In the poker world, Dan Bilzerian is known as the son of former corporate takeover specialist Paul Bilzerian and a player prone to extravagance. (Sample tweet from July 13 of this year: “I lost 3.1 million tonight shooting dice and playing poker, kinda bummed
.”) His other notable attributes include having had three heart attacks by the age of 30. (Sample tweet from the hospital: “Guy just died in hospital bed next to me, WTF.”)
But it appears what Bilzerian really wants to do is act. That’s why last October, he signed an agreement with Randall Emmett and George Furla, producers of Peter Berg’s forthcoming Navy SEAL war film Lone Survivor. As documented in The New York Times earlier this month, Lone Survivor is Berg’s relatively modest ($40 million) follow-up to the disastrous money loser Battleship. To finance the film, Berg took on “a list of producers as long as his arm whose only required movie expertise was the ability to fork over at least a million dollars to get a credit.”
Bilzerian was one of those producers, but his money came with a catch: he’d be given no less than eight minutes of screen time and 80 words of dialogue in the final cut delivered by Berg to Universal Pictures.
The Hollywood Reporter says
Bilzerian’s now following through on his contractual threat to demand $1.2 million in the event his role is “less than 4 minutes and/or Bilzerian speaks less than 50 words of dialogue in the Delivery Cut.” That’s a million for the loan, plus “a 20% premium thereon.” You can read the lawsuit and original agreement here in .pdf form. The contract’s most impressive part is the multi-tiered table of potential repayments. If his role was between “79 and 70 words of dialogue” and his screen time was between “6 minutes and 59 seconds and 6 minutes,” Bilzerian would be entitled to $125,000 plus a 20% premium; if between “69 and 60 words of dialogue” and “5 minutes and 59 seconds and 5 minutes,” he’d demand $250,000 plus a 20% premium, and so on.
As for Bilzerian's fledgling film career (which is thus far limited to stunts on Olympus Has Fallen), his Twitter reports
he was recently shooting Antoine Fuqua’s forthcoming Denzel Washington thriller The Equalizer.
(Sample tweet: “First time doing my own laundry since 2003.. while staying at best western #alltimelow”)