Years of folding clothes has paid off for Tomás Romero.
His film “The American Mall,” which is based on his experiences working in the kids’ department at Macy’s in the Burbank Media City Center, now called the Burbank Town Center, is set to air on MTV on Monday night.
The musical follows Ally, a girl with dreams of becoming a singer/songwriter, who falls for Joey, a mall janitor with rock star ambitions.
“It’s very ironic, because the job that put me through film school is the very thing that has made my career as a screenwriter possible,” Romero said.
At 22, he signed up for work at Macy’s while finishing graduate work at the American Film Institute.
When it came time to try to get his work optioned for a film, he could not think of a better inspiration than his time spent at the mall.
“When I was a teenager, the mall was the first place I actually felt like a grown up. . . It was totally unsupervised, so there was this great sense of liberation for me,” Romero said. “I also wanted to explore the office politics of retail, a world that is so rich and unexplored.”
Romero sold the script, which was originally titled “Lowlifes,” just after graduating from film school in 1996 to 20th Century Fox. It laid dormant for 10 years until he got a call from “High School Musical” producers Bill Borden and Barry Rosenbush.
“The script was very appealing because many teenagers work at the mall. It is a real life coming of age job,” Borden said. “Many kids can identify with the characters.”
Borden and Rosenbush transformed the script into a musical and easily found a market for it after the proven success of their breakout hit.
“The movie really deals with the aspirations of kids. They always want to be somewhere bigger than where they are,” Borden said.
The film’s love story is based on Romero’s romance with his wife, Christine, whom he met while working at Gap Kids in San Francisco.
“It is very exciting because we were together when he wrote the script and it’s neat that it is inspired by us,” Christine Romero said. “It is really great seeing it as a musical, it adds a whole different aspect to it.”
Tomás Romero is already in talks with MTV to pen a sequel.
“If I knew I was going to have something on MTV as a kid, I would have died,” he said. “MTV and the mall were the coolest thing around; when my parents finally got it, my friends and I stayed locked in the house watching music videos for weeks.”
