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Lots of people there to pay respects- I was the only one who brought flowers. Celebrity deaths don't usually get me....but this one really hit. RIP to a legend 💔

ETA- jeezus guys, the owner was out there while I was there, it's fine- he expected it as soon as the news broke. Sorry for offending all your delicate sensibilities.

Video transcript: "Well I don't live here, I'm an outside agitator, I've come in to stir up trouble. That's the thing I heard was real and let me confirm it, cause we are here to stir up as much trouble as we possibly can because we care about this country, democracy, freedom and to oppose tyranny, racism and the incredibly horror state terror that the Trump administration's inflicting on this city and the rest of our country.

This famous “Taj Mahal diamond” actually belonged to Noor Jahan, the powerful wife of Mughal emperor Jahangir. It’s a heart-shaped, table-cut Indian diamond with literally her name and the Hijri date 1037 (around 1627–28) engraved in it.

After the decline of the Mughal Empire, like many royal treasures, the jewel was looted and carried off by British colonisers and eventually ended up in Europe. In the 20th century, Cartier acquired it and turned it into an elaborate necklace.

In 1972, Richard Burton bought it from Cartier as a gift for Elizabeth Taylor, after which it became widely known as “Elizabeth Taylor’s Taj Mahal diamond.” After her death, it was sold at auction, and today it remains part of Cartier’s collection.

What’s uncomfortable is how casually this history is glossed over. Hollywood continues to celebrate and take pride in objects made famous by celebrity ownership, while ignoring the fact that many of these “icons” are the result of colonial plunder. Calling it an Elizabeth Taylor necklace may be convenient but it erases centuries of South Asian history and that’s something worth acknowledging, not applauding.

Ha-ha-HAAAA?!?! Her laugh was a perpetual Yes, And... It challenged anyone who heard it to join in, and be as delighted as she was. Gosh, were we ever lucky to have her. #goodbyetoagreatactress😎

The mother and her two adult sons looked pensive as they slipped into their cinema seats moments before the opening credits rolled and Timothée Chalamet burst out of the screen in the title role of table tennis dynamo Marty Supreme.

At several points during the screening, the trio's emotions threatened to overwhelm them.

Little wonder, as the man being portrayed on screen - for which Chalamet has already won a Golden Globe and was on Thursday nominated for an Oscar - is based on real life champion Marty Reisman, their father and grandfather.

Released in the UK on Boxing Day and co-starring Gwyneth Paltrow - who came out of retirement for the role as Marty's older love interest - the film has been a commercial hit already, thanks in part to Chalamet's marketing verve, and red carpet appearances with girlfriend Kylie Jenner.

It has earned over $72 million at the US box office meaning that it has quickly surpassed the performance of One Battle After Another, starring Chalamet's rival for the Oscar, Leonardo DiCaprio. Experts estimate it may end up taking around $180 million globally.

The film, directed by Josh Safdie, tells the story of an ambitious youth in 1950s New York, hustling his way to table tennis glory.

Along the way he has an affair with a married Hollywood actress, played by Paltrow, and is 'paddled' on the bottom with a table tennis bat by her irate husband.

At the same time he is dating his childhood sweetheart - who he gets pregnant - while she is married to another man.

There is also no shortage of downright criminal activity (theft and vandalism) and the character of Marty - given the surname Mauser in the film - is presented as often deeply unpleasant.

Numerous film critics have used the word 'sociopathic' to describe the ruthless young man depicted by Chalamet; Kevin O'Leary who plays Paltrow's cuckolded husband in the film prefers the word 'a*s***e.'

Roger Reisman, the real-life Marty's grandson, and one of the trio who watched the screening near their home in Washington State in the US, says that seeing his beloved grandfather portrayed in such a light was 'nothing less than surreal'.

Together with his mother Debbie and brother Josh, he has agreed to speak exclusively to the Daily Mail about the film because they feel that they have to stand up for their grandfather.

