Why Dinner Party

Around 8 months ago I posted an ad on mandy.com. Amerigo Film, small production company's looking for a short movie to produce. I read around 50 shorts. Some of them were good, some were not.

I got amazed by a short called Dinner Party sent in by Bob Ingraham. From day one I began to think there was something special about this short. I believe my first impression was that the characters were very well developed. The writer created various stereotypes and put them all together in an absurd scenario ... at first glance without much reason, without any meaning.

The short, originally written for the theatre and represented at USC, received 2 award prizes as best Stage Play. It's comic, well written and SMART. It was written more than 20 years ago ... so why should it matter a subject like that NOW ? In 2005 ? Why could I be interested to produce something like this, investing all my funds (the last ones !!!) in an absurd electric-chair comedy?

Because I BELIEVE IT.

I had a big argument with my girlfriend this morning, starting at 5:00am and remaining on the phone until 7:30am. She's already working in the production of Dinner Party but it was not until this morning we both agreed on the short's true meaning and what we can learn from it. How much we could change if we learn how to listen and ignore our fears. Society. Society, society ... society.

I live in USA since 2000. Like you can read in other pages of this website I moved here from Italy. I love this country. I love USA and California but at the same time I miss Italy, I miss Europe. Things over there are different. People are different. Feelings are different. Living here but having grown up in another environment makes seeing things differently. Coming from outside allows to see with a different eyes people who have been living for all their life INSIDE. People that could be great people, turn to be mediocre ... many times, too often actually. They're convinced that their way is correct. They lost the right way to judge. Bad attitudes, arrogance, selfishness and fitting in with the "crowd" become part of their daily life.

And that's when we need somebody to say it. To point it out. To make people think. To make them use the brain ... And that's when Dinner Party becomes believable.

If you read until here ... well maybe there is some sort of willingness to try to understand. To try to see things in another way, from another point of view. Too often I feel like the Condemned Man surrounded by people from another planet. Maybe you should re-read the Dinner Party screenplay and sometimes try to learn how can it be so easy to be perfect in this world. So easy to pick the right answer, to do the right choice.

In a world where people are fighting wars for the wrong reasons, I still think that it's not so difficult. Read again, judge again and maybe you'll begin to see things differently.

Now ... are we going to toast ?

Luca Costa