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I Love You So Much is a silent film/TV POC reminiscent of “Wonderstruck” and “Coffee Shop.” The story revolves around a musician still adjusting to recently losing her hearing. At her new job at a deaf café (a real restaurant in Texas called Crepe Crazy), she rediscovers hope thanks to a repeat customer: Having left her singing career behind, she finds a unique way to make a positive impact in the stranger’s life, ultimately saving it.

This short is intended to be a breakout project representing my stand for the disabled entertainment community. And I don’t mean in a “feeling sorry” kind of way-the intention is to create awareness in a way that features people of disability doing such brave and impactful things, that the audience relates to them like they’re not disabled at all. 

I was inspired to write this when I first met actress Michelle Mary Schaefer. I learned that most of the people around her when she was younger didn’t speak sign language or understand how she communicated. She often would sit in silence during family and social gatherings feeling alone and unexpressed. As she got older and got heavily involved in her community, some of that shifted, but what didn’t so much was trying to integrate into the working world. Can you imagine a day to day life where outside of typing on a computer, you cannot communicate with most of the general population? How isolated that must feel? Carly Wilkes, who is the film’s main character, lives this struggle to a huge degree having recently been able to hear and then her whole world going silent. And although she works at a cafe that only employs deaf people, still the outside world, now void of music that she loves and the sound of voices we all take for granted, is a lonely, silent void.

I have always had a special in my heart for the disabled community in film. Years ago I produced “The Hollywood Quad,” a TV pilot starring Bryan Cranston and the late Jim Troesh about a quadriplegic actor trying to make it in Hollywood. I’ve also written another pilot “Tornados,” a true to life dramedy set in the 1980’s, about the most unpopular kid in a Midwest high school, Tori Carty, trying to manage her dysfunctional home life, a physical disability and all of the work it takes to be a martial arts wannabe darksider. My last film, “Curiosity” had a main character who was on the spectrum.