Showbiz

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A: When Jordan walked on the scene, I didn’t know who he was until someone reminded me of the movie Boiler Room and even then, it didn’t make much difference—we’re all dressed in the same prison garb. There was nothing outstanding about him, other than the fact that when I met him, he was playing backgammon and having a conversation with another guy and talking to me at the same time. He was one of those geniuses who can do many things at the same time. And then we ended up in the same cubicle, so at night he’d tell me these great stories, which became (the book) The Wolf of Wall Street.

Q: What role did you play in the writing of the book?

A: Well, I was working on a book myself, so every evening or every chance I got I would sit and write. Jordan got curious and wanted to know what I was doing, and I told him I was writing a book, and he said, “I’m gonna write.” So he started kind of emulating me—every night, we’d sit together, he’d write his pages and I’d write my pages.

After a while he showed me what he had written, and it was the only time I had critiqued someone really heavy—usually when someone writes something, you say, “Oh yeah, that’s great, keep going.” But I knew instinctively he had a lot more to offer than what he showed me. … I told him, “Honestly, you haven’t really written anything.” He had been working on it for a couple of weeks so he was really pissed off. He snatched the papers back, and I said, “No, you’ve got to write those stories you’ve been telling me at night. Your real life is much more exciting than any kind of imaginary story you could come up with.”

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http://www2.macleans.ca/2014/01/09/tommy-chong-recalls-his-months-in-prison-with-the-wolf-of-wall-street/