Find Your Champion: It Just Takes One Person to Change Your Life

Everyone in life needs someone who believes in them. Their champion. For my late wife Adrienne Shelly, that person was Michael Roiff.

Michael was just a 26-year-old kid from Boston who moved to Los Angeles with the dream of producing his first film. So when the script for WAITRESS landed in his lap, he saw something that no one else had seen. Literally. After a couple of years of the script making the rounds in Hollywood, everyone was passing.

Experienced producers, the ‘seasoned pros’, wouldn’t touch it. The film was ‘too small, too weird, too controversial, and/or a chick flick’, they said. But Michael saw something uniquely special. He saw gold.

One wonders how/why the story of a pregnant Southern waitress in an abusive marriage who cheats on her husband with her OB/GYN could resonate so much with a single young man from Beantown, but thankfully it did. Unlike the ‘seasoned pros’, he knew the market and the audience for it existed. He excitedly took on the project, raised seven-figures to get the film made, and the rest is history.

So the moral of this story is, find your champion. That person who believes in you and what you’re doing. Who sees in you what no one else is seeing. He or she is out there. All it takes is one person. Just one person to change your life, and the course of history…