Long Beach has a starring role in LI screenwriter's 'Standing Up, Falling Down'

In the comedy-drama "Standing Up, Falling Down," a young comedian from Long Island returns home after a failed bid at stardom in Los Angeles. Scott, played by Ben Schwartz, mopes around town until he meets Marty, a local dermatologist whose boozy wisdom comes from a life of hard partying and botched relationships. Together, the two form an unlikely friendship.

The film is perhaps the 20th screenplay written by Levittown-raised Peter Hoare, who later lived for a time in Long Beach. He finished it several years ago while sitting in a Long Beach coffeehouse called Gentle Brew. Several studios passed on it, Hoare says, and for a while it looked like "Standing Up, Falling Down" would languish on the shelf.

Instead, Hoare's screenplay became a reality. Billy Crystal, who was raised in Long Beach, surprised the filmmakers by agreeing to play Marty. Much of the filming took place in the town itself. "Standing Up, Falling Down" held its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival last year and is now being released with a limited run in select theaters, including the Cinema Village in Manhattan, where it opens Feb. 21.

For its writer, "Standing Up, Falling Down" marks a homegrown dream come true.

"I wrote a million things, some were optioned, some were sold. I was hired to write a few things that never shot. It’s a weird business," says Hoare, 38. "This is the first movie I've been 100% in love with."

Hoare, raised in Levittown, describes himself as a kid who had an interest in writing for the movies but never imagined it could be a career. After attending Nassau Community College and graduating from the New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury with a degree in communications, Hoare says, he worked as a producer at MTV's digital arm for a few years.

"I didn’t hate my job, but I didn't love it," says Hoare. And so, at the age of 27, Hoare began teaching himself to write scripts. He downloaded as many as he could find — the very first was "Stand by Me" — and tried to follow their example. Around 2008 or so, he says, he moved to Long Beach, charmed by the town's walkability and small-town feel. But the seeds of "Standing Up, Falling Down" were planted during 2015, when he was living in Los Angeles and trying in earnest to break into the film industry.

"I was treading water and I deeply missed New York," says Hoare. One day, suffering from a case of hives, he went to a dermatologist who unexpectedly began asking about his stress level. As Hoare tells it, the office visit turned into something like a therapy session. "I didn't expect to have a conversation about why I'm stressed with my dermatologist. There was something really nice about it," says Hoare. "That was the jumping off point of the movie."

Eventually, the script found its way to Matt Ratner, an independent producer looking to make his directing debut. "I read the script in one sitting, and it was everything I was looking for," says Ratner. "I've always had a soft spot for stories that blend humor and pathos. I feel like that's life."

As production got underway happy coincidences occurred. The biggest was the participation of Crystal, whose ties to Long Beach remain strong; his one-man show, "700 Sundays" is based on his childhood there, and he raised funds for the town in the wake of 2012's superstorm Sandy by auctioning off his personal belongings. Then there was the day Crystal showed up to shoot at Temple Emanu-El and revealed that it was the location of his bar mitzvah.

"He's so identified with that community," says Ratner. "You wander around Long Beach and it seems like Billy Crystal must have 50 uncles. Everyone's like, 'Oh, Billy Crystal's uncle lives next door!'"

When it came to shooting a scene where Schwartz's character performs a stand-up routine at a small café, Ratner's crew unwittingly chose Gentle Brew — the very spot where Hoare wrote the script. "There's a lot of serendipity in the movie," says Ratner.

Hoare, who now lives in Brooklyn but still visits Long Beach frequently, says his career is on the upswing. Last year, Miramax bought his pitch for "The Twenty Year," a comedy about high-school reunion plans that go awry, and he began writing a buddy-cop comedy starring Chris Hemsworth and Tiffany Haddish titled "Down Under Cover."

"It took a while for the ball to start rolling, but now a few doors have opened," says Hoare. "I have to go back to that coffee shop in Long Beach and write."