KNOBBY LOW BOY
1983: Queens, New York. Otto Maddox, a charming debt-ridden banquet hall manager desperate to make the leap to a glamorous Manhattan nightclub, needs three things: to pay off a loan shark, prove he can throw a big-time party, and come up with his stake. Then he remembers his estranged son just turned thirteen. Otto will throw the kid the Bar Mitzvah he never had – and steal the gift money.
Project Overview
KNOBBY LOW BOY is a gritty, funny father-son story set in the outer-borough world of 1983 New York. A world of banquet halls and Bar Mitzvahs, loan sharks and wiseguys, Chinese restaurants, custom suits, cash envelopes, and complicated families.
Otto Maddox is handsome, stylish, streetwise, ambitious, and morally flexible. A nightclub guy who wants badly to be somebody. When the opportunity comes to buy into a new Manhattan club, Otto sees the Bar Mitzvah of the son he abandoned as the perfect hustle: the party will prove he can run a big-time room, and the gift money will provide his stake.
The problem is his son Remy.
What Otto intends as a con slowly becomes something real, forcing a man who has spent his life chasing the next big thing to decide what he’s willing to sacrifice when his son gives him a chance.
Set against a changing New York populated by Jews, Italians, Chinese immigrants, gangsters, strippers, rabbis, and nightclub dreamers, Knobby Low Boy lives somewhere between the character intimacy of John Cassavetes, the Jewish New York humor of early Woody Allen, and the warmth and humanity of Hal Ashby, with the grit and danger of 1970s New York cinema.
