It was one of those stories that everyone noticed and everyone wanted to turn into a film. But it’s taken nearly 20 years to get it to the screen. In 1982, a young Toronto banker was charged with embezzling $10.2 million from his employer. Unlike Barings’ Nick Leeson, he didn’t pour the money into over-ambitious speculation on the futures market: he just plain lost it at the gambling table.
In the boom years of the early eighties, this made him something of a folk hero. It was a time when, paradoxically, people didn’t like banks but were obsessed with money. “All the papers were celebrating this guy who had just committed a crime,” recalls Hungarian-born film producer Andras Hamori who, in 1982, had arrived in Canada and was busy trying to get a handle on his new home. “What a great, tolerant country!” he thought.
In 1987, a Canadian financial journalist called Gary Ross wrote a book about the scam called Stung, which became an instant bestseller. Hamori had, by then, become a founding partner in Canadian mini-major Alliance Entertainment, and Stung was one of the first books he optioned.
But there, the progress rather ground to a halt. Three scripts were commissioned, none of which captured what the producer felt was the essence of the story. “We couldn’t crack it,” he admits. “It’s a fascinating story, but the character wasn’t there and, without that, the story just wasn’t exciting enough.”
The rights lapsed and it wasn’t until over a decade later - by which time he had left Alliance and set up his own production company - that the story of the gambling bank manager came back into his life.
He was having lunch at Sundance with fellow producer Edward R Pressman, who mentioned a “Canadian story” he was interested in. Pressman only needed to mention the barest details, and Hamori immediately knew what he was talking about. Stung had struck again.
| We’re kind of used to it these days - bank employees losing millions of their employers’ money. But when the assistant manager of a Toronto bank embezzled $10 million in 1982, it seemed both extraordinary and a symptom of the money-obsessed times. Max Levant traces the genesis of Owning Mahowny, the story of an ordinary guy who does a very out-of-the-ordinary thing.
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By then, British-born director Richard Kwietniowski - who had won the Best Short Film prize in Berlin in 1987 and had recently made his feature debut with Love and Death on Long Island - was attached to the project. Kwietniowski had written a script with Maurice Chavet which seemed to overcome all of the problems. Here was the story of Dan Mahowny, a very ordinary guy who was totally addicted to gambling: at one stage Dan admits that, since his 12th birthday, he hasn’t gone more than 72 hours without placing a bet. Then he finds himself in a position where he has access to almost limitless funds: it was, after all, the years of the bull market, and money was the sexiest thing going. Even business leaders were suggesting you were supposed to have fun with it. The bank thought they had found a high flyer for the new decade, and Mahowny was having the time of his life.
Agreeing to work with Pressman and reinvigorated by the new script, Hamori went into overdrive. He linked up with Seaton McLean, who had merged his Atlantis Films with Alliance in 1998 and was president of motion picture production at the newly named Alliance Atlantis. As it turned out, McLean had also tried to get the rights to Ross’ book when it first came out, so he wasn’t too hard to convince. “I wanted to see this story get made 20 years ago,” he told Hamori, “and I want to see it get made now.”
For the role of the banker, Philip Seymour Hoffman was everyone’s dream casting. The essence of ordinariness in appearance, his performances - especially in The Talented Mr Ripley, which had just been released - often contain that lurking hint of danger (which may be why his girlfriend in the film calls him ‘Wild Man’).
The way the actor finally came on board, however, has much the same air of happy serendipity as other aspects in the genesis of Owning Mahowny. Hoffman and McLean were attending an Alliance dinner for State and Main at the Toronto Film Festival; they had both gone outside to have a cigarette and McLean, who had never met the actor but knew the way his career was currently taking off, decided against the ‘I’ve always admired your work’ approach. Instead, he started to talk about a project he was developing based on Gary Ross’ book.
“Oh,” said Hoffman, “I just finished reading that book two days ago. My manager sent it to me and I’m half-way through the script. I thought the story was fantastic…”