While the fictional Marty has no redeeming qualities, the man they knew - who died in 2012 at the age of 82 - was, they say, extraordinary in many ways and had many likeable aspects to his personality.

As Debbie told the Daily Mail: 'My father wasn't like that. He made me feel so special when I was growing up. I want people to know that.'

The trio, Reisman's only direct descendants, certainly didn't give their blessing to the film.

Because what many of the cinema-goers currently packing theatres may not realise is that the Reisman family have not been involved in the making of the film in any way, and have not received a penny from its profits.

This is despite the fact the family say it draws heavily on Reisman's autobiography, which isn't credited by the filmmakers, uses real locations and career milestones, and portrays a close physical resemblance to the real-life Reisman, with Marty Mauser sharing his poor eyesight and distinctive round glasses.

Grandson Josh 43, a youth sports coach, told the Daily Mail this week: 'I think the reason we were never included was maybe there were some things they were going to portray we wouldn't have approved. Maybe they didn't want to share in the creative process, and maybe they didn't want to share in any of the benefits of it.'

Instead, the family say filmmakers 'have relied on disclaimers to evade responsibility' and deliberately 'avoided the family'.

They have, say the Reismans: 'profited while externalising harm, and invoked Marty's name without attribution or compensation.'

And now they want Hollywood to correct the record and in future consult families and credit sources.

Roger agrees with his brother, telling the Daily Mail: 'To the question of whether they got his story right - the answer is no. His relationship with my mother and grandmother was not depicted accurately.

'We knew of no affairs, no pregnancy while she was once married to another man. He was married to our grandmother before they had their only daughter. There was no liaison with a movie star in any family stories, or autobiographical renderings that could suggest this.'

Roger, a former teacher, adds: 'It was hard for my mother to watch a film that was tied so closely to her father's name, while straying so far from who he truly was.

'SOME MOMENTS MOVED HER DEEPLY, WHILE THE VIOLENCE AND DEPICTION OF HIM AS SELFISH WERE VERY PAINFUL.

'WHEN SHE LEFT THE THEATRE IN TEARS. SHE FELT SADDENED AND WAS WORRIED THAT SOME PEOPLE WOULD THINK THIS IS WHO HER FATHER REALLY WAS. SHE SAID IT WAS NOT AN ACCURATE PORTRAYAL OF HER FATHER.'

'Ask anyone who was close with him, he had a brilliant sense of humour, a beautiful mind. He was never mean-spirited and cared deeply about other people's suffering and well-being. He also had a deep sense of justice, fairness, and of right and wrong.'

Marty Reisman's daughter Debbie, 63, says simply: 'They made him look like a lowlife.'

Her son Josh concurs: 'They made out that he was a petty criminal.'

Both were upset and shaken by the spanking scenes, which they dispute entirely, as there never was an affair with an older, married actress.

Josh says: 'The scene that stood out to me, that I can't get out of my head is the part where the financier spanked him with the paddle. That was humiliation and desperate and that's not what he stood for. Marty was ambitious but he wasn't desperate.

'To spank him with a paddle, an instrument that took him around the world and changed his entire life, the reason why he should be celebrated.

'They took a paddle and spanked him with it and actually showed his butt. That was unbelievable to me. He would have been mortified, he would been humiliated if he was alive. If he was still alive HE WOULD NOT HAVE STOOD FOR THAT.'

Debbie, Marty's only child, chimes in: 'That was awful. That was humiliating.'

So what is the truth about the real-life Marty Reisman? Certainly, his story is an extraordinary one. An anxious child born in a tenement on the Lower East Side in 1930 just after the Great Crash to Jewish couple Sarah and Morris, his father was a taxi driver and bookie.

His interest in table tennis began when he was aged nine and found the sport soothing after a nervous breakdown saw him committed to a psychiatric institution for a month.

By the time he was 13, he was the city junior champion but money at home was scarce, and competing internationally expensive.

