WELCOME TO ‘OSCAR PHITKIN’

VIMEO LINK to the award-winning Indy film – OSCAR PHITKIN (A Vendor’s Tale)

https://vimeo.com/211111314?&login=true#=

“…it was the hottest place in the city, Hell’s Kitchen, and a lonely hot dog vendor pushed his wares up and down the Ave. to his spot at the Lincoln Tunnel light…”

This section of the blog is dedicated solely to my father Louis Scotellaro, (2/7/1936-9/11/2025) who produced this Indy feature with me, as well as played Oscar Phitkin’s father in the film – Lou Phitkin, Vietnam war vet.

Who is ‘Oscar Phitkin?’

The character was first written by my father Louis who penned a teleplay titled, ‘THE STRANGE FATE OF OSACR PHTIKIN’ under the pen name Christopher Scott – his son’s name. Me. The family legal name is Scotellaro but both my paternal grandfather Anthony and my father Louis used ‘Scott’ in their business lives in order to be less ethnic. To be honest, Scott was always too white bread for my taste and although I was registered in schools back in the day as Christopher Scott, student, I would at times also tell teachers my name was Chris Scotellaro which for some odd fuckin’ reason confused them. I never like my teachers, not a single one, ‘cept a cool English teacher who recognized my talents as a writer, Mr. White I think it was. That was in St. Joseph’s Regional H.S. in Montvale, N.J. Long time ago.

Point is, I self-identified as an Italian not a WASP named Chris Scott.

Many decades later as an adult (mid -1990s), my dad and I decided to make the full-length Indy feature about a hot dog vendor by the name of ‘Oscar Phitkin’ in honor of his short teleplay never accepted by The Twilight Zone, the famous Rod Serling series that ran from 1959-1964. Over 150 half-hour and hour long episodes and for Louis, the themes of the series influence him greatly as did of course, Serling himself as a self-made writer of great merit. The teleplay had nothing to do with a New York City hot dog vendor, that was something I added to my own screenplay when I identified one particular vendor as ‘Oscar’ because we saw the same man standing at his cart every day for years when my dad and I drove into the city to go to work at 22 E. 21st Street. LSA, Inc. (Louis Scott Associates) was between Gramercy Park and Irving Place for thirty-five years until he retired in 2000. I became fascinated by the street vendors in the city and to this day, they still hold a special place in my heart.

It’s the fact of SELLING something, hawking one’s wares that plagued me – it’s what my father always did – SELL. The hot dog vendor in NYC to me was the supreme symbol of ‘the sell’ even more so than a retail merchant or grifter con-man, and sales clerk in a department store trying to gain favor from a supervisor. A man who left home every morning and pushed a cart up and down the streets of a city was an iconic image of the freedom in America to earn a living simply by standing on a corner hawking food and soda. My father’s original tale was a take-off on the H. Wood movie THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY, starring the amazing Danny Kaye. Both ideas dealt with men trapped in their own flights of fancy as they fantasized about being different heroic’types who could save people and beat up bullies. In my dad’s script the story ends with Oscar walking past a burning warehouse in the winter I think it was and hearing the SCREAMS of people trapped inside! Oscar Phitkin rushes into the building and rescues the workers from the flames. The Serling’esque twist at the end is that there were never real people trapped in the flames for Oscar rescued mere mannequins in an abandoned warehouse.

That’s brilliant!

The image of the dying Oscar atop the cement snow being tended to by EMT’s haunted me then and still does today. The twist combined two of my father’s favorite ‘Zone sodes’ – the one titled ‘After Hours’ starring the stunningly beautiful Anne Francis as a mannequin ‘on temporary’ leave from the department floor she’s displayed on as she like the other mannequins take turns to be free and ‘living humans’ for 24 hours I think it was. It’s one of Serling’s best teleplays I thought – creepy and poignant. The other sode was ‘Next Stop Willoughby’ starring James Daly as the stressed out city executive who is found dead in the snow after the conductor announces “WILLOUGHBY! NEXT STOP WILLOUGHBY!” The twist was that there’s no such place as the idyllic summer town of yesteryear called Willoughby. As men lift the dead man off the snow into a car, we see the name on the back of a hearse – ‘Willoughby & Son Funeral Home.’

Apparently, Daly got off for the last time from the commuter train when he leapt to his death. The entire episode was in his mind as a fantasy for a better life. Louis Scott Scotellaro did that his entire life – lived for fantasy and making his family always believe in magic; for us, it was the belief in Santa Clause because in essence my father was many different kinds of men rolled into one. But the one thing he will always remain, now that he’s transcended, is Jolly ol’ Santa. Our Christmases in Vermont on Bausch Lane Hill, where we spent 56 holidays, is a testament to his love of all things Christmas and St. Nick. Lacking great Christmas’s as a child in Brooklyn when his father never bought him what he had asked Santa for stayed with him all his life. So, as our father he provided ALL he never received as a boy and much more. My love and affection and loyalty to my dad is carved in stone and on the Four Winds to the day I take my last breath; as I was there beside him in Hospice up close and waiting until he took his very last gasp of air at the age of 89. That micro-second of ‘other’ time was brutally sacred and my honor to be present and shall haunt me forever – even in my own afterworld realm at the moment I transcend.

Now, back to Oscar Phitkin…