Thank you so much for your review, Frank.  I appreciate your "nitpicks" as well, I do need to go back through (once again!) and clean up some of these spots.  That's what I love about feedback - others (probably with more experience than me) catch the things that shouldn't be part of a clean, well written script. This is how we all learn and sharpen our presentations.

I'm so glad you liked Joe's story - it is based on something that actually happened in a town near me - although I did take quite a bit of literary license in my version.  Thanks again for your time.  It is much appreciated.  

Kathy

It’s December 21st. Every year this editorial is posted in our statewide newspaper. The author and eyewitness to these events was Paul Greenberg, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist here in Little Rock. RiP Mr. Greenberg. He liked to refer to himself as “just another inky wretch”. He was much more. I had the opportunity before he passed to talk with him about my idea for a screenplay about the legend. He said (with a chuckle) he’d look forward to seeing the movie.  That chuckle told me he had more than a little knowledge of the difficulty one faces as an unknown in getting your work produced. I’m attaching his years old editorial as published once more in our newspaper today. He entitled his piece “Tell Us”.  

Paul Green­berg was the ed­i­to­rial page ed­i­tor of the Pine Bluff Com­mer­cial and then the Arkansas Demo­crat-Gazette. Paul died in 2021. We re­pub­lish this col­umn ev­ery year to re­mem­ber Mr. Telles. And to re­mem­ber Paul.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Dec 21, 2022

There are some dates everybody remembers. National holidays, Christmas and New Year’s and the like. Festive dates and dates not so. Birthdays, wedding anniversaries, the day your mother died. All personal markers.

Some dates are historical markers. Dec. 7, 1941. Nov. 22, 1963. Sept. 11, 2001. And still others are both personal and shared with your community. Because you’ve resolved not to forget them—or let others forget them. Like Dec. 21.

That’s the date the stranger arrived in my small town—and not on any crack express. His sleeper would have been a boxcar, his diner wherever he could scrounge a meal. And for him this was the end of the line.

Maybe he knew it, because he was still aware enough to lift himself off the train somehow and wait for help. Or maybe he fell off. We never knew. He was just somebody passing through. Like the rest of us.

For some reason—there’s always a reason because for some of us there are no coincidences—he’d wound up in a spot on the map called Pine Bluff, Ark., on Dec. 21, 1967. Typing out the date like that makes it seem so long ago, maybe before you were born, Gentle young Reader.

Yes, it was decades ago, but for somebody who remembers, who makes a point of remembering the date every year, it was just yesterday. Even today.

It’ll sneak up on you, Dec. 21. Like a thief in the night. That’s the date the stranger would enter the town’s history, though surely neither he nor the town knew it at the time.

Now, every Dec. 21, the man out by the tracks comes to mind. We didn’t know it then, and surely he didn’t know it, but he had come to tell us something. It would take a reporter days, weeks, to find out his name. It turned out to be Joe Telles, as in Tell Us.

He was nameless to the people who found him, just another bum down on his luck, riding the rails, and this was where he’d landed. He would never make it to wherever he was going. He wouldn’t even make it to Christmas.

He’d arrived four days before all Christendom is to rejoice in the birth of Him who said, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” He’d come at a bad time. People are so busy this time of year with their own plans. And along he’d come—like still another chore to be done with, scratched off the list. In the words of the old gospel hymn they used to sing in Black churches, We Didn’t Know Who You Was.

And so, through the short waning hours of that Dec. 21, the shortest day and longest night of the year, he was trundled from one station of his cross to another.

They said he wasn’t sick enough for the hospital to take him in. And he was too sick for the Salvation Army to take responsibility for him.

So they put him up in the county jail—not because he’d done anything wrong, but because there was no place for him anywhere else. That would be the last place he would know in this world. They would find him the next morning. Sometime during the night, they didn’t know just when, he died. In the dark. Alone.

At first the newspaper heard only a rumor—something about somebody dying in the jail and the body being shipped out before an autopsy could be performed.

Strange how what turns out to be a big story will surprise you—how it may not be about the great and powerful, about Roman emperors and their census and taxes. Sometimes it’s just about people looking for shelter on the road, a place to spend the night on the way to someplace else. Joe Telles’ story, it turns out, mirrors The Story, the one about there being no room at the inn.

The stranger left behind little but the usual fragmentary chronicles of the poor and troubled. A brush with the law years ago, traces of a family, an illness only vaguely diagnosed . . . . There was no way to know what he thought, what he prayed, that last night. Some of us still wonder about that every Dec. 21.

It hurts to think about it, but it’s a saving kind of hurt. It reminds us there is still time. Four whole days of it. Time to wake up, to free ourselves from the hubbub, to slip off our numb, dying selves, and come alive to the least of these. Four days to bring Christmas.

That’s a fascinating tale, Kathy. Thank you

Quoted from SAC That’s a fascinating tale, Kathy. Thank you

Glad you enjoyed it. I’ve been obsessed with it for years.  

God, that's so fricken sad.
Plenty of people on the fringes of society sadly become invisible.
Great message, Kathy.

Merry Christmas to you, so glad you joined SS.
Not least because we needed more female voices.  

Watched your trailer at Mea Via Studios. An excellent visual for marketing your story.

Best to you,

Frank Dellipoala

Thank you, Frank.  So far, I'm happy with their work and willingness to please.  Now that I'm "hooked", I've agreed to let them do a couple more.  Best twenty dollars I've spent in recent memory  

Here is the link to the trailer for anyone who wants to take a peek. FWIW, as Pia mentioned concerning her trailer, there are a couple odd scenes thrown in i.e. the fish market LOL.  I didn't include anything "fishy" in the script.  Oh well, overall, I'm happy with it.  

https://youtu.be/FDDhFH3kyPU

Hi Kathy.

I just watched your trailer on Mea. I must say I enjoyed the video immenesely and feel it really gets the message across. What do you think of the voice over? Just curious as it an English vocal.

Quoted from Stoneyscripts Hi Kathy. I just watched your trailer on Mea. I must say I enjoyed the video immenesely and feel it really gets the message across. What do you think of the voice over? Just curious as it an English vocal.

Even though the story is set in a small town in the southern U.S. where virtually NO ONE has a British accent, I actually like it. It gives it a rather classy effect, as if Sir Anthony Hopkins is narrating. What’s not to like about that!  Glad you enjoyed it.  

Ahoy Kathy - I see you took the plunge. Glad it turned out alright for you gurl. -Andrea

Quoted from ghost and_ghostie gal Ahoy Kathy - I see you took the plunge. Glad it turned out alright for you gurl. -Andrea

So far, so good, Andrea.  The downside is that I may have developed a small addiction.  I will seek therapy if it escalates.