Sometime in 2014 or 2015 I took a play writing seminar from the inimitable Carey Harrison at the Byrdcliffe theatre in Woodstock, NY. The result, for me, was a short play called “The Light”, about two old guys, Joe and Wally, in a retirement home and the nurse they flirt with. As part of the seminar all the plays got staged, so the debut performance was acted by Violet Snow as Lucy/Angel, Joe Bongiorno who played Joe and Carey taking the role of Wally. I wrote the play in about 45 minutes, so the dialog was pretty rough, but it was, as every first time playwright knows, an amazing feeling to see my words brought to life on stage, in real time.
Flash Forward a few months and I can’t stop reworking the play, I change the name to “Catching The Sun”, keep working on the dialogue and then, on a whim, convert it to screenplay format. In the script, the men grouse about their retirement home which looks out over a cement plant, so I get in the car and scout the the local cement plants (there’s heaps of them in the Hudson Valley). We found a great location in Germantown on the east side of The Hudson, and that’s it – we’re going to shoot a movie.