A Simple Game of Catch

There's a scene in A Simple Game of Catch where we hear Chazz's voice on the phone with her mother telling her that she can't see people's faces---they're just silhouettes. I took this to be a reference to the theme song in Midnight Cowboy. Nilsson can't see their faces, only the shadows of their eyes.

The movie was reportedly shot in four days with no budget and a one man crew. It's just under an hour long, mostly in one apartment. A young woman, a recent college graduate, has moved to New York from Pittsburgh. She's unemployed, lonely, and keeps embarrassing herself in conversations with strangers. She responds to an ad on Craigslist and annoys a man trying to sell a couch. She phones a bewildered classmate from the 4th grade she locates online. But she won't return her mother's calls.

It was pretty good, really. Having music on the soundtrack helped a lot. A lot of zero-budget movies don't.

Available on Fandor.

I've never understood people going to New York. If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere, so why not make it somewhere you would actually want to live? Pittsburgh wasn't big enough for her?

I saw a story on a TV news magazine---a family moved to Los Angeles so their teenage daughter could pursue a singing career. They were from New England. They were a short distance from several huge cities. Those weren't good enough for them? And anyway, Justin Bieber was from a little town in Canada, Hanson was from Oklahoma City. I knew an aspiring writer who thought he had to move to New York so he would be close to the publishers. I pointed out that it was small, economically depressed towns with low costs of living that artists and writers flocked to.