A stubborn 76-year-old vintage motorcycle dealer. Estranged brothers. A woman who won't let him hide. And the unlikely family that forms around a Pittsburgh garage.
THE BIG CHILL · THE DUDE · THE KOMINSKY METHOD
Lenny's garage is a museum of machines nobody makes anymore, run by a man nobody makes anymore. Vintage BMWs line the walls — airheads, oilheads, bikes from the era when you could see the engine and understand it. The tools are organized. The coffee is terrible. The phone is a landline.
Into this world crashes Danny — Lenny's younger brother, a broke former broker who sold the family cottage ten years ago and hasn't been forgiven. Danny brings chaos, a crappy car, an eye for Lenny's neighbor Audry, and an unwanted talent for putting things on the internet.
It's a comedy. It's profane. It's about old men who still know how to fix things, even when the thing that needs fixing is themselves.
Stubborn, profane, generous in ways he'd never admit. Estranged from his brothers over a sold family cottage. Still rides. Still fixes things. Still hasn't forgiven anyone, including himself.
Lenny's younger brother. Divorced, two kids who don't speak to him. Arrives uninvited, builds Lenny a website, sleeps with Lenny's neighbor, and slowly becomes indispensable.
Audry's son. Lenny's apprentice since age 13. Engineering student. Vegan. The surrogate son who absorbed Lenny's sensibility without either of them noticing. Rides a BMW through his high school hallways.
Divorced. Two kids. Ten years of "pointless chatter and flirtation" with Lenny. She calls him her spiritual advisor. He calls her a friend. Nobody believes either of them.
Garden, chickens, no patience. Meets Lenny over a dropped motorcycle and a gravel driveway. Makes him want to be somewhere other than his garage. Calls him "Vintage."
Laid off, living with his mother, afraid to start his life. Buys a motorcycle from Lenny, can't ride it across the country alone. Lenny rides the first 500 miles with him.
Winery in upstate New York. Prostate cancer brings all three brothers to Pittsburgh for the first time in a decade. The cottage wound gets aired out in a steam room with two bewildered old men listening.
Has to sell his bikes. Ben handles it alone. Waddington's last request: one final ride. Ben obliges — pink helmet, goggles, old man on the back whooping "fast, faster!"
BEN & LENNY — THE PROMISE OF A BIKE — PP. 17-18
Later, Ben rides a 1991 BMW K75 through his high school hallways, crashes into the trophy case, breaks his wrist, and becomes a YouTube legend. Lenny's response: "Linoleum floors will do that."
Jeff Ritter, Ph.D. spent 25 years as a professor at La Roche University in Pittsburgh, grew up in the folk music and free speech radio world of New York — WBAI, Gerde's Folk City, Newport — and holds a B.A. in Folklore from Hampshire College, whose motto Non Satis Scire (to know is not enough) is basically his operating system.
He directed the documentary ABANTU N'UMUCO, about Rwandan students at his university — $12,000 in grants for a first-time filmmaker, five film festivals. Lenny's Vintage is his first screenplay.
He wrote it from the inside: decades of riding BMW motorcycles across the country, up to Cape Breton and down to New Orleans, years riding with Pittsburgh's BMW club of unrepentant old guys, and watching his older friends do everything Lenny does — take in relatives, sacrifice, start over, fall in love again.
Lenny's Vintage is complete at 91 pages and available for representation. The script, a full synopsis, and the writer are all available on request.
REQUEST THE SCRIPT