Counting to 21 With Jeff Ma

Pull up a seat, this might get a little confusing. Even fans of Ben Mezrich's excellent book Bringing Down the House and the new Jim Sturgess film based on it called 21 might not know the name Jeff Ma. In the book, which details Ma's incredible days as a part of the now-legendary card-counting team from MIT, Jeff's name was changed to Kevin Lewis. In the film, which takes a few fictional liberties with the true story, Kevin/Jeff's name has been changed to Ben Campbell. So, who is Jeff Ma? He's a charming, intelligent guy who has gone through all of the ups and downs of the "City of Sin" and lived to tell his tale. He's been traveling with his counterpart in front of the camera in 21, Jim Sturgess, and he sat down with The Deadbolt to talk about seeing part of his life on the big-screen, his newest projects, and whether he'd do it all over again.

THE DEADBOLT: What's scarier - reading a book about your life or seeing a movie about your life?

JEFF MA: I don't think either are "scary." I guess the first time that you read it. Reading a book, actually, just because there's so much more detail and people believe books a lot more than they do movies. If there's a movie, there's definitely a feeling that there's some artistic license going on. But the way Ben writes his books, he tries to make them as true to the story as possible.

THE DEADBOLT: People might be a little confused with all the name changes and title changes. There are different book and movie names and then different character names. Maybe you can walk them through the history - Kevin Lewis to Ben Campbell.

JEFF: Jeff Ma to Kevin Lewis to Ben Campbell. I had the idea to write this book probably ten years ago, when this was going on and we were just kind of winding down. I thought it would make for a really fun book. I kind of started writing it myself, meaning like the first sentence, and I just decided, ‘I'm not a writer’. But my friend, Ben Mezrich, was a writer. He had written some books, all fiction, and I told him, ‘Hey Ben, I've got a great story for you.’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ So, I took him to Vegas with me and he was like, ‘Oh my God, this is such a cool story.’ So he started writing it and I actually spent the better part of three weeks, every night for a couple hours, just telling him every story. He would take notes and he would research it and call me the next day with more questions. And he turned it into a book. About two months into the process, I remember saying to him, ‘Hey, Ben, I'm not really sure.’ I started to get a little bit of cold feet and I wasn't sure I wanted my story to be in a book. And he said, ‘It's kind of too late for that. But what I can do is I'll change your name.’ He changed the name to Kevin Lewis. Kevin is my middle name and Lewis is something we perceived to be a decent name generically speaking. And then there was a Kevin Lewis that was at MIT at the time that I was there. So, they weren't comfortable using it in the movie. And then it was gonna be Ben Lewis, but there was also a Ben Lewis somewhere that didn't clear. So they changed it to Ben Campbell.

THE DEADBOLT: And then the title change. Queen Latifah stole your title.

JEFF: Yeah. I think [21] is a better title. I think it's great. Just the number and the age. It's a great play on all that stuff. I never liked Bringing Down the House. It was too long.

THE DEADBOLT: And then there are elements of the story that changed, too.

JEFF: Yeah, there are a lot of elements. You take seven years and condense it into 300 pages and then 300 pages into two hours. There's just no way you're not going to change things significantly to make it work. The first script that I saw was very true to the book and I don't know anything about making movies but it did not seem like it was going to make a very good movie. So they really changed things and, to be honest, when I first saw the script, before I saw it on the big-screen, I was a little scared or skeptical about how it was going to work. When I saw it all put together, it's really fun. I think that if I were focused on them creating an autobiography/documentary of Jeff Ma then I would have problems with some of the liberties they took, but because they're creating a motion picture that they want more than ten people to see, I think it's a good idea.

Counting to 21 With Jeff Ma Page 2