Milton Schlesinger is a middle aged Jewish man, who is a writer for a cable network channel. Milton has been with the company for over 20 years. He is a hard worker but he never speaks up about all of his creative ideas. Milton is a shy man, never married, never really had a relationship. Milton keeps to himself because he is afraid of the consequences, the consequences of his adult imaginary friend, Darwin. Darwin has been with Milton since he was a kid. You can say their brothers. In fact, Milton thought they were brothers. Darwin’s skin color is not the only thing that gives it away, but Milton is an only child. As an adult, Milton has strayed from every person he has ever met because Darwin is always fighting with him. Milton is so embarrassed because he knows he is the only one to see him and he looks like a fool to be swinging and yelling into the air. Milton is working on a new pilot for the company; Darwin obviously takes all the credit. There is a big company meeting and Milton wants to present his idea of a possible new series. However, Milton is afraid of two things: 1) his nerves are going to get the best of him and 2) Darwin is going to mess things up as always.

Behind the Story

This film is my tribute to Curb Your Enthusiasm. At the time I wrote it back in 2012, I was watching a lot of television shows. I love Larry David and all his creativity. I wanted to do something similar. My goal was to double my last film which was 15 minutes. We hit 30 minutes run time. The idea was to create an episode that felt as it was in the middle of the season in the second season or so. I wanted people who watched it to feel the need to search for more of them. After the film premiered on Amazon Prime and at Festivals it did just that. I've heard that people wanted to see more and were waiting for the next episode.

After I finished my 15-minute short film, "Tomorrow Never Comes" I had my son and changed jobs twice so jumping into a new film had to wait. At my new job, there were two employees who shared the same passion I did for filmmaking. I thought a comedy would be great to get our feet wet in working together. I used my film connections in the Fort Lauderdale community to set up a day for auditions. Not a lot of people responded because I was very strict on who can attend. Actors could only audition who submitted a reel, which I don't think was asking too much. I needed to have a group audition because I needed the two main characters to have chemistry. I couldn't take a chance even though it was a free project. Unfortunately, I had only one actor show up to audition for Darwin and one actor audition for Milton. But they kind of knew each other and not only did they work great together they took my criticism very well. I knew these guys were going to be funny.

On the first day of production, I made the mistake of shooting three scenes in three different locations, but it worked out just a very long day. Going forward we did one scene per location per day. We filmed consecutively taking a short time off for the Christmas holiday then back at it. The crew varied from two to four on any given shoot. The majority was just Sucre (cinematographer) and I. I cut scenes together right after we would shoot them. On the second to the last day of filming, I showed the main actors the opening scene to see what they thought. I wanted to have the opening scene in one take, but because we were driving and riffing I chopped it up so it didn't drag. It was actually funnier. Needless to say, they loved it. I released the shot film to festivals on April 1, 2018. We made some "Official Selections" but to our surprise, we won five awards in the Guerilla MovieMaking Award Festival. Soon after that, I uploaded it to Amazon Prime to share with the world.

Two years later, I was approached by actor Lj Ugarte, Darwin, to do a sequel. But "Shut Up, You!" actually has a connection to an earlier comedy short film I did back in 2013, "Spencer Jones: The Cubicle Chronicles". Milton, the main character of "Shut Up, You!", is a writer and is working on a teleplay called, "Spencer Jones: The Cubicle Chronicles". So the last in the trilogy would focus on Darwin. Darwin would be seeking the attention of Milton whose too busy working on his series, "Spencer Jones: The Cubicle Chronicles". Darwin, the imaginary character, would go through the five stages of grief in order to come to the understanding that he's no longer needed in Milton's world. It's actually more of a dramatic comedy. The upcoming film would have a character arch of Darwin, Milton, and Spencer Jones. The film entitled, "Darwinism" is currently in pre-production. I'm looking forward to sharing this new project with you and closing the story on a good note.

Audiobook