Fred Stoller

2 Fred and Vinnie Contents 1) Synopses 2) Director’s Statement – Steve Skrovan 3) Finding Vinnie – Fred Stoller 4) Bios 5) Production Notes and Facts 6) Credits 7) Screen Captures 8) Behind the Scenes Stills 9) Festivals and Awards 10) Reviews www.fredandvinnie.com 3 Fred and Vinnie Long Synopsis Everybody knows a Vinnie. Fred Stoller works as an actor in Hollywood, playing an assortment of deliverymen, clerks, and other oddball schnooks. The rest of the time he wanders the streets researching his pet book project, “Restaurants You Don’t Feel Self-Conscious Eating Alone At.” As the title suggests, he lives a relatively isolated life punctuated by the occasional hellish date. He does, however, have a long distance bond with his old friend from the stand-up comedy scene back East, Vinnie D’Angelo, who these days hardly ever leaves his rent-free basement apartment. Fred calls Vinnie whenever he has an odd anecdote to relate about some dumb thing he overheard a lady say at the post office or how the owner of a video store refused to wish him a “Happy Holiday” because Fred was renting a porno on Christmas. Vinnie howls with delight, living vicariously through Fred’s stories. What to anyone else would seem mundane, for Vinnie are great adventures. In fact, he has all of Fred’s calls on tape, because since 1984 Vinnie has never thrown out an answering machine message. He longs to one-day sort through the box and listen to some of the classics. The tapes reveal a quirky, symbiotic relationship where Fred provides Vinnie with a window to the outside world, while Vinnie is the adoring parent Fred never had. One day, Fred gets a surprise call. Vinnie plans to venture cross-country to give show business a try. “Scariest thing I ever did, man.” He needs to stay with Fred for a couple of weeks until he rents his own place with the money he’ll make doing “extra” work in films. Fred is thrilled to have the company and eager to give Vinnie a live tour of his “crazy” life. It’s the perfect marriage of two misfits. In fact, this would be a romantic comedy if Vinnie weren’t a three hundred and fifty pound middle-aged man. The romance soon fades, though, when Vinnie arrives and quickly reverts to his agoraphobic ways. Despite his pledge not to be a bother (“It will be like I’m not even here”), Vinnie snores loudly every night and devotes an hour and half every morning to blow-drying his hair and gazing at his beloved baseball card collection while sitting on the toilet. Even though the only thing he does all day is camp out on Fred’s roof to smoke cigarettes. And he can’t seem to apply himself to the task of getting “extra” work. Or any job for that matter. With no end in sight, Fred feels trapped, his already small apartment getting smaller and smaller. Eventually, the claustrophobia overwhelms him, but he doesn’t have the heart to kick Vinnie out. Will Fred be able to overcome his meek nature and get rid of Vinnie? Is Vinnie a freeloading conman taking advantage of an old friend or just a well-meaning guy who is truly incapable of dealing with the world? One thing’s for sure. Everybody knows a Vinnie. www.fredandvinnie.com 4 Fred and Vinnie Short Synopsis Fred Stoller works as an actor in Hollywood, playing an assortment of deliverymen, clerks, and other oddball schnooks. The rest of the time he wanders the streets researching his pet book project, “Restaurants You Don’t Feel Self-Conscious Eating Alone At.” He has a long distance bond with his old friend from back East, Vinnie D’Angelo, who these days hardly ever leaves his rent-free basement apartment. Fred calls Vinnie whenever he has an odd anecdote to relate about some dumb thing he overheard a lady say at the post office or how the owner of a video store refused to wish him a “Happy Holiday” because Fred was renting a porno on Christmas. For Vinnie, these mundane stories are great adventures. It’s a quirky, symbiotic relationship where Fred provides Vinnie with a window to the outside world, while Vinnie is the adoring parent Fred never had. That relationship is put to the test when Vinnie ventures cross country to stay with Fred to give show business a try. At first, Fred is thrilled to have the company and eager to give Vinnie a live tour of his “crazy” life, but soon feels trapped when Vinnie quickly reverts to his agoraphobic ways. Will Fred be able to overcome his meek nature and get