American novel.
Born in 1930 on New York’s Lower East Side to Jewish parents scraping by after the Great Crash, he was an anxious child.
At nine, after suffering a nervous breakdown, he found solace in table tennis. The sport became his anchor.
By 13, he was a city junior champion. With little money at home, he hustled matches in a Manhattan club — a former speakeasy riddled with bullet holes — deliberately losing early games before raising the stakes and crushing his opponents.
He wasn’t proud of all his side hustles, but they kept him afloat.
Hustles, Championships and A-List Friends
Marty’s life was colourful, no doubt. He sold silk stockings illegally in post-war Britain.
He smuggled gold in his underwear while touring with the Harlem Globetrotters.
But he was also a champion — winning 22 major titles, including the US and British Opens.
By the 1960s, he owned a table tennis club in New York and counted Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon among his friends.
A Book That Sparked a Movie — Without Credit
His 1974 memoir caught Josh Safdie’s attention years ago.
Safdie has openly spoken about discovering the book, showing it to Chalamet and realising how perfectly he fit the role.
The resemblance was uncanny.
Even a harrowing concentration camp anecdote in the film appears lifted directly from the memoir — a story Marty had been told by a friend who survived Auschwitz.
For the family, that’s proof enough of where the inspiration came from.
Finding Out Through the Trade Press
The cruel irony is that the family first learned about the film through a Variety article.
Debbie was initially thrilled. “The guy from Dune!” she said.
“He’d be perfect to play my dad.” Early whispers even referred to it as “the Marty Reisman project.” Then, quietly, the language shifted.
Months passed. No calls. No emails. No invitations. People assumed the family had been involved.
They hadn’t. Even premiere screenings came and went without them.
Watching It at Last — And Walking Out in Tears
Debbie finally saw the film days after its New York premiere.
She admits the opening moments were enjoyable.
The music worked. The energy was there. But as the story unfolded, the joy faded.
“They fictionalised him,” she says. “And the violence… my father wasn’t like that.”
She left the cinema in tears, worried that audiences would now believe this version of Marty was the truth.
Trying to Set the Record Straight
Marty Reisman died in 2012 at 82 and lies in an unmarked grave on Staten Island.
His family is now preparing to publish the sequel to his memoir — written before his death — and has launched a website, martyreisman.com, to share his story in his own words.
For now, the hurt remains raw. As Josh puts it, “This film draws deeply from his life but left out the voices that mattered most.
Even a small gesture — putting my mum in the story — would have meant everything.”
What’s Next?
For the Reisman family, the hope is simple: that Hollywood learns to listen before it rewrites lives.
And that audiences, having watched the film, might take a moment to look beyond the screen and seek out the real man behind the paddle.
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