Writer Larry Ratso Sloman was more than ready for his close-up when director Josh Safdie tapped him to make his Hollywood acting debut in Marty Supreme — and discovered that four days on a movie set can rival a lifetime at the typewriter.
Larry Ratso Sloman Might Quit His Day Job
This week, as the world turns its attention to the Academy Awards, most of the conversation will revolve around the usual suspects: famous faces, professional actors, lifelong practitioners of the cinema arts.
But one Oscar-nominated film this year quietly challenged that idea — by putting a remarkable amount of its weight on people who aren’t actors at all.
I’m talking about Marty Supreme, directed by Josh Safdie.
Much has been made of Safdie’s unconventional casting choices — a mix of first-timers, outsiders, and people whose primary credentials come from lived experience. Which raises an old question with fresh urgency: what exactly makes someone a professional? And where does professionalism begin — or end?
Among the film’s most memorable performances is a surprising one: Larry “Ratso” Sloman, cast as the sharp-tongued, shoe-store-owning Uncle Murray.
If that name rings a bell, it’s probably not because of his acting résumé.
Larry Sloman is best known as a writer — a legendary one. He’s collaborated with Howard Stern, Mike Tyson, Anthony Kiedis, and David Blaine. He edited National Lampoon and High Times. He chronicled the counterculture from the inside, and rode along with Bob Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Revue — where Joan Baez gave him the nickname Ratso.
As I once said my Third Story Podcast conversation with him back in 2018: he perfected the art of hanging out — and turned that art into a career. If his life weren’t real, it would sound implausible. It would definitely make a good movie.
Which makes his late-career turn as a scene-stealing film actor feel… oddly inevitable. When Josh Safdie called him about Marty Supreme, Ratso was told it wouldn’t just be a cameo.
“You’re gonna play his uncle,” Safdie said. “You have really important, pivotal scenes.”
There was just one catch. “It’s set in the 1950s,” Ratso told me. “You have to cut your hair.”
He hadn’t cut it in forty years. He said yes immediately.
On set, Ratso quickly realized he’d entered a very different economy of labor.
“I realized how — what a racket it was,” he said.
Every day, a car picked him up. He had his own trailer. A knock on the door.
“Here’s a menu. What do you want for breakfast?”
Fifteen minutes later: breakfast arrives.
Then hair. Makeup. More waiting. Lunch. More waiting.
“I’m sitting there eating, watching TV, talking to my wife,” he said. “It was an amazing proposition.”
Four days of shooting later, the math started to set in.
“Ninety percent of the time,” Ratso said, “was just hanging out, eating in my trailer.”
And for a man who perfected the art of hanging out, it felt like home.
The acting itself? Safdie made it simple.
“He ripped up the pages,” Ratso said. “He said, ‘Forget about what I wrote. Just hit these points.’”
In other words: be yourself. Or at least, a very familiar version of yourself.
“I’m still a New York Jew,” Ratso said. “That’s what Murray is. A New York Jew.”
At one point, improvising in a scene with a fake cop, Ratso ad-libbed a line that made the cut.
“You’re not gonna get pastrami,” he said. “What are you — a cop?”
Safdie loved it.
After decades of writing books that take years — years — to finish, four days of work suddenly looked very attractive.
“Why do you think I’m getting an agent?” Ratso said. “I’m getting an acting agent.”
As the old saying goes: don’t quit your day job.
Then again… Ratso may be reconsidering it.
Whatever happens on Oscar night, Larry Ratso Sloman has already logged a win: a late-career reinvention, a memorable performance, and a reminder that professionalism isn’t always about training — sometimes it’s about knowing how to hang out in any room. Even if that room happens to be a movie set.
