Case Study
The Blindfold
A comedy about a bakery running out of room, made for a gala dinner — and a reveal that nobody in the room saw coming.
- Client
- Chabad of Parkland · Friendship Circle
- Industry
- Community & Inclusion
Most gala films are earnest. This one had to be funny.
Chabad of Parkland runs a Friendship Circle bakery out of their headquarters — a program where individuals with special needs bake together every week. It works. It works so well that it stopped fitting. Every week they were producing more than the space could hold, product stacked on product, a kitchen that had comprehensively outgrown itself.
The Friendship Bakery describes itself as a social enterprise: it makes challah, cakes and cookies, and it exists to give adults with special needs real jobs. They post the work on Instagram.
So they were building a real café. And they needed a room full of people at a gala dinner to fund it.
They brought me in to make the dinner films. This was the one the evening was built around.
The brief
The challenge
The honest version of this story is a logistics problem. We are out of space and we need money for a bigger space. That is not a story. That's a line item.
But the funny version is right there — a kitchen drowning in its own success is genuinely comic. Flour everywhere, trays with nowhere to go, an operation collapsing under the weight of how well it's doing.
The problem with leading on comedy at a gala is that you have to land the plane. Make people laugh for two minutes and then ask them for money and you've made an ad. The laugh has to set up something real, or it works against you.
So the film had to be funny first and then earn a turn — into something that made a room full of people want to build the thing.
The build
Building it
It started with a brainstorming session rather than a script. I wanted the story to come out of the people who actually run this thing, because they know what's funny about it and I didn't. The film was written by Zvi Kugel, Dov Gurewicz, and the Chabad of Parkland team in that session.
What came out was a simple structure. Eddie — Eddie Barbanell, who runs the operation, and who played Billy in The Ringer — calls the rabbi. Rabbi, we need more space. We can't keep doing this. The rabbi says he'll see what he can do.
Casting Eddie wasn't a gesture. He has been acting since 2000: Billy in The Ringer (2005), then Jackass 3D, Dumb and Dumber To, Addicted to Fresno, Loudermilk, and two seasons of Workaholics as Bradley “B-Rad” (IMDb · Wikipedia). The film needed someone who could carry comic timing and then turn on a dime. That's a genuinely hard ask and most people can't do it.
Then came the chaos. The bakery at full tilt, doing more than it can hold.
The turn
The turn
Some time passes. Then the rabbi comes back and says: Eddie, let's take a little ride.
He blindfolds him.
They drive. And when the blindfold comes off, Eddie is standing in the new café, Common Grounds — the building they've been planning, the one he knew nothing about.
He breaks down.
Then the rabbi tells him the part he really didn't know: he's going to be the general manager.
Then blueprints, the plan for the space, and the ask.
The reason
Why it worked
By the time the film asks the room for anything, the room has already watched somebody's life change.
That's the entire mechanism. The comedy earns attention, the chaos establishes a real problem, the blindfold pays it off, and the ask lands on people who have just seen exactly what their money buys. Not a floor plan. A person standing in a room that was built for him.
A film that opened with we need funds for expansion would have gotten polite applause. This one had people ready before the number went up.
The outcome
The result
The gala was a success and raised significant funds toward completing the café.
The film also outlived the evening. It's a piece the organization can keep using, because it isn't about a campaign — it's about what the place is for.
Watch the film
Common Grounds gala film
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