Bronx-born Tony Vitale worked his way up from location intern to location manager on films by directors Irwin Winkler, Robert De Niro, Nick Gomez and Paul Mazursky before making his writing and directing debut with "Kiss Me Guido" (1997), a film that brings together gay and "guido" cultures in an attempt to break down the walls existing between the disparate groups, "... to reduce people to human beings instead of labels." Vitale did it first as a one-act play at the Village Gate in 1991, wrote the second act in 1993, turned it into a screenplay in 1994 and went about acquiring financing.