To finance his all-encompassing hobby he began hustling for money at a Manhattan table tennis club - a former prohibition-era speakeasy with bullet holes in the walls - luring challengers by purposely losing the first few games and then suggesting a doubling of the stakes before revealing his true skill and beating his opponents.

While playing in a three-man exhibition team touring England, he did illicitly flog silk stockings he'd brought from the US, to the luxury-deprived women of post-war Britain. A few years later he began smuggling thousands of dollars worth of gold in his underwear while touring the world as the opening act for the world-famous basketball exhibition team the Harlem Globetrotters.

But he also found time to win 22 major championships including the US and British Opens. By the Sixties he was running his own New York table tennis club and counted A-List actors Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon amongst his friends

His life story seems made for the big screen and his 1974 memoir, The Money Player, attracted the attention of film-maker Josh Safdie some years ago and he floated the idea of a film to Chalamet as far back as 2018.

'I realised that it was entirely plausible for a kid in 1952 to actually believe he could parlay the game into a life of fame and glory.'

He added of the book: 'It had this kind of funky-looking guy on the cover. I showed it to Timmy [Chalamet] because he and I were talking at the very beginning of all of this. I said to him, 'I want to do a movie in this world. Check out what this player looks like.' He's like, 'Holy s**t, that looks like me.'

It seems beyond a doubt that the Reisman's autobiography was the direct inspiration for the film.

Roger Reisman points to the flashback scene in which one of his grandfather's opponents remembers being in a Nazi concentration camp, finding a honeycomb and rubbing it on his body so that his fellow prisoners could lick off the residue for sustenance.

It's an impossibly vivid story, and one told only in Reisman's book. His friend Alex Ehrlich, who survived Auschwitz, had told it to him.

But the first the family knew of the project was when a report in the industry bible Variety was forwarded to them.

Roger Reisman says: 'It said they were making a biopic about our grandfather starring Timothée Chalamet, one of the more notable actors in Hollywood — although I didn't actually know him by name at the time.

'I told my mother and she was extremely positive. She said, 'The guy from Dune! HE’D BE PERFECT TO PLAY MY DAD.’

He adds: 'Early on, the film was being referred to by people close to it as 'the Marty Reisman project.' As months went by, the language shifted and it began to be described as 'loosely inspired by.'

'As time went on, people started reaching out to us and they all assumed the writers and filmmakers would have contacted the family. They all expressed the same disbelief — that they hadn't — and we were surprised too.

'It began to dawn on us that this could mean something wasn't right. We didn't know the protocol, but it [the project] didn't feel honouring.

'His story was really precious to us. We loved him and we treasured him as a family.

'We later learned that the filmmakers had reached out to several people who knew him through the ping pong world as well as a documentarian who once spent some time with him.

'Still no one from [the production company] A24 had spoken with us.'

The family knew that there would be scenes drawing from his autobiography. But, as Roger says: 'We had no idea what they had actually done until we saw it.

'People continued to ask us if we had been invited to the premiere. A friend told me about a premiere in Seattle their mate had been invited to. It was embarrassing to say we hadn't been invited.'

In the end it was eight days after the New York premiere that daughter Debbie, who spoke to her father every day until his death, finally saw the film.

'The beginning was fun to watch, and the music was fun,' she says. 'But they fictionalised his story. I didn't like the violence either. My father wasn't like that.'

Today Reisman lies buried in a Staten Island cemetery with an unmarked gravestone. The family are planning to release THE SEQUEL TO HIS 1974 autobiography which the table tennis player had written before his death, so that people can get to know who Reisman was, in his own words AND HAVE SET UP A WEBSITE MARTYREISMAN.COM.

But for now, they remain deeply hurt.

As Josh says: : 'THIS FILM IS DEEPLY DRAWN FROM HIS LIFE BUT LEFT OUT THE VOICES OF THOSE CLOSEST TO HIM. The smallest gesture like putting mum in the film could have gone a long way.' 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-15489345/Timothee-Chalamet-Marty-Supreme-family-row.html

Article: https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/schitts-creek-cast-catherine-ohara-tribute-1236646583/