Special Request

I'm proud to announce that for the first time since Hold My Beer (or Try Again Tomorrow, if you're only counting feature-length scripts), I've completed the first draft of a screenplay!

It's called Special Request, and it's actually an expansion of a 5-minute short I wrote back in 2020 as an exercise for a screenwriting workshop conducted by Jonathan Stark and Tracy Newman, creators of According to Jim.

The short was a fictionalized account of the time when my son Torin asked me to write him a book (which was the genesis of the Joel Suzuki series). The funny thing is, I had previously submitted the original version of Hold My Beer for Jonathan and Tracy and the rest of the writers in the workshop to review, but after we did this exercise (which was meant to get us to write a new script from scratch), they actually liked it better than Hold My Beer.

Despite that, I never did anything with Special Request until just recently when I decided to expand it into a feature-length script, mostly just as a way to keep up my writing chops. As it turned out, since it's semi-autobiographical, it was fun and easy (and somewhat cathartic) to write, and in a couple of weeks, I had a 100-page draft. It's still fiction, but it's based on real-life people and events, telling the story of what led up to Torin asking me to write him a book and what happened after.

Will it be turned into a film one day? Who knows. But if it is, the big question will be: who will play "me"? Let me know your suggestions!

(I've always thought it funny that Brad Pitt played Billy Beane in Moneyball. It's like, "Hey Billy, we're making a movie out of this. Who do you want to play you?" and he says, "Brad Pitt, of course!" and everyone has a good laugh but then it actually happens.)