This scene means a lot to me because of the way it came to be. This was for my class in college that built my demo reel, and we had to find as many scenes as we could that we thought matched our type. We would record our own versions of each scene professionally, then add them to our reels as placeholders until we got more actual jobs.
No shade to anyone who did take scenes from other works, but I hated that. I couldn’t find a scene to save my life that fit my type, and wasn’t from something everyone knew like Breaking Bad. I didn’t think I had any real skill as a writer, but I figured anything would be better than scouring the internet for whatever dreck I could find, so I asked my professor if I could write my own scenes.
He loved that idea. He encouraged me much harder than I expected to make my own scenes. He called it “making movies, not remaking movies.” I wrote a scene for myself, and I wrote a “gangster scene” for my friend and classmate Jax. This, is the gangster scene. Jax is the thug who comes into my restaurant. We did a table read of the two scenes, and they went over extremely well. I had never been so excited as seeing people laugh at my jokes in “Forgiveness of All” (also on this site) or gasping at the twist of “Jessica.” Seeing my work come to life with professional camera work, microphones and background actors is a thrill like no other, and I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I did making it.