“Love, Lust and New York”.
An indie film of 20 shorts.
Each 15-minute-long.
Each stand-alone.
All all-heart.
Download Script
(300 Pages / PDF / 100MB) = BIG file.
Sometimes, it’s not how grand a thing you are capable of achieving but how uniquely beautiful you can be at taking care of a small pest of a problem. Going out to conquer the world is great. Staying home to ensure the soufflé isn’t burnt is the real calling at times. This film is that. I was in a place in life where I knew I would have neither money nor any friends in a new city I was moving to to make a film. So I had to avoid writing the traditional 90-minute-long story that would demand professional actors, locations and crew for long periods. So I wrote 20 short stories of 15 minutes duration each. Nothing dramatic. Plain slice of life stories. And seemingly unconnected with one another. The very small cast and crew that come together to film each story would be different for each film. I wouldn’t need anyone for more than 1 or 2 days that it takes to film any given short. And therefore, if they like the story, there is possibility that I can ask them to work for free for a day or two. And repeat the exercise 19 more times. 20 shorts. When put together, a 3-hour-long seemingly big production. And since not a single actor is on screen for more than 10 minutes or 15 minutes, nobody can ruin the entire 3 hours. Which means I can work with even untrained actors from other professions. I made it sure to write the stories and characters in a very understated and realistic manner. Not much needs to be done in terms of acting. If a person looks the part, half the job is done. The dialogue, the surgical cuts and a good background score can ensure the rest. 20 such stories. Interwoven here and there in the in-deliberate way life surprises us in a city like New York. 3 hours of decent enough identifiable drama for diverse sections of the society and age groups. That’s all I wanted to do. I wasn’t planning a feast. I was just baking 20 assorted muffins. And this is where I am now: still driving home. I knew not a single soul except the AirBnB contact when I moved to New York. And I needed to make this film possible without raising money or using social media. The beauty of the idea is that it can be pulled off in the smallest imaginable budget. It was conceived and designed to be a near-zero budget production. If you bring in more money, you can make it look better. Bring in even more money, you can hire known names and make it catch the attention of a million people in its first week. But that would defeat the purpose. Anybody can write and direct a good drama in a decent budget. To stand out on the sole strength of your writing, you need to prove your story can hold together strongly even when it is filmed on a cellphone featuring kids from your neighborhood. You have watched such sleeper hits. Nothing new. Except they come only now and then. Hence this obsession to ensure the production is poor and will remain poor. Even Gandhi was poor. But look at what he managed to pull off. I am not trying to create the Moulin Rouge experience. I am just trying to pull a coin from behind your ears. Because I know it still can make a million people out there smile. This film is that. A small coup. And small coups take a long time and patience to reach fruition. One moves inch by inch. But one moves every single night. This little big film might take another year before you can see even half the film. But you sure will see the whole film soon enough. And it will stand out in any film festival. It will be so inexpensively made, so refreshingly honest in its drama, and so original in its voice that every good film with any budget upwards of $50,000 at the same film festival would feel small about themselves for needing so much money to just tell a good story. It’s for a reason Russians chose to use pencil while America was secretly spending millions of dollars in R&D to invent a pen that can write in zero-gravity during their space race. I can really sharpen this cheap pencil into a fine weapon. I can write well. And I write from my heart. And I write about the times we are living in. And I write for you and me. Hope you enjoy reading these short pieces. And contribute to filming the same in whatever capacity you can: acting, camera, sound, art, costumes, publicity, producing, location jobs, administration, secretarial, networking. Any chipping in can help me dent the world better. Just don’t expect the film to be done in less than a year. These days, I am spending most of my waking hours fighting politics to ward off evil, and doing freelance gigs to pay rent dues. I love New York City. I write to it a love letter every single day. Getting to know you is my vocabulary. Thank you very much for crossing paths and considering reading my screenplay. Please read all 20 stories. It’s a free PDF download at www.LoveLustNewYork.com Please read all stories, backstories and casting sections. You will understand the method behind my madness.
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