
One in a Million Trillion: An Interview with Rick Rosner
Rick Rosner has repeated high school four times, using fake IDs, wigs, and prosthetics to pass as a teenager well into adulthood, and this interview sits him down to explain why. He talks through the jobs that filled the years between, bouncer, nude model, television writer, and the cosmology theory he built on the side, one that puts the age of the universe at trillions of years rather than the standard estimate. The film's other thread is his run on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, where a single disputed question knocked him out of the game and, by his account, cost him the top prize. Rosner describes spending two years afterward combing through every question ever asked on every version of the show, looking for the pattern that beat him. He speaks for himself throughout, no narrator standing between him and the camera, laying out a life organized around do-overs and an IQ he claims ranks among the highest ever recorded, and letting the viewer decide how much of it adds up to genius and how much to obsession.