Bloggin' On: Adventures in Screenwriting - Looking Back, Looking Forward

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I'm still over the moon about Ronnie and the Pursuit of the Elusive Bliss. © 2020 Popcorn Sky Productions
Wow, gang!

Man, it's been an amazing 10 months for me as a screenwriter. That's about how much time since my high school buddy Juan Carlos Hernandez first challenged me to write a two-minutes-long short film for him and his wife Adria to act, direct, and produce. I didn't quite manage to write a movie that brief; the short that is now A Simple Ad has a running time of 3:41, which is nearly twice as long as the requested length. Still, I wrote the script in early April of 2019, and it was uploaded to Juan 's YouTube channel a few weeks later.




A relatively short time after A Simple Ad was shared with the world, Juan asked me to write a sequence for a film he was doing in the Big Apple with Adria and their son Anthony (a talented young man who I predict will have a great career on stage and screen). My contribution was modest, but it complemented what Juan and Adria were filming fairly well, especially after they finessed the material so it jelled with theirs.


A sight gag that I wrote into my segment of Clown 345. © 2019 Popcorn Sky Productions


The result was Clown 345, which has a running time of 8 minutes and 45 seconds, or over twice that of A Simple Ad. And in contrast to the shorter film's rumination on loss and grief, Clown 345 is a joyful and irreverent film about a young clown who is trying to tell a joke.

A few weeks after that was uploaded to YouTube on July 12, 2019,  I started working on the Norman Lear-like "comedy about today" that I called Happy Days Are Here Again. Originally, we had hoped to shoot it over the summer, but for a variety of reasons, Juan, Adria, and Anthony couldn't do it then. But they liked the script and believed in its potential. They polished the script and made it better, and after several weeks of principal photography, post-production, pickup photography, editing, and an almost last-minute renaming, the film now known as Ronnie and the Pursuit of the Elusive Bliss was posted on Juan's channel on February 9.

"It's almost time for The Bachelor...." © 2020 Popcorn Sky Productions

At just a tad over 22 minutes, Ronnie is our most ambitious project to date; not only is it our longest finished film, but it mixes comedy, drama, and topicality that evokes such classic TV sitcoms as All in the Family, Maude, and ¿Que Pasa, USA?  I've watched it twice with others, and the jokes and physical comedy have not failed to get laughs.


"I got a special award for a paper I wrote...." © 2020 Popcorn Sky Productions



Here are some of the comments we've received about Ronnie on Facebook:


Norma D. writes:

 Wonderful! Terrific character portrayals, dialogue, and score ~ the concept played full out with heart, humor, hurt and hope. Congratulations to all of you!

 Lazaro L. writes: 
Intelligent, comical political satire ... Very nicely done. 

John H. writes:
I loved it so very much. The mother's face at the end gave it the right touch.

One of my favorite shots features two photos of my late mother, Beatriz Diaz-Granados. © 2020 Popcorn Sky Productions


I'm thoroughly pleased with Ronnie and the Pursuit of the Elusive Bliss. I pinch my arm so often to check if I'm dreaming that I look like I got into a fight with an angry crab. (No, not really, but I do rewatch the movie often. Sometimes it's to see what I can learn from Juan and Adria's enhancements to the script, but sometimes it's just to watch the movie and soak in the reality that "Wow! I came up with the original idea! And 90% of my dialogue is there!")

Of course, now is not the time for me to rest on my laurels (so to speak). It's fine and dandy to celebrate the completion of one project, but there are more films that need to be written, other stories that await their time to be told.

So, yes...I'm now brainstorming ideas for my next script!

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