Did Marathon-Running Gambler Cheat?
Filmmaking Leake brothers document Andrew McElroy’s high-stakes bet
Highland Park High School grads John Leake, Michael Leake, and Andrew McElroy have made an entertaining and engrossing documentary, Double or Nothing, premiering locally at the Angelica Film Center in January.
The Leake brothers enlisted a film crew to document an aging inveterate gambler — their high school buddy Andrew — making the biggest wager of his life.
“Andy was a professional bookie and part of a $5 billion sports gambling ring until he was busted by the feds in 2013,” John explained. “Since then, he has made a living doing personal high-stakes wagers. In 2022, he bets his best friend ‘G-Man’ a million dollars that G-Man cannot quit drugs and alcohol. To everyone’s surprise, G-Man succeeds in quitting cold turkey. Now on the hook for a million dollars, Andy makes the greatest wager of his life by proposing to do the Honolulu Marathon despite being in catastrophically poor physical condition. If he succeeds, he will cancel his one million debt. If he fails, he will owe G-Man two million. Again, to everyone’s surprise, Andy does the marathon. However, as soon as he finishes, G-Man raises the suspicion that Andy cheated.”
Would Andy cheat his oldest friend? If so, how exactly did he perform the deception? Mounting tension and conflict are resolved when Andy takes a lie detector test.
McElroy remains a colorful legend in Park Cities circles of his generation. His parents were the late philanthropist, SMU supporter, and socialite Linda Harris McElroy Gibbons and lawyer, educator, and ’72 Texas gubernatorial candidate Benjamin Thomas McElroy.
“We had no idea the story would unfold the way it did,” Michael said of he and his Maui filmmaker friends on the initially spontaneous decision to shoot. “We thought, ‘This is just writing itself — it’s just falling into our lap.’ The story just got better and better. It worked beautifully.”
“It taps into a malaise of modern American society,” John observed. “We have a trust problem. There’s a widespread perception that you can’t trust people. That becomes the central drama of the latter half of the picture. ‘Did he cheat?’ The more we got into it, the more I realized this is a great story with a great moral center to it based around friendship and the question of betrayal.”
Produced by Michael and John, written by John, directed by John and Jace Panebianco, and edited by Cody Carter, Double or Nothing will be streamed on Amazon, Vudu, Google, and Apple and available for download.
“Maybe we’ll take it on tour to independent theaters, which I think would be a lot of fun,” John said.
Beyond fun, the film also explores serious themes.
“Gambling is a metaphor for accessing reality,” John noted. “At any given moment, we have to kind of bet on things. There’s a kind of wonderful irony in that these guys have known each other over 30 years, yet they both catastrophically underestimate each other.”
