Paul Walter Hauser Is the Lead in an Adaptation of the Greatest Game Show Episode Ever

By Dustin Rowles | Film | May 9, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | Film | May 9, 2024 |

I was young when that episode aired, but one of my earlier memories is the clinic that an unemployed ice cream truck driver put on during a 1984 episode of Press Your Luck. For the unfamiliar, the game is essentially a game of luck: A light bounces around a board, and players attempt to stop it on a square with a large cash prize or vacation package instead of a whammy. A player can take as many turns as he or she likes, but if they hit a whammy, a cartoon figure will dance across the screen and the player is busted back down to $0.

Ohio resident Michael Larson, however, kept playing and playing, racking up thousands of dollars without hitting a whammy. Larson was so good that they had to run his domination over two episodes. He never hit a whammy, and the odds of that after as many turns as he took were infinitesimal. At my young age, it was one of the most incredible things I’d ever seen on television. It was riveting and tense, and I kept screaming at the television, “No whammies, no whammies, no whammies!”

A few decades after watching that episode, at an age when I thought it was perhaps all a fever dream, This American Life aired a 2010 episode on Michael Larson. It was thrilling, but also bleak. It involved bad real estate deals, losing all his money, and dying of throat cancer at the age of 49. But I had no idea until that This American Life episode that Larson had cheated. Or rather, he had figured out the pattern. There was no rule against that, and CBS had no choice but to pay the man. But after Larson, they began to change the pattern regularly so it wouldn’t happen again, and they also wouldn’t allow the episode to be re-aired for nearly 20 years.

It’s a great story, and there has been talk of adapting it for the screen for years — at one point, Bill Murray was even attached to play Larson.

Today, Deadline announced a new adaptation is being developed starring Paul Walter Hauser as Michael Larson. That’s good casting (and the first image is in the header). It’s called, appropriately, Press Your Luck, and will also star Walton Goggins, David Strathairn, and Maisie Williams. As described by Deadline, the movie is set in 1984 and “follows Ohio resident Michael Larson, who steps on to the set of game show ‘Press Your Luck’ harboring a secret: the key to endless amounts of money. But his winning streak gets threatened when the executives in the control room start to uncover his real motivations.”