Movie-A-Day #78: The Hustler (1961).

On this date in 1954, pool legend Willie Mosconi set a record by running 526 consecutive balls without a miss in an exhibition in Springfield, Ohio. The rest of Mosconi’s career was similarly amazing, and he was almost single-handedly responsible for boom in pool as a respectable pastime in the 1940s and 1950s. Thanks to his stature and the popularity of the game, he was hired as the technical advisor for “The Hustler” and given the job of making Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason look like legitimate pool pros. He did a pretty damn good job at it too.