(File Photo)
By Dillon Cooper | Sports Editor
Fortune cookies may give most of us a laugh, but in Alex Pinedo’s screenplay “Fortune Cookie,” he takes it to the next level. His protagonist, Charlie, makes life choices as directed by those little slips of paper.
This is the second year in which Pinedo’s work has been featured in Emerging American Voices.
“Watching the crowd’s reaction from last year made me really excited,” Pinedo said. “Everyone was really digging it and that was huge for me.”
“Fortune Cookie” was well received in the fall 2013 Emerging American Voices performance.
Before Emerging American Voices, Pinedo never really took himself seriously as a writer.
“I didn’t think people would be into it,” Pinedo said. “When I watched everyone have a good time watching something that I wrote, it was really cool.”
Pinedo said writing and coming up with “Fortune Cookie” has been therapeutic.
“Unknowingly, the script became a worst-case scenario for my life,” Pinedo said. “It was really fun to write it as a comedy because it was poking fun at me. It made me realize that it’s ok to fail.”
Pinedo has ideas to make “Fortune Cookie” into a pilot for a TV show.
“I think it’d make a great episodic thing,” Pinedo said. “Every episode it’s a new fortune cookie. It lends itself really well to a television kind of thing.”
Before last year, Pinedo hadn’t written a script before, but now he’s fallen in love with it.
“I know it’s really scary because writing is so intimate and it’s really hard to show that off because it makes you vulnerable,” he said.
“This script will always have a special place in my heart because it was the first script I wrote,” Pinedo said.
