Exclusive: 21: The Vegas Premiere!
Exclusive: 21: The Vegas Premiere!
Posted by
SinFuLsiGnoRiTa 195 days ago
A couple weeks back, ComingSoon.net was in Las Vegas for the premiere of Sony's upcoming blackjack caper flick 21, based on the best-selling novel "Bringing Down the House" by Ben Mezrich about a group of MIT students who learn how to beat the Vegas blackjack system by counting cards.
The action-packed caper film stars Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) as Ben Campbell, a student from a poor background who joins a team assembled by Professor Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey) to learn how to count cards and make money to pay his medical school tuition. Along the way, he gets closer to his beautiful and brainy teammate Jill, played by Kate Bosworth, and encounters Laurence ishburne's Cole Williams, a tough old school security man who doesn't particularly appreciate seeing his casino losing money to card counters.
The premiere at the Planet Hollywood Hotel and Casino was as flashy as these things usually go—lots of fancy dresses, suits and even a trio of showgirls—and for roughly an hour, our roving reporter stood on the red carpet amongst a bevy of local and international outlets, most of them with video cameras and sizeable crews, while we stood there with our lowly Olympus recorder grabbing whomever we could that didn't necessarily need a camera in front of them to talk to us. (And believe me, you've never been challenged until you come face-to-face with someone without having prepared any questions beforehand!)
Fortunately, we did have a brief chance to talk to the man of the night, actor and producer Kevin Spacey, who wouldn't be around on Friday when we spoke to director Robert Luketic and the rest of his cast from the casino floor of the Red Rock Hotel and Resort--video interviews that you can watch later this week.
"I always thought this was a great story, and this was a story people could relate to whether they were gamblers or not," Spacey told us as he stopped by just before the start of the premiere. "The idea of being able to learn how to count cards is not illegal and breaking the bank is something that anybody would want to do, but it was entertaining and also it had some echoes to 'Risky Business,' that coming-of-age story of a young guy suddenly finding a way to make lots of money, and how will that change him? What kind of moral questions does that raise?"
"My interest in this started way before I knew there was a book," he continued. "Probably about a decade ago I started hearing these rumors from friends I knew in Boston, but we could never get any confirmation. It was sort of just a rumor, and then more than five years ago, a Wired magazine article came out that Ben had written, but I didn't even know there was a book."
The action-packed caper film stars Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) as Ben Campbell, a student from a poor background who joins a team assembled by Professor Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey) to learn how to count cards and make money to pay his medical school tuition. Along the way, he gets closer to his beautiful and brainy teammate Jill, played by Kate Bosworth, and encounters Laurence ishburne's Cole Williams, a tough old school security man who doesn't particularly appreciate seeing his casino losing money to card counters.
The premiere at the Planet Hollywood Hotel and Casino was as flashy as these things usually go—lots of fancy dresses, suits and even a trio of showgirls—and for roughly an hour, our roving reporter stood on the red carpet amongst a bevy of local and international outlets, most of them with video cameras and sizeable crews, while we stood there with our lowly Olympus recorder grabbing whomever we could that didn't necessarily need a camera in front of them to talk to us. (And believe me, you've never been challenged until you come face-to-face with someone without having prepared any questions beforehand!)
Fortunately, we did have a brief chance to talk to the man of the night, actor and producer Kevin Spacey, who wouldn't be around on Friday when we spoke to director Robert Luketic and the rest of his cast from the casino floor of the Red Rock Hotel and Resort--video interviews that you can watch later this week.
"I always thought this was a great story, and this was a story people could relate to whether they were gamblers or not," Spacey told us as he stopped by just before the start of the premiere. "The idea of being able to learn how to count cards is not illegal and breaking the bank is something that anybody would want to do, but it was entertaining and also it had some echoes to 'Risky Business,' that coming-of-age story of a young guy suddenly finding a way to make lots of money, and how will that change him? What kind of moral questions does that raise?"
"My interest in this started way before I knew there was a book," he continued. "Probably about a decade ago I started hearing these rumors from friends I knew in Boston, but we could never get any confirmation. It was sort of just a rumor, and then more than five years ago, a Wired magazine article came out that Ben had written, but I didn't even know there was a book."
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