A happily married father of four sons confronts his attraction to another man and must navigate between his devotion to family and his recognition that his life imitates art.

CAST LIST:

Narrator: Julie Sheppard
Michelangelo: Sean Ballantyne
Homer: Shawn Devlin
Lu-Lu: Hannah Ehman

Get to know the writer:

1. What is your screenplay about?

«"Anybody Seen My Baby? » is about a happily married father of four boys who falls in love with another man, a colleague of his wife's, and finds he must navigate both his attraction to another man, his devotion to family and his belated discovery that his life imitates art.

2. What genres does your screenplay fall under?

« Anybody Seen My Baby? » is a mix of screwball comedy, family drama and magic realism. It was inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's « Contempt » (the conflicts of a married man and his wife;) "The Odyssey, » by Homer ( and other Greek mythologies) and the antics of « What's Up, Doc? » by Peter Bogdanovich.

3. Why should this screenplay be made into a movie?

« Anybody Seen My Baby? » is unlike any gay-themed movie of which I am aware in that the character's homosexual desire (or bisexuality) though an important element of the story is not the subject of the film. The theme of the film is sexual freedom, not homosexuality. Though conventional in many respects, the screenplay is also experimental and beaks new ground in using dialogue from old movies to comment on the action.

4. How would you describe this script in two words?

Great fun.

5. What movie have you seen the most times in your life?

« Nashville. »

6. How long have you been working on this screenplay?

Continuously since the COVID-19 pandemic, five years. During that period I wrote two screenplays back to back. The other is a mordant satire of the legal profession called « Failure to State a Claim. »

7. How many stories have you written?

Four. I wrote my first screenplay, called « Dissembler » while a student at New York University School of Film and Television. I thought at the time, « Wow, I know how do do this! Alas I didn't write another for twenty years. It was called « Another Day at the Salt Mines, » which is now lost. However, I might be able to retrieve it from the U.S. Copyright Office where it was registered in 1994.

8. What motivated you to write this story?

Many people who write books, screenplays or even music stress that they are the stewards of inspiration and not the owners. That has been my experience. It comes from somewhere beyond the reach of conscious thought even though it may have autobiographical elements.

9. What obstacles did you face to finish the screenplay?

Every time I complete a draft I think the screenplay is finished. The truth is the screenplay is never finished, not only because I have new ideas for it all the time, but because it will be amended by the director and the actors. It is a blueprint.

10. Apart from writing, what else are you passionate about?

Music. Fleetwood Mac, The Rolling Stones, Puccini's and Philip Glasses' operas, the film scores of Georges Delarue, Ennio Morricone, Russell Garcia and John Barry.

11. What influenced you to enter the festival? What were your feelings on the initial feedback you received?

Having entered some general interest screenplay competitions and not even ranking among the top 100 quarterfinalists it suddenly dawned on me that no gay themed script was going anywhere in a heterosexual contest like Coppola's Zoetrope or the Atlanta Film Society's. This is not necessarily a result of overt LGBTQ Discrimination so much as the failure of the heterosexual imagination. They can't suspend their imaginative life long enough to take an intestinal in gay and bisexual themes. After all, how many gay films are produced each year even for the independent market? Very few. And those that are focus almost exclusively on « the homosexual lifestyle," which means promiscuity, dancing, female friendships, and going to the gym. I recently typed in « gay » in the Amazon Prime search bar and didn't find a single entry that promised anything more than these worn-out cliches. The kinds of gay movies I'd like to see more of are a film like « Fellow Travelers, « which starred Jonathan Bailey, an out gay actor whom I'd love as the lead in « Anybody Seen My Baby? »

I always find notes helpful. Notes have taught me correct script format as well as character development or lack there of. The notes from your Marco Amato identified a key weakness and improved my script dramatically (I should say comedically too.) Since the tone is largely light or comedic it helped with consistency, too.