CINEMA: MATT DAMON: REIGN MAN

When you've got a lot of chips, it's easier to keep winning," Matthew Paige Damon confided the other evening as we settled into our seats for several hands of seven-card stud, high-low. We were hanging out in a private poker club in New York City, and none of the players had a clue that the baby-faced kid pulling up to the table was within days--perhaps hours--of becoming a Big Movie Star.

Yet they saw in Damon the same thing Hollywood does--an all-American beer-drinking dude, with an appealing self-assurance. The 27-year-old actor's gambling strategy was to raise, raise, raise--an approach that suited...