Timothée Chalamet's character in 'Marty Supreme' is based on a real hustling ping-pong icon from the 1950s

Timothée Chalamet's character in "Marty Supreme" is based on champion ping-pong player Marty Reisman. Reisman had a flamboyant style and was known for doing trick shots during games. Like Chalamet's character Marty Mauser, Marty Reisman also had some unique side hustles. Josh Safdie's sports drama "Marty Supreme" follows Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) , a talented but impulsive table tennis player in the 1950s who's determined to become the top player in the world. Along the way, he gets distracted by side hustles, a fling with an aging starlet ( Gwyneth Paltrow ), and retrieving a gangster's (Abel Ferrara) lost dog, all of which almost leads to self-sabotage on an epic scale. It's a story that feels both larger than life and like it was ripped from someone's biography. And it turns out, both things are true. The character of Marty Mauser is loosely based on the real-life 1950s table tennis champion Marty Reisman. Mauser's flamboyant style of play and mischievous antics in "Marty Supreme" are an homage to Reisman, who died in 2012. Here's what to know about the real Marty Supreme. Marty Reisman was a ping-pong champion player dubbed 'the James Bond of table tennis' Reisman discovered his talent for playing ping-pong at a young age in New York City's Lower East Side and became a junior champion when he was 13. Nicknamed "The Needle" due to his thin fame, Reisman was described in a 1977 Sports Illustrated profile as "the James Bond of table tennis" because of his creative shots and charismatic style. He won 22 titles over his career, which spanned the late 1940s to 2002. He won five bronze medals at the World Table Tennis Championships in that time, as well as two United States Open titles and a British Open crown at London's Wembley Stadium in 1949 , which featured him doing a shot between his legs and forehand shots clocked at 115 mph, which the British press called "The Atomic Blast." When he wasn't playing competitively, Reisman traveled with the Harlem Globetrotters, entertaining tens of thousands of people with trick-filled performances all over the world. By the 1970s, he ran the Riverside Table Tennis Club in New York City, which became the hot spot for top players, as well as celebrities who loved to play table tennis, like Dustin Hoffman and Walter Matthau. Even chess sensation Bobby Fischer could be spotted there. From hawking watches to smuggling gold bars, Reisman always had side hustles Reisman was known for hustling, and was always devising ways to make a quick buck while traveling the globe. The Sports Illustrated story highlighted his antics, which included him coming home from his first trip to London with a bag full of nylon stockings, which he sold on the streets of New York for five times what he paid for them. During trips to Hong Kong, he smuggled gold bars out of the country, earning $1,000 each time (he boasted in the story that he did it 25 times). When...

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