Filmography
In 1986, McCready starred as the character Grady Seasons, a fictional infamous, sharking hustler and top money-winner in all of pool, with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise in Martin Scorsese's Academy Award-winning film The Color of Money, loosely based on the novel by Walter Tevis (the sequel to The Hustler). In 1985, Martin Scorsese, Tom Cruise, and Scorsese's casting director, Gretchen Rennell, had come to Norfolk, Virginia, to the US Open Nine-ball Championship in search of actual pool personalities to play character roles. McCready was engaged in a stakes game with Filipino pool champion Efren Reyes and was selected to be in the movie because of his entertaining style of play. McCready had an established reputation in pool circles as one of the most feared money players in the nation.
After the film's release, there was a boom in the pool industry. One of McCready's more memorable lines, "It's like a nightmare, isn't it? It just keeps getting worse and worse", as he runs the table on Vincent, Cruise's budding hustler character, inspired the name of one of the top amateur eight-ball teams in the US, Like a Nightmare. In his earliest scene in the film, McCready also demonstrates an intimidating hustler trick: He literally throws the balls at once into the rack, and they land in proper position for a legal rack of nine-ball.
Accu-Stats Video Productions recorded a match when McCready defeated Filipino Champion Jose Parica at the 2003 US Open Nine-ball Championship and describes it as: "The most entertaining match that Accu-Stats has ever offered. Keith steals the show and the audience approval."
On the 25th anniversary of The Color of Money, the German Touch Magazine wrote an article about the movie and included a four-page interview of McCready. It highlighted the influence the movie continues to have on pool 25 years later as well as how it has impacted McCready personally.
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