For Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie’s ping-pong movie starring Timothée Chalamet, a number of unusual casting choices were made, including several blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos.
Gwyneth Paltrow, whose character, actress Kay Stone, has an affair with Chalamet’s rambunctious Marty Mauser, makes her first appearance in a film in 10 years. Tyler, the Creator (née Tyler Okonma) plays Marty’s best bud, Wally. Fran Drescher is his mother, Rebecca, and Odessa A’zion plays his pregnant girlfriend, Rachel. Basketball Hall of Famer George Gervin, Sandra Bernhard and Penn Jillette also appear.
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Then there’s Larry “Ratso” Sloman, who plays Marty’s Uncle Murray, the owner of a busy shoe store where Marty and Rachel both work.
Sloman’s appearance is also a small moment of High Times history on screen. He served as editor in chief of High Times from 1983 to 1984, after joining the magazine in 1977. In the years following founder Tom Forçade’s death in 1978, Forçade’s wife, Gabrielle Schang, took over as editor in chief in 1979 for one year. She was followed by publisher Andy Kowl, then Sloman, who had served as executive editor under both Schang and Kowl before stepping into the top editorial role.
These were lean years for High Times, shaped by the early drug war and the rise of Ronald Reagan’s “Just Say No” movement. Among Sloman’s better-known contributors during that era were William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski.
“He valiantly saved the magazine’s editorial standards after Tom died,” says former associate publisher Rick Cusick, who is currently working on a history of High Times. “They were lucky to have Ratso to take over the editorial reins. It was miraculous.”
In Marty Supreme, Sloman’s first scene comes early in the film: Marty fits shoes on a customer, then slips into the back room for a quick encounter with Rachel, setting up her pregnancy. Sloman, who is 75, is made up to look roughly 10 years older. In his only other scene, Murray and a cop threaten Marty with arrest after Marty steals $700 from the till to fly to Japan and compete in a major tournament.
Vanity Fair’s “Guide to All the Cameos in Marty Supreme” includes a section on Sloman, with Safdie noting that Sloman “has written so many books,” including Reefer Madness: The History of Marijuana in America, Private Parts (Howard Stern’s biography) and Scar Tissue (Anthony Kiedis’ biography).
After his tenure at High Times, Sloman became known as a biographer. His entertainment books include Private Parts, Scar Tissue, Make Up to Break Up: My Life In and Out of KISS, Undisputed Truth and The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero.
Sloman’s nickname dates back to 1975, when he covered Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour for Rolling Stone. Joan Baez reportedly dubbed him “Ratso,” saying he resembled Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo character in Midnight Cowboy.
He also appeared in Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue and had a cameo in the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, both in 2019.
“[I try to] cast someone who you can impersonate, which I think is essential to casting, because it’s what makes them iconic,” Safdie said in the Vanity Fair interview. “On-screen, the writer in him, the personality in him, the individualist in him just brought the character to a different level.”
Despite efforts to reach distributor A24, Sloman was not made available for an interview.
Steve Bloom is a former editor of High Times.
David Shankbone, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
