EVART, Mich. (WLNS) – Evart Michigan. Population 1,673. It’s the setting for the movie “Jerry and Marge Go Large.”
You may have heard about Jerry and Marge Selbee and Jerry’s winning formula.
“I’ve always been good with numbers. Never been too good with words,” said Jerry.
Back in 2003 while reading the back of a brochure about payoffs in a lottery game called Winfall, Jerry figured out a flaw in the way the game was set up could be used to a player’s advantage.
Basically, when the jackpot didn’t pay out, the odds for smaller payoffs became much more favorable for player.
Jerry calculated he’d only lose 3 out of 20 times. He tested his theory.
And he was right.
“The next bet was $3, 000, and I got back $15,700,” Jerry said.
It was totally legal. The couple brought family and friends in on the action.
“We played $18, 000 and we lost. They stayed with me and we had that $18,000 loss and a profit back in the next draw,” Jerry said.
Their winning ways continued, first in Michigan until the state shut the game down, then in Massachusetts until that state’s lottery shelved the game in 2012.
The states said they were simply phasing out the games. Jerry’s convinced they were embarrassed by his winning ways.
There were articles and news magazine features on Jerry and Marge. Then Hollywood picked up the story.
This week, Jerry and Marge Go Large began streaming on the Paramount streaming service. Annette Benning plays Marge. Bryan Cranston plays Jerry.
Suddenly, the couple from this small Osceola County Community are walking the Red Carpet at the Tribeca Film Festival.
For years, the couple traveled to Massachusetts to play Winfall, printed the tickets, then checked them one by one. They won $1.8 million in total over the years.
But there was some dramatic license in the film, which has Jerry as a recently retired line manager at Kellogg’s.
Truth is, he worked at Kellogg in the 1960’s.
The couple bought a convenience store in Evart in the early 80’s and eventually sold it and retired, and the beneficiaries were the family and friends who invested in the GS Investment Strategies, the company Jerry formed to distribute the winnings, not the Evart community, and there were no Harvard University rivals attempting a hostile takeover of GS.
“If they had stuck strictly to a documentary, it’d been boring. They had to jazz it up some,” Jerry said.
But while Hollywood did get the motive behind the effort, the winnings didn’t change their lives.
Married for 65 years, the parents of six kids, 14 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren, the Selbees still live in the comfortable home just a short drive from downtown Evart.
“We didn’t take cruises. We didn’t do things out of the ordinary that we would have normally done anyway,” Jerry said. “It did not seem like work to us. It was just a pleasure and a challenge to do it.”
And it was the happiness their winning gave to others. Jerry still remembers an investor named Aldee.
Jerry and Aldee played poker. One day, Aldee didn’t show up for the game.
“He drove himself to the hospital. He had had a heart attack,” Jerry said.
A few days later as Aldee was in a coma, the man’s son brought him his latest winnings: $73,000.
“He said he thought he saw Aldee smile. Aldee died that night. That always breaks me up,” said Jerry.