You're going to be left with a zero balance. "The amount of people willing to talk to us was so small it was absurd," a cop explained. Whatever could have made the difference here? Sometimes their tasks would include an array of sexual activity...These parties always came with huge payouts for me and the girls. "I had so many damsel-in-distress stories," Rosie said. Surely we don’t want to support that! ", Samantha added, "They should have worked with me instead of against me. And that's how Rosie ended up getting involved in Samantha's scheme, noticing the shift in the industry when she returned to work two years after having a child with her estranged boyfriend. Burning through their client lists and their roster of prostitutes becoming unreliable--"You have opportunities," Rosie would say to them. It was a stripper movie, a heist movie, a buddy comedy, a drug movie, a capitalist fable, an exploration of friendship and family, a period piece — and there were tons of gorgeous, amazing women looking super-duper hot. And don’t forget all that gratuitous violence against and exploitation of men! @jimmyfallon @hustlersmovie @jlo @navarroesq @avmediafilms @mariposamakeup #roselynkeobook #HustlersMovie #inspiredbyatruestory #JLo #ConstanceWu #youcancallmeMadameRosie #therealDESTINY #jimmyfallonshow 9.4.19 #TheSophisticatedHustler, A post shared by Rosie #therealDESTINY (@roselynkeo) on Sep 5, 2019 at 3:18am PDT. "I was not a stripper. At best they are useful idiots, at worst they are aggressors and impediments. The True Story Behind Hustlers Might Even Be Wilder Than the Movie Meet Samantha Barbash and Rosie Keo, the real-life exotic dancers who inspired the … And when the numbers tell the story, they bring us back to the first words you hear in “Hustlers.”, 100 times a white actor played someone who wasn’t white. © 2020 E! When Samantha Barbash and Roselyn (aka Rosie) Keo were first taken into police custody in 2014, their major issue was that the cops and eventually the media kept referring to them as strippers. And Rosie has also penned her own book about the experience. The child of Cambodian immigrants, Keo was raised by her elderly grandparents in Rockland County after her parents took off for Atlantic City when she was young. Could it be that the heroes of “Hustlers” were … women? ), The 2020 Oscar nominations didn't have to look like this. What’s not to love? Hustlers (2019) Awards. But numbers help tell the story, and it’s hard to look at this year’s nominees and think, gee, this was a crop of voters that was truly interested in stories about people other than white men. I can make all sorts of excuses about why “Hustlers” deserved to be a contender, and you can make all sorts of excuses why no film is a lock on an Oscar nomination, not even “Frozen 2” (what, the Academy rejected a feminist anti-colonialist woman-centric more-than-slightly-queer-coded option? "Nobody put us up to anything!" Maybe there were just too many characters to keep track of (sorry, Mercedes Ruehl) — come on, an ensemble piece based on real people with splashy stunt casting? "I have my dignity," Samantha told Jessica Pressler. In the “Hustlers” universe, the women are the protagonists and the ringleaders, driving the action and working together to learn, grow and experiment with grand larceny. "The neighbors were staring. Hustlers is based on a true story about strippers who drugged their wealthy clients in order to use their credit cards to run up large bills at the strip club "I taught them fake drinking and fake sniffing," Rosie explained. They're warped.". While the tale of their scheme definitely made headlines in the New York tabloid scene, it wasn't until journalist Jessica Pressler's December 2015 story for The Cut titled The Hustlers at Scores, went viral that their "Modern Robin Hood story" became infamous. The story is told through the eyes of Destiny, played by Wu, which was inspired by the story of Roselyn Keo. Well, the Academy loved “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which got nominated for best director and best adapted screenplay (among others) in 2014, but somehow, something changed when the women were the wolves instead of the playthings. After pleading guilty to conspiracy, assault, and grand larceny, both Karina and Marsi were sentenced to weekends in jail for four months and five years' probation in January 2016. "We were like Kobe and Shaq," Rosie recalled. And for a while, Rosie was making good money, with Samantha taking her under her wing, and quickly learning men were either a--holes, losers who wanted to believe you really liked them, or a little of both. While she said she initially didn't want to be "a rat," Rosie ended up taking a plea deal that helped her avoid any jail time in exchange for pleading guilty to grand larceny and attempted assault in exchange in March 2016; she ended up with a five-year probation. Back in April, she told the New York Post she was planning on suing the production company and J.Lo, claiming they never secured the rights to her life story and they were defaming her. — but they were nameless and generic, not characters to be developed and considered. ", It’s all ❤️ when my Boo @constancewu comes into town. And who can say what films will ultimately make the cut come Oscar-nom morning? she writes. After that "pinch of salt" amount of the drug, the rest of the night was lost for the guy, whose credit card would be swiped, running up an insane bill at one of the clubs they have negotiated a deal with that he would have no recollection of the following morning. There is money to be made at the club, but only if you pay out to the gatekeepers, endure their come-ons, vague threats and shakedowns (“You want to keep working VIP?”), and please the high-rollers who come in through the back into a room with no cameras and no consequences. I was never a stripper. (That was the reason a gentleman friend gave, in earnest, for not wanting to see the film with me. Rosie said. The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning. "Once the signatures are done...you can party your head out.". While Zyad was willing to come forward (even being covered in the New York Post, name, profession and all), a lot of other men stayed mum. Although Samantha wasn't a dancer at that time, we believe the movie and Jennifer Lopez's character is based on her. It's defamation of character. The Oscars love mediocrity. Just for that, I'm going to max out his credit card, like a penalty. And when they lost, so did the women working at the clubs, now fighting over hundreds rather than thousands. — and not conclude that the deck is stacked against women, their stories and their storytelling. "Men don't want to admit to being victimized by women.". All desperate to avoid jail time, only two of the four women involved ended up with a prison sentence. No, seriously. Keo t… Sure, there were men in the film — someone had to throw cash at J. And numbers-wise, it’s hard to look at the makeup of the Academy — where male directors have outnumbered female directors 20 to 1 for over a decade, and white men have outnumbered nonwhite female directors 92 to 1, and only 10.6 percent of the top-grossing movies of 2019 had female directors (and that’s a record high!)