Hollywood comes Closer to Home

“My favorite thing Billy Crystal said to me was, ‘hey you write good, kid. You're funny,’” says Chris Millis. “I was psyched he did the movie. I think we caught him at the right time. He had never been in an independent film before, so I was really honored that he chose my script to do that.”
The nature of a screenplay is that it’s a collaborative venture which requires flexibility, Millis says. The novel was set in Buffalo, but the film’s setting was changed to Los Angeles, which helped to secure actors for the roles.

The movie adaptation of "Small Apartments" was screened at The South by Southwest Film Conference & Festival in Austin, Texas in 2012 and promptly nabbed by Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions for distribution. The Los Angeles premier, attended by the film’s featured star - Billy Crystal - was held earlier this month. Millis has written several screenplays, cartoon books, celebrity biographies, and a second novel. He got to meet his boyhood idol "Doc" Gooden and party with cast members of Jersey Shore during the TV show’s height of popularity.
The fun part is I got to spend time with 'The Sitch,'  We also hung out in L.A. where I got to see him do his thing at the clubs,” Millis recalls. “I had this surreal experience where we went out and the cast of ‘Twilight’ happened to be there. This was when ‘Twilight’ was the number one movie and (instead) everyone at the club lined up to get their picture with The Situation, you know, lifting his shirt and doing The Thing. That's the power of reality television. Here's the cast with the number one movie in the world right now - they're right here - and they want their picture with this dude lifting his shirt,” he laughs.
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A Journey of Hope

The crowded vessel lurched atop the Black Sea, a Red Cross flag flying high above the mast to disguise the Jewish refugees it carried within as Isadora Rosen climbed on to the deck of the 130-foot cargo boat to escape the groping hands of strangers. The skinny 20-year-old girl from Romania, one of 600 orphans aboard the ship, could not have known what the future would hold for her.

She could not have known that on that cold December night aboard the ship she would meet a Czechoslovakian man named Joshua Benanav, himself an escapee of a Jewish slave camp, and that despite their language barrier she would marry three days later.

She could not have known a decade later they would emigrate to America, that her husband would become a real estate developer and she a top saleswoman at Lord & Taylor in Scarsdale, N.Y., that together they would raise a family. And she couldn’t have imagined that nearly 70 years after her journey of escape from the Nazis across the Black Sea that her grandson would visit a university in Saratoga Springs to share her story of survival. 
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