EVART — Over the years, Gerald and Marge Selbee have received a fair amount of recognition for the unorthodox and highly profitable way they played a certain Lotto game.
Gerald has to admit, however, that the latest buzz surrounding their exploits is quite flattering; after all, not many people can say a part of their life is interesting enough to make it to the big screen.
Later this summer, Paramount+ and Landline Pictures are slated to begin filming a movie based on Gerald and Marge called “Jerry and Marge Go Large,” directed by David Frankel and starring Bryan Cranston and Annette Bening.
From the couple’s unassuming home in Evart, Gerald told the Cadillac News they were first approached by a movie studio interested in buying the rights to their story following a 60 Minutes piece about them that aired in 2019.
“I knew the potential was there for a movie, just because of the human interest aspect,” Gerald said. “But I never really expected it to happen.”
Earlier this summer, Cranston, Bening, Frankel and a couple of other crew members spent several days with the Selbees in Evart as part of the research process for the upcoming movie.
Marge said she initially was apprehensive about meeting the Hollywood stars but within minutes of interacting with them, she was at ease.
“They’re just people like you and I,” Marge said. “They value the same things, like family.”
“There was nothing false, pretentious or put on about them,” Gerald added. “I looked forward to meeting them. It was something different. How many chances will you ever get to do something like that?”
During their time in Northern Michigan, the Selbees showed Cranston and Bening around their hometown and took them to a number of local eateries, including the Mineral Springs Pizza Pub and Grill in Tustin, Travlers Bar in LeRoy, the Blue Cow in Big Rapids, and the Lamplighter Café in Evart.
Marge gets a chuckle out of one incident at a local restaurant, when a group of guys thought they recognized Cranston but weren’t 100% sure it was him.
“They came up to us and said, ‘you look just like Bryan Cranston,’” Marge said. “And Bryan replied, ‘you know, I get that a lot.’”
Gerald said the point of the visit by Cranston, Bening and others on the crew was to get an idea who the Selbees are and how they live. “Jerry and Marge Go Large” will be a human interest story with a comedy component, not a documentary film, meaning the actors won’t be trying to imitate the Selbees.
The movie is the latest bit of media attention surrounding the Selbees, who figured out a way to win millions of dollars playing the WinFall Lotto game in Michigan and Massachusetts starting in 2003, when the couple were in their 60s.
Gerald, who holds bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and business, figured out that he could make reliable profits during the “rolldown” of the WinFall game. The rolldown occurred when there was no winner after the jackpot reached $2 million, at which point payoffs would go to players who purchased tickets with partial matching numbers.
“I figured it all out in less than two months, but I still had do a risk-to-reward analysis,” Gerald said. “And it confirmed that over the long run it would be profitable.”
While it’s been several years since Gerald has played the WinFall game, he can still recite the odds of getting matching numbers during a rolldown. About one in every 40,000 plays would be a five-number match worth $28,000-$33,000. Four and three-number matches were more common but worth less money — $1,000 and $25, respectively. He said they could also count on winning about 26,000 “free bets,” which is essentially your money back on a ticket.
To increase the odds of getting matching numbers, Gerald and Marge would buy hundreds of thousands of tickets, using their own money, along with money from investors who were part of their corporation. Gerald estimated he and Marge put in about 500 hours each prepping, organizing and sorting the tickets for each rolldown drawing.
When Michigan discontinued the game, the Selbees focused their efforts on playing in Massachusetts. Every two months for seven or eight years, the Selbees would travel to Massachusetts to play the game. Gerald estimates they spent 100 nights a year in Massachusetts hotel rooms during the time they were playing.
“Stores used to stock up for us when we came,” Marge said, “to make sure we had everything we needed.”
Marge said it would take days to scan all the tickets they purchased, and the old scanning machines would break down frequently enough that stores would have technicians on standby to fix them when they did.
“We would be there from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m., scanning and buying tickets for three days straight,” Marge said.
On one occasion when they were traveling back to Michigan from Massachusetts, the Selbees were pulled over by law enforcement, who asked them to turn off the engine and pop the trunk. Inside the trunk were 249,750 losing WinFall tickets, which immediately arose the suspicions of the officer, who questioned the Selbees as to what they were doing with that many tickets. Gerald explained what they were doing and pulled out about $300,000 in checks from the Lottery Bureau made out to their corporation.
The officer eventually turned them loose but not before asking if he could become an investor in the group.
Marge and Gerald, who today are 83 and 82 years old, said reports in the media about their winnings often are exaggerated or misleading. Most reports don’t mention the taxes they had to pay, as well as the hundreds of thousands of dollars they spent on losing tickets.
By the time Massachusetts followed Michigan in discontinuing the game, the Selbees personally had netted between $8.5 and $9 million, although what they actually took home was a fraction of that amount after taxes.
Gerald said the filming of “Jerry and Marge Go Large” is scheduled to begin this August in a small town outside Georgia. The Selbees plan to visit the set for a week once filming begins.
A representative of the film declined to comment at this time, as it’s still quite early in the production process.