Little Things Mean a Lot

I was already a huge fan of Kitty Kallen before my older siblings informed me that Kitty had actually been a childhood friend of our mother. Since my mother was no longer with us, I decided to write a page or two about her famous friend, just for my family. However, when I eventually got to writing it, I thought it might be fun to try to make it into a screenplay.

At the time, I knew a lot of Kitty’s music but not very much about her personal story. Consequently, the first draft of “Little Things Mean a Lot” was largely a work of fiction. Still, I sent it to Kitty’s son, Jonathan Granoff, who called me the day he received it. A few days later, I was contacted by another of Kitty’s loved ones, Dr. Irwin “Sonny” Shiell.

Soon the problem wasn’t a lack of information about her, it was how to fit into a single feature script so many interesting, dramatic, movie-worthy events from her life. One reviewer criticized an early version for having too much story. I felt that, if there was any problem, it was a lack of focus. There was no single plot line that ran through the entire screenplay. I tried to solve that potential deficiency by making the central focus the mystery of Kitty’s premature death. Similar to Rosebud in the movie “Citizen Kane,” the question of what caused Kitty’s early death became the common thread that holds the script together from the very first scene to the jaw-dropping surprise ending.

“Little Things Mean a Lot” has since won top prize in over thirty screenplay contests.