Light and Shadows

In this dark comedy, Ezra Gentile, a mid-40s sales manager, goes to work for a tight-fisted, selfish owner, Howard Goodson, to manage Thoroughgood Studios, a faltering chain of family-owned Milwaukee wedding photography studios. Ezra has bounced around the business world with limited success, and although Goodson hires him on the cheap, Ezra sees this as an opportunity with potential.

Goodson wants to expand the chain, putting Gentile under enormous pressure to increase sales and devise a new training system. And yet, the foundation of the wedding business -- the dream of everlasting love -- is to Ezra a sham. A messy divorce has left him cynical and fearful about romance. He needs this job.

At work, Ezra’s efforts to train the existing sales force are generally rejected, as the staff continues to follow their own idiosyncratic methods and outmoded sales techniques, no matter how flawed, unethical, or manipulative. This often results in unintentionally hilarious situations, like the outraged mother of the bride who accused them of “fartography,” because their “work stinks!”

Since the average bride knows little about wedding photography,Thoroughgood Studios gives them as little as possible. The studio’s plagued by numerous problems - poor photography quality, poorly paid photographers, poor management policies, and inept salespeople, which lead to continuous customer complaints.

All too soon, Ezra discovers he has joined the photo studio from hell. Although their sales presentations paint Thoroughgood Studios as the perfect photography studio, the photographers show up late for weddings and upset the bride, and miss or mess up important shots. When the bride gets the photos, she’s appalled.

Like the company he has come to rescue, Ezra’s personal life is in shambles, and his divorce has left him with large debts. He has long given up on his own dreams of love. Ezra owes money to his ex-wife. During a visit to help her with a home repair, she falls, hits her head, and lapses into a coma, blamed on Ezra’s clumsy efforts to revive her. The police suspect he tried to kill her to save on alimony, and Ezra is dogged by an annoyingly inquisitive detective, which confirms his beliefs about the futility of change.

Paradoxically, Ezra’s ongoing spiritual discussions with a co-worker who has befriended him give new perspective on his ex’s coma. He also has a series of strange, unexplained visionary dreams while asleep. The conversations with his friend gradually causes Ezra to re-examine his relationships in more detail and question the direction of his life....

Alas, Howard Goodson doesn’t want to spend a penny to upgrade anything. Sometimes the employees are inept, other times they try to do their best. But everyone’s underpaid and under-appreciated. Typically, Howard ignores the quality problem and general insanity around the studios because of his central and overriding philosophy – THE AG FACTOR: He only acts when the aggravation from a problem is higher than the cost of changing it.

Howard’s only in it for himself and the money and really doesn’t care about anyone or anything else. If there’s a problem, the company tries to brush it under the carpet and spend as little as possible to remedy the situation. This makes customers even madder. But Howard doesn’t care because they only buy wedding photography once, and there are always plenty of new customers.

Howard is seeking an investor to expand his company. When a rogue financier with reputed gangland ties in Vegas, pretends to invest in the company’s expansion as a ploy to take over the studio, Ezra Gentile discovers personal resources he was not aware he possessed. Finally seizing control of his own dreams and fears, Ezra regains the mysterious woman he thought had been lost to him forever.