In 2004, Atlas Shrugged Producer John Aglialoro, won the
United States Poker Championship. This past week, he was entered in the 2013 World Series of Poker.
And, he was KILLING IT.
Until... his pocket-Kings met Ace-nothing.
Or should I say... until the Atlas Shrugged Part III Production team showed up for a script reading.
Yep. We, the ASP3 Production team, met for a script reading and, during the course, managed to ruin John's chances of going all the way. How'd we do that exactly?
A couple of weeks ago, we scheduled a script reading for the second draft of Part III. The meeting was to be held in Vegas on Thursday, July 11th at 11:00 AM. Everyone confirmed and Duncan Scott, the screenwriter for Part III, even went so far as to schedule six actors to travel to Vegas to perform the reading.
It was going to be
epic.
All systems go, on July 10th, I packed my bags and headed to the airport.
After landing at around 7PM on Wednesday, I started to make my way to the Wynn when I got a call from Producer Harmon Kaslow to meet him and fellow Associate Producer Joan Carter for dinner.
"
Where's John?" I thought. I remembered Harmon mentioning something about John playing poker but I just brushed it off as inconsequential.
Barely sitting down for dinner, the topic quickly turned to "
John's still in. What are we going to do? We have a reading tomorrow!"
You see, John was not supposed to "
still be in", or so we thought. This was the World Series of Poker. With a $10,000 buy-in, only the best poker players in the World were playing. It was day 3 - all the riff-raff should have been long gone by now.
We all seemed to forget however, that John...
is one of the best poker players in the world.
Oh boy.
It was getting late but I didn't want to miss an opportunity to maybe get some pics of John playing. I decided to head on over to the RIO.
The first thing that hit me was that the poker rooms were HUGE. How on Earth was I going to find John!?
It took a minute, or fifteen, but I found him (look for the red arrow in the above pic).
John eventually saw me hovering on the outskirts. He popped up, came over with a smile and, right on cue as if he were continuing the dinner conversation...
"
I'm still in. We have a reading tomorrow!"
Apparently John too forgot that he was one of the best poker players in the world.
"
Yes, you're still in and you need to stay in. We'll record the reading. You can't dump."
"
Yeah, yeah. We'll see."
"
How's your stack?"
"
Mid."
"
We'll record the reading."
It was now after 1AM and another hand was being dealt. John swiftly moved back to his table.
END PART I. READ PART II.
- - -
This post originally appeared at Galt's Gulch Online.
