The Big Break

Sal Ferraro has been chasing one dream his whole life—and New York City has been telling him no for most of it.

A thirty-one-year-old Italian-American actor from Queens, Sal works two data-entry jobs to keep the lights on while he waits for the break that will prove every rejection wrong. When he spots a TV commercial casting call for Italian family types in a borrowed trade paper, he finally has a real shot. He has the look, the drive, and the desperation that comes from being two months behind on rent. What he doesn't have is a family.

So he does what he's always done: he improvises. He rounds up his night-shift coworkers and convinces Rose Parella—a widowed file clerk with no acting experience, a magnificent laugh, and exactly the kind of presence the camera loves—to play the Italian momma they need.

What happens next is the kind of thing that's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't spent years trying to make it in a business that measures people the way grocers measure produce. Rose gets the role. Rose gets the commercial. Rose gets the career. And Sal gets the lesson that breaks him open—and slowly, painfully, starts to put him back together.

THE BIG BREAK is a deeply human story about ambition, humiliation, resilience, and the particular kind of courage it takes to keep believing in yourself when the evidence keeps pointing the other way. It is for anyone who has ever wanted something badly and had to find out what they're made of when it doesn't come.