Pacific Coast

Two brothers make a road trip down the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles to help move their somewhat estranged father into a retirement home.

I’ve long believed that there’s nothing like a long car ride to really get to know someone, even or perhaps especially someone you think you already know. And as Robert Frost famously observed, the roads we take in life are often a metaphor for how we navigate the human condition, that how we get there is more important than where we wind up. Pacific Coast was born of these ideas, along with the sobering realization that my own creative journey, started quite late in life, might have begun much earlier if I’d only had the courage to take the path less traveled.

Courage, ultimately, it what this story is about – the courage to finally accept our own adulthood for what it is, to re-examine how we got here, and to figure out what it means for whatever time we have left. I wanted to explore how this kind of courage is often born of necessity, when we’re confronted by the death of a parent or simply the undeniable evidence that they’re truly getting old. Navigating these transitions is often fraught with peril – dredging up old unresolved conflicts, stirring strong emotions, and revealing mixed or questionable motives, all of which to me are the very stuff of comedy.

While this story is certainly very personal, my hope is that it will resonate with a broad audience, particularly in this post-pandemic moment where our already aging society has now been forced with increased urgency to examine what’s really important in life.