Hiding in Plain Sight4/27/2024 Among the industrial confines of Roselle Park, New Jersey, a small crew of talented lighting artists, camera magicians, and set-organizing maestros put the finishing touches on the final shot of a feature film.
As the make-up artist removes any-and-all blemishes from the faces of the film’s actors, a joy and melancholy mixed with pure exhaustion wash over me as we cross the finish line of our 11-day sprint. For better or for worse, this film had to be shot in 12 days total. 84 pages up. 84 pages down. That was the task for a project with greater ambitions than the budget would allow. The location for the day was a non-descript building that housed an indoor basketball court and a dentist's office nestled between a Meineke Car Care and an H&R Block. With only a red sign next to the steel door marking the entrance to the court, it was the perfect place to conclude our story. ‘Americano’ is the story of Jack Armstrong, a college basketball standout who gets injured in the final game of his college career, putting his pro career in peril. With nowhere to turn, he goes back home to work at his family’s coffee shop where he is reunited with his friends from high school who are also beginning their own lives after college. The journey of this story from pen to page to screen was one of reflection. Even if none of the characters in this story look like me, I had lived a version of the same truth that our actors captured on camera. If you’re a recent college graduate with a healthy dose of humility, chances are you’re fighting an internal tug-of-war between standing out and blending in. (I’ll let you guess which location between the coffee shop, with its large outdoor backdrop and even larger lighting rig, and the hidden basketball court I preferred) It was this internal conflict that brought me to make the film in the first place. It was never a dream of mine to make a movie. Growing up in New Jersey, I was primarily obsessed with sports and becoming a sports journalist. There was something about it that seemed to be an obtainable dream. The men and women on television and the radio were relatable. If you went to a sporting event, you saw the broadcasters, the reporters, and the cameramen. Some of them were even the parents of classmates at school. It’s also important to note, that this was 20 years before the film industry would come back to New Jersey. Sure, the Sopranos was in the middle of its historic run, but that seemed more like an anomaly than the regular occurrence it is in New Jersey today. With my eyes on the sports media world, I set out to figure out how to break in. In high school, I attended seminars on the business in New York City, and by college, I landed internships that eventually led to my first job. Those early jobs required working all hours of the day and night, which I had no problem with. Every great movie where a character beats the odds has a montage scene of hard work. This was mine. However, where real life differs from the movies is that you don’t always get out what you put in. Oftentimes, promotions or raises are carrots that are dangled in front of entry-level employees to ensure productivity beyond a role’s pay grade. The infancy of what became the story for ‘Americano’ stemmed from this period of frustration. The realization that graduating college is joining a world, to borrow a phrase from cable television, already in progress. After seven years of climbing up the world of creativity at publicly traded companies, working alongside many of the athletes, broadcasters, and journalists I grew up watching, I realized that the only way to make the life I wanted to make for myself was to go out on my own. At this point, I had fine-tuned a script for ‘Americano’, and began to raise money to try to make a feature. This was the other lesson I learned during my career as a producer, the best way to try to achieve wealth is to own your content. Let the market decide if the package that you put together has value.
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