The Fix: A Short Film with a Crucial Story

I first met Amanda Greer nearly a decade ago, in 2017, after I saw her performance as Marilyn Monroe in Anthony Marinelli's play, Max & Domino, which was playing at The Duke on 42nd Street in Manhattan.  I had first gotten to know Anthony some years before, when he asked me if I thought he got Marshall McLuhan's concept of "acoustic space" right in the play Anthony wrote (later made into a movie) of the same name (Anthony did get it right).  And I first got to see Denise Reed, with Amanda, in Marinelli's production of Sartre's No Exit in 2020, and I saw the two again in Anthony's wise and hilarious Why I Had to Kill You While You Slept in 2023.  Denise also played an important role in an episode of FBI on CBS in 2024, and joined Amanda and Anthony and me in a dramatic reading taken from my 2024 novel It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles at Big Red Books in Nyack, NY in 2025 (Anthony and Amanda are real-life characters in the novel).

I tell you all this because when I heard that Amanda and Denise had formed a production company -- The Abbey, Stories Worth Telling By Women, For Women -- I couldn't wait to see one of their movies.  And The Fix, an 18-minute short (co-written by Chelsea Hattan and Anthony Marinelli, from a story by Amanda Greer), is one powerhouse of a film -- a brutal,  scathing, heartbreaking, hopeful, all-too-real portrait of what it means to be a woman addicted to heroin.

The heartbreak and horror of heroin addiction has been depicted in feature-length films like Trainspotting (1996) which also tried to leaven its message with dark humor.  The Fix has no time for that.  There's nothing funny about its smiles.   Anyone who thinks there's an easy exit out of this kind of hell will be quickly disabused.  Indeed, the creative work that comes closest to the The Fix in tone and message is something even shorter than this movie, John Lennon's "Cold Turkey", a song 5 minutes and 1 second long.

Speaking of cold turkey, of course in reality there are ways out of heroin addiction.  But all are life shaking.  Is The Fix wrong to vividly portray such a painful situation?  No, because it's also a testament to sheer human willpower, how the part of us that strives to save our lives can triumph over the part that seeks to blissfully self-destruct -- they're two sides of the same human coin.  Anything that shows people this reality is eminently worth seeing.  The Fix been making the film festival rounds -- garnering 16 nominations and 9 wins -- and will be at the 32nd Annual San Antonio Film Festival later this month of July.

Here's the trailer.