rid of Vinnie? Is Vinnie a freeloading conman taking advantage of an old friend or just a well-meaning guy who is truly incapable of dealing with the world? One thing’s for sure. Everybody knows a Vinnie. www.fredandvinnie.com 5 Fred and Vinnie One Line Synopsis Lonely guy Fred Stoller is thrilled when his good buddy, Vinnie D’Angelo, the world’s happiest agoraphobic and fattest vegetarian, comes to live with him, until Vinnie also proves to be the world’s most maddening roommate. www.fredandvinnie.com 6 Fred and Vinnie Directors Statement By Steve Skrovan I can’t remember if we met at The Comic Strip or The Improv in New York, but I’ve know Fred Stoller for almost thirty years now. We are both children of the 1980s stand-up comedy boom. No matter what their personality differences, stand-ups tend to have a bond that develops between those brave or foolish enough to stand alone on a stage trying to make a group of strangers laugh. Fred and I are nothing alike, me Catholic from a small town in the Midwest, Fred Jewish from Brooklyn, me an Ivy League education, Fred a high school graduate, me a 200-pound jock who married his college sweetheart, Fred a 140-pound stick, who’d give his left nut to date a woman who wasn’t certifiably insane. But we had that bond. I always thought Fred was one of the funniest guys I knew. I was most impressed at how truthful he was on stage. He could never say anything false. It would never occur to him to do a stock line, or any of those “savers” most of us had filed away to dig ourselves out of a hole onstage. It just wasn’t in his DNA. He was authentic. Over the years, our careers took us both out to LA, me to write for sitcoms, Fred to be a guest star on just about every sitcom of the last twenty years, “Murphy Brown,” “Seinfeld,” “Friends,” “Everybody Loves Raymond,” just to name a few. But he was always a guest star, never a regular. In movies, he was always the weird cartoonish character given only one scene. You may remember him as the poor schmuck in “Dumb and Dumber,” who gets punched through a telephone booth. In spite of the frequent work, he longed to find a “show business home” not for the paycheck necessarily, but just for a place to go every day, to be part of a regular community. He took to writing a memoir about all of his guest star appearances and would send pages for me to edit. It was entitled “Maybe We’ll Have You Back,” which is what all guest actors hope the writers will say to them at the end of the shoot week. After that, Fred would run all sorts of ideas by me, including a script about an experience he had with a mutual acquaintance from Philadelphia, Vinnie D’Angelo. Vinnie was a local comic, who would emcee or “middle” when comics like Fred and I would come down from New York to do one nighters. Fred wanted to write about this odd, funny, disturbing experience he had when the agoraphobic Vinnie got kicked out of his rent-free attic apartment in Philadelphia, “the cave,” and came to stay with Fred in LA. He kept pitching it as a high concept comedy, “The Vinnie character’s a psychiatrist who lives on my couch…” kind of thing. It all seemed a bit contrived to me, so I encouraged Fred to write the real story and not worry about making it a script. I told him to write it as a short story in prose form the same way he wrote “Maybe We’ll Have You Back.” He ended up www.fredandvinnie.com 7 producing about a forty-page manuscript version of his experience with Vinnie, and I remember reading it and immediately thinking that this would make a nice little independent film, never thinking I’d be the one to make it. A few years later, I directed a documentary on the life and career of Ralph Nader entitled “An Unreasonable Man,” which made the Sundance competition, was short- listed for the Academy Awards, had a nationwide theatrical release, and aired on PBS’ Independent Lens. All of a sudden, I was a filmmaker. I called Fred and said, “Let’s do the Vinnie story.” I was attracted to this story of two guys who have somehow fallen through life’s cracks. These aren’t two men having a middle-aged crisis. As Fred says, “These are two guys who are always in crisis, one just slightly more functional than the other.” Fred wrote the script based on his short story and after a couple of years of fits and starts, we found ourselves on a set shooting a movie.

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