| Dan Fiorella: Writer @ large |
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 The horror/comedy film, STEAMED!, co-written by Beverly Bonner and Dan Fiorella, is making the rounds on the film festival circuit. How did it come together? The film was in the digital can. Beverly was very excited about how it turned out. It was time for a public viewing!...
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Things are winding down here in Pandemic land, so the Amazing Maskoroni has a couple of final tricks to pull!  Weird week for me. The show is only 3 days a week now, and I got nothing in Tuesday and Thursday, but got 4 jokes in on Wednesday, so my average remains intact. The FBI joke punchline was a much wordier version of my punchline, "So, not jovial tourists?". And the Texas power grid joke; I don't know what they was going on there. The whole joke turns on the word "power" and it got altered. The same premise and tag, but the logic that gets you there has been removed. So, the TMI: Daily summer season is 3 days a week, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays for June, so check the TMI: Hollywood Facebook Page for details. And here's my contributions for last week:  From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things... Yeah, I was in a real writing slump at this point. I pulled this item out of the file and thought it would be considered. It's basically a one-act play I wrote years earlier, back when I had no idea what one did with a one-act play. Still don't. I consider them long sketches. It's in my wheelhouse of little guys getting it over on the system, only this time literally. I vaguely remember getting the idea and mulling it until the ending came to me. I wrote it up. Presented (I believe) to a workshop I was part of at the time. I think that's what brought the idea up, sitting in a workshop seeing people present their stage plays and all I ever brought in was my little comedy skits, so this was me trying to be a mature writer...kind of. Anyway, I had not business sending it to PHC. I didn't even try to set it up as a typical PHC bit. I can't say I was surprised when I checked the website that Monday to discover it failed to make the cut.... Milton vs. the System The horror/comedy film, STEAMED!, co-written by Beverly Bonner and Dan Fiorella, is making the rounds on the film festival circuit. How did it come together?  Finally, filming began! Beverly assembled a crew, hired background actors, called in some favors and friends and was up and running. She filmed a lot in her neighborhood in New Jersey, using her own apartment for many of the scenes. The one day of filming that I actually attended was in the Broadway Comedy Club. It was the opening scene. She had decided early on that her character would be a struggling stand-up comic (like herself), and after a draft or two, the noir voice-over narration evolved into an opening with her preforming her set onstage, doing her act before a sparse and disinterested crowd. It made perfect sense, she had an arrangement with the club and was able to use their basement room, their secondary stage, as a set. I told her I'd be there. So, she asked me if I wanted to be in it. I could be the club manager! I agreed. I once was invited to be part of the on camera cast for "Where's the Party" and I turned that down because I had to "go home." I was a wimp even then. A chance to be on TV and I walked away because I wouldn't take a day off from work. Not again.
 As the crew settles into its summer schedule for June, I had a pretty good week for them just doing 3 shows a week. Some of the jokes got a little extra padding here and there but some were as written. It's funny how a couple of jokes I wrote I just knew that it would get picked. The cruise ship joke was one. The Christine remake joke too, to the point that when the punchline was said, they should show a photo of the female car from "Cars." But I forgot to write that in...and they did exactly that anyway! Sometimes we're all the same page creatively. It feels so good. Maybe why that's why I get bummed out when a joke doesn't make it or gets rewritten, I miss that rush. So, TMI: Daily is going into summer hours for now, 3 days a week, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays for June, so check the TMI: Hollywood Facebook Page for details. And here's my contributions for last week:  My Radio Script, "The Nick Files: Cupid Is as Cupid Does" is a finalist in the Marion Thauer Brown Audio Drama Scriptwriting Competition! The winners are announced June 21!  The script is an adaption of my short story that appears in the anthology "Love and Other Distractions" available on Amazon.com!
 From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things... Man, I just wouldn't give up. The season was winding down and I was pulling stuff out of the trunk, big time. Again, despite the lack of success of my Storeman's Pet Place or Storeman's Travel Agency, I submitted yet another store sketch. This one has a slightly more interesting life. It's one of my early sketches, when I was deep in my Monty Python phase. I was really trying to come up with a replacement for my Pet Store sketch, something solid I could use as a sample. The storekeeper was becoming a more unhinged Groucho, or a less tall John Cleese. The character does ricochet all over the place, personality-wise. But it was a contest to see how many absurd lines l could come up with for some of the straightest lines I could dole out. It's a litany of puns, absurdity, wisecracks and darkness. Years after I wrote it, I submitted to a group of young adults who were doing a sketch comedy show on Manhattan Public Access TV. They liked the bit and took me and a couple of friends on as writers. That will be a tale for another day. But, they did produce the Plant Store and I included that version at the end. Excuse the bad picture ratio, this was one of the first videos I attempted to transfer from a VHS tape to digital and I never quite got control of the aspect ratio. So, as I attempted to keep my presence felt at PHC, I submitted this to them, after re-fitting it to kinda fit the format of the show. It, too, was rejected but only in the sense they didn't use it. It's not like anyone was writing back to me saying, "no thank you." Storeman Plant Store  The horror/comedy film, STEAMED!, co-written by Beverly Bonner and Dan Fiorella, is making the rounds on the film festival circuit. How did it come together? Okay, slight detour... back when she was readying for her birthday fundraiser in 2017, she decided to put together a sample of the movie by filming a scene. Frankly, this made me nervous. They took the cops scene in Beverly's apartment and turned it into an interrogation room scene. Technically, it worked fine. It's just that the actors were in street cloths and not the actors we would be using. They were friends doing Beverly a favor. But now it was something tangible, something that made the movie seem real and it did the job.
This scene contain one bit of business that I loved, but Beverly didn't. When the cops come in, they ask if Beverly knew the landlord:  From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things... I never would give up trying to submit something as one of their recurring bits. This was based on a real news story; word had gotten out that McDonald's had been putting beef broth in the fryers to give their fries that special flavor. Naturally, people went nuts. So, naturally, I thought it would be perfect for a ketchup sketch. As I often did once I had a couple of these sketches under my belt, I would recycle some of the opening monologue gags from earlier ketchup sketches that didn't get picked up. There would be a new one and then the others would be ones that I thought were underappreciated lines. The sketch hits one of my long standing annoyances: vegetarians who can't let go of the carnivore lifestyle. They won't eat meat, but they want to hang around McDonalds or have fake tacos. I thought I nailed the tone and pacing of the series, but it got a pass. I need some ketchup to settle down... Ketchup Advisory Board: Fries |
Dan FiorellaFreelance writer, still hacking away. 
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