FATS:  Do you like to gamble, Eddie? Gamble money on pool games?

FATS:  Hundred dollars?

EDDIE:  Well, you shoot big-time pool, Fats. I mean, that’s what everybody says, you shoot big-time pool. Let’s make it two hundred dollars a game.

FATS:  Now I know why they call you Fast Eddie. Eddie, you talk my kind of talk… (moving to the main table) Sausage! Rack ’em up!

As any billiards cinephile knows, these are some of the indelible lines penned by Sidney Carroll and Robert Rossen for the 1961 film The Hustler. The exchange marks the first interaction between Paul Newman (as “Fast” Eddie Felson) and Jackie Gleason (as Minnesota Fats). The dialogue is so precise that the actors’ voices are audible and instantly recognizable from the printed word alone.

Twenty-three years later, in the 1984 “The Hustler” sequence from The New Show, these words are uttered almost verbatim by the same characters, shot in B&W in a cinematographic feel identical to that created by Eugene Shuftan in The Hustler.  But, replacing Mr. Newman and Mr. Gleason are two very different actors: Kevin Kline (as Eddie) and John Candy (as Fats).  The full sequence is below:

Is this a remake?  Are we going to watch a shot-for-shot reenactment, like Gus Van Sant’s 1998 treatment of Psycho?

For those familiar with The New Show, Lorne Michaels’ NBC sketch comedy that aired during the 1983–84 television season, the answer, of course, is no.  There is anticipation that though the dialogue, framing, music, and cinematography all mimic the original The Hustler, something is hopefully about to become wildly different and madcap.  And, boy does The New Show send-up of The Hustler not disappoint!

Once Sausage has racked the balls, and the two players have lagged for break, Fats prepares to break and…miscues. His ingenuous follow-up response is priceless:  “Wait, I wasn’t ready for that.  Can I take that again?” For Eddie’s turn, after asking if you need to call balls (“No, you don’t need to call them.  Except the 8-ball.  That you must call.”), he misses wildly on his break, caroming the cue off of several rails without touching the rack.

And so it goes, turn after turn. As Kenyon Hopkins’ noirish score from The Hustler marks the slow passing of the hours, Eddie and Fats miss, scratch, and scratch some more, until a line of nine balls have been put back on the table, penalizing the players for their ineptitude. Fats shares, “It’s time to get something going here Eddie. Maybe a little old-fashioned bangy ball.”

More hours pass, the hands of the clock rotating speedily, the cigarette butts amassing on the floor, and still the chalkboard reads, “Game One.” The two players, feuding after 16 hours, about whether the $200 bet really counted, collapse on the table, exhausted.  Fats proposes, “Let’s clear all the balls off the table except the 8-ball and the cue ball. Whoever sinks it is the winner.”   I won’t reveal the ending, but it’s consistent with the previous lunacy.

“The New Show” was intended to mark Mr. Michaels’ return to television, after a five-year hiatus from Saturday Night Live. The comedy show appeared on Fridays, not Saturdays, in prime time, not late night. It was filmed “mock live,”not live, and featured three guest stars, who rotated from show to show, instead of one host. These decisions were intended to differentiate it from SNL.  But, even with its incredible rotating cast of characters (Kevin Kline, John Candy, Steve Martin, Catherine O’Hara, Buck Henry, Jeff Goldblum, Gilda Radner, Raul Julia, Penny Marshall, and Laraine Newman), the show was a ratings disaster. It ran for just nine episodes before getting canned as the lowest rated of 94 programs during the 1983-1984 television season.

If you are like me, and you are only experiencing the joy of watching “The Hustler” for the first time via this blog or seeing it recently posted on YouTube, then we collectively owe a huge amount of gratitude to Tor Lowry, a managing member of Zero-X Billiards and the creator of the billiards web series, 14 Days – The Great Pool Experiment.

