Turning 65 and Running Out of Runway. Luckily I Ran Into Runway.
How a two-minute question at Tribeca, a 23-year-old screenplay, and a couple of mindful breaths might just change everything.
25 years ago, I started the first full-time day job I had ever had. I was turning 40, getting married for the first time, and was offered a position as Associate Commissioner and Media Director for the Lawyers and Corporate Basketball League.
It was not exactly a day job. I started at noon and worked into the evening. With mornings free and the rent paid for the first time ever, I vowed to make the most of the opportunity.
Quick backstory on me, because it matters for what comes next. My dad’s record store had the biggest 45 collection in Brighton Beach. I worked in his record store from the time I was a kid. The first audiobook I published, I edited with reel-to-reel tape and a razor blade. In 1998, I was streaming spoken-word audio on the web over 28k and 56k modems. In 2000 my startup hosted the first online auction for the MLB Subway Series. Two years ago, my spoken-word label, BetterListen!, was a content launch partner for Spotify Premium audiobooks.
I say all this for context. I say it so you understand that when I tell you what happened at Tribeca last week using AI, you know where I am coming from.
When I started working at the Lawyers League, I met with my writing coach, Charles, aka Luddy Yates. Quite a character. I sat down with the Lud Man to decide what my next writing project would be. Two options.
Option A: Revive the rock jazz folk musical I had written and produced at The Evergreen State College, Kaleidoscope Grey. My senior project, more than 100 people worked on it, 12 piece band and a full cast. The show closed with a bang. It was May 18th, 1980, the day Mt. St. Helens blew for the first time. We were 50 miles from the volcano.
Option B: Follow through on a story idea that had been brewing. My Brighton Beach memoir set in the late 1960s.
I chose B.
I set my alarm for 5 AM, two to four days a week, for more than a year. That writing became the first draft of The Sneaker Tree screenplay. The first person to read it was Jerry Stiller. He loved it and wanted to play the dad. My dad, in the story. Life happened, Seinfeld was ending, Jerry was busy, his agent tragically passed away.
Jerry’s interest pushed me to do multiple drafts. The screenplay went on to be a Finalist in the Sundance Screenwriters Lab Competition. That got me interest from New Line Pictures, Harvey Keitel’s production company, and Showtime. Because it was a period piece, too expensive and too much of a gamble on a first time writer, they all passed.
I tried to get an agent. Without more than one property to promote, no one would take me. So I changed course and put my energy back into my audio publishing label, BetterListen!
The Sneaker Tree stayed dormant for about 15 years. No one had looked at it.
Then one day I was talking with one of the most important authors I work with, and my friend, Jon Kabat-Zinn. I mentioned I wanted to get back to my writing. Jon said he would love to read it. Fortunately I found the digital files for the screenplay and the novel treatment. He loved them both, introduced me to his publisher, and that publisher encouraged me to finish the novel.
I finished the novel on August 19th, 2019. The 50th anniversary of the first day of Woodstock.
The publisher passed on it so I self published on Amazon. Feedback was phenomenal. Then I turned 65. My boys were finishing college. And I made a decision. I did not want to look back and say what if.
A friend named Ditto, who I knew from the basketball courts, invited me into a writers group. Like Luddy Yates years before, Ditto became a big supporter of the work and a kind of mentor. I put my head down and built out the full package. An amazing lookbook and slide deck for The Sneaker Tree as a limited streaming series. Then I finished the script for the pilot. The final piece was the sizzle reel.
I finished the sizzle reel about 10 days ago.
Two days before the Tribeca Film Festival started I asked my digital twin if it was worth going. My twin listed a few of the key speakers at the Storytelling Summit. The most interesting was that the co-founder of Runway was on the AI and Film panel. Light bulb moment. Runway was the platform I had used to create the AI portions of the reel.
I started imagining what it would be like to ask him a question.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Flash forward a few days. I am in the room as the AI session is about to start. Packed. Every seat full. At least a hundred people standing. There is a buzz in the room. The panel presentations are electric. A theme running through all of it: we are in uncharted territory. There is a tinge of fear as AI disrupts every corner of life, film included. But underneath the uncertainty, there is hope and the promise of something genuinely new.
The zeitgeist was in the house.
As we get closer to the Q and A, I take a moment. A few mindful breaths. Deep inhale, longer exhale. I have been publishing wisdom teachers for decades. Turns out I needed the practice as much as anyone.
I am in the zone. The moderator calls on me.
I stand up.
“23 years ago I wrote a screenplay that was a finalist in the Sundance Film Festival Screenwriters Lab competition. I had interest from New Line Pictures and Showtime. But because it was a period piece, it was too expensive to make, so they passed. This past year I turned 65 and I decided I did not want to look back and say what if. I am shopping a limited series. I finished the script for the pilot. I have a great lookbook. And the last piece of my puzzle was a sizzle reel. I finished it five days ago. I was showing it to people here at the festival yesterday and they were loving it. The reel is made of archival news footage and the rest is AI done with Runway. Scenes that were in my head for 23 years. I was finally able to put them on screen. It was, as they say in Brooklyn, f*cking amazing.”
The room gave me a spontaneous ovation. The panelists too.
The day before, AT&T had set up a pitch studio at the festival. I went in, worked with a producer, got the pitch on video, honed the story. That preparation, plus a couple of mindful breaths, set me up for a moment I could not have scripted.
After the panel, I introduced myself to Cristobal and the other panelists. Then people who had been strangers just a day before came up and hugged me. High fives everywhere. And then Cristobal came back and said he wanted to take a picture to share with his team.
The co-founder of a company with a five billion dollar market cap. Asking ME for the selfie. Well, that doesn’t happen every day of the week.
One media producer came up to me afterward and said she could not believe it.
I am still pinching myself.
Here is what I keep coming back to. Cristobal did not ask for that photo because of my good looks. He asked because it is such a clear use case for what AI can do for independent storytellers. To recreate Brighton Beach in the summer of 1969 the traditional way would have cost at least a hundred thousand dollars. Using Runway and an editor in Bangladesh, I brought those scenes to life on my laptop. The cleavage catch. My dad’s record store. The boardwalk. Scenes that had lived only in my head and on the page for more than two decades, finally on screen.
Now here I am in 2026, using AI to tell stories about the good old days and analog living. Plug in to unplug. I wrote The Sneaker Tree 23 years ago so my sons would know what it was like in old school Brooklyn. The story sat dormant for 16 years until Jon Kabat-Zinn discovered it and encouraged me to finish it. I finished the novel six years ago.
After the excitement settled, I went over to Shayna, the coordinator of the quite excellent Storytelling Summit at Tribeca. I told her: if I had scripted this, no one would have believed it.
She smiled and said: “You crushed it.”
Cristobal and his team invited me to the AI Film Festival tonight at Lincoln Center and the VIP afterparty.
I need to start getting ready.
For more about The Sneaker Tree and the Brooklyn Universe: