A Simple Ad (Short Film)
A Simple Ad is a short film directed by Juan Carlos Hernandez from a screenplay that I wrote in late March of 2019. Juan had asked me for a script for a two-minute short, but the best that I could manage was a screenplay that, when filmed, ended up becoming a film with a running time of 3:42...not quite four minutes in total. I based the script on an apocryphal story - a legend, really - about Ernest Hemingway. (Supposedly, in his days as a young writer in Paris, Hemingway was having drinks at a bar with some of his friends when someone made a challenge - perhaps in jest, perhaps not - to see who could come up with a complete story using the fewest words. According to the myth (for that's all it is, really), the group of writers, now reasonably sober, reunited at the bar with their short stories, some of which were two pages long, others just one, but all of them were at least two or three paragraphs long. Hemingway reputedly read them all, after which he said, "I