For over the past year, Mr. Lowry had been on a personal quest to locate “The Hustler.”  Other clips from The New Show (e.g., “Roy’s Food Repair”, “The Twilight Zonettes”) had been available on YouTube for some time, but only the first several minutes of “The Hustler” were viewable, prior to Mr. Lowry’s successful sleuthing. (I even reached out to the New York Paley Center for Media, with their library of 160,000 television shows, radio programs and commercials, on Mr. Lowry’s behalf, only to come up empty.)  Mr. Lowry finally located someone who had recorded the episode on VHS, and subsequently transferred the recording to YouTube, making it viewable for all.

Given “The Hustler” has already racked up almost 16,000 views in less than a month, there is perhaps hope that this short-lived series may one day be available again to watch.

The Fox sitcom A Minute with Stan Hooper pretty much came and went in about that much time. Premiering in late 2003, the series was cancelled after the first six episodes aired. That’s too bad. Based on the third episode, entitled “The Hustler,” the sitcom had some comedic promise, attributable in no small part to the offbeat humor of the show’s creators and writers Norm MacDonald (Saturday Night Live) and Barry Kemp (Newhart).

For those who blinked and missed this series, A Minute with Stan Hooper featured Norm MacDonald in the titular role as a famous newspaper columnist turned television commentator, who moves his family from New York to (fictional) small-town Waterford Falls, Wisconsin, where he hopes to connect with middle America in order to grow the viewership of his weekly minute-long television commentaries.

In “The Hustler,” Stan is invited out by Lou Peterson (Garrett Dillahunt from Raising Hope), one of the locals, to “shoot a little pool, drink a little beer” at Jimmy’s Tavern, where they will play billiards for “nickels and dimes.” Feeling this will give him a chance to connect with the town’s denizens, he readily agrees and goes to the bar, where humorously everyone is named Jimmy. But, when he sees Lou unsheathe his cue stick and go through his routine of polishing and chalking, he questions if he is being hustled.

That suspicion increases after Stan sees Lou miss wildly on his shot after the break. Yet, the gaffe elicits “oohs” and “aahs” from the bystanders, and Lou’s good friend Jimmy consoles him with, “That was close.” Stan, who has already admitted he is not very good, botches his next shot, prompting Fred (the ever reliable Fred Willard) to share, “Gents, this has all the making of a great one.”

Confused? So is Stan. The television viewer’s vantage shifts from eye-level to birds-eye, hovering over the pool table, as simple shot after simple shot is horribly missed.   When Stan finally makes a gimme in the side pocket, the locals go crazy. Stan dryly retorts, “I’ve made three balls in 90 minutes.”

Finally, as the game hits the three-and-half-hour mark, according to a clock in the tavern, Stan lines up to shoot the 8-ball. Lou, drenched with sweat, shudders, “He’s not going to sink the 8-ball. That’s the hardest one.” And Fred, with an inside reference to Minnesota Fats’ character in The Hustler, says to all, “You are watching an artist. Watch that fat man [Stan] shoot with his fat hands.”

When Stan wins the game by five balls, he is owed “two dimes and a nickel,” which he learns does not equal 25 cents, but is equivalent to $2500, an enormous sum that will force Lou to close his diner to pay the bet. Stan later inquires why they play for such high stakes. The answer, according to Fred, is “they’re simple folks. It makes them feel important. And because no one plays well enough to finish a game, no one has ever lost. Until now.”   The remainder of the episode focuses on Stan’s ill-conceived attempts to return the $2500 to Lou. The full episode is available to watch here.

“The Hustler” is not the first television episode to focus on pathetic pool.   In the 1996 “City Slackers” episode of Boy Meets World, Eric challenges an opponent to a game of pool to win the heart of a girl, but his plan fails after “15 hours of someone yet sinking a ball.” A far more interesting spin on bad pool is the episode “Water Park” from Malcolm in the Middle, in which Malcolm’s older brother Francis competes with his Commandant to see who can lose in eight-ball in the most spectacular fashion. But, perhaps, the most hilarious take on bad billiards is from the 1984 “The Hustler” skit for The New Show, in which “Fast” Eddie Felson (Kevin Kline) challenges the Fat Man (John Candy) to $200/games of pool, and both proceed to shoot horribly.