“The Final Fight” to Turn Real-Life East Side Guardianship Saga Into Potent Drama

Manhattanites may know Todd Stein for his membership on Community Board 8, or his run to be the Democratic District Leader for Assembly District 76, or even for his lengthy and successful career as a talent manager—embodied by his company Stein Entertainment Group.

Yet shrewd newspaper readers will also be familiar with Stein as a vivid living example of how the modern guardianship system works, after he was featured in a long form New York Times piece that detailed his elaborate—and ultimately successful—mission to release his aging father from such oversight.

Now, perhaps true to his roots as a Hollywood impresario, Todd Stein is finishing a short fictionalized film based on the experience titled “The Final Fight,” which he has written and directed.

It was originally set to be a documentary, due to Stein’s sharp instinct to film and record everything, which was bolstered by a rather journalistic awareness that New York is a “one party consent state” (secretive recording by one party in a conversation is permissible).

The film is a family thriller of sorts, one that involves “Scott Cohen” extracting his father “Martin Cohen” from a dingy basement; Josh Davis (“Les Miserablés” and “Law and Order: SVU”) plays Scott, Trini Alvarado (“Little Women” and “The Staircase”) plays a Times reporter, and the voice actor Tom Hair plays Cohen’s father Martin.

The real-life guardianship battle came with steep legal fees, brutal family feuding, and a deeper reckoning with the remarkable life of Stein’s father Marvin. A former Golden Glove boxer and health club mogul, Marvin Stein saw legendary mobsters and celebrities patronize his gyms, which operated under the Shelton umbrella.

Just as importantly, the younger Stein told Our Town, the experience was one of profound personal transformation.

“I changed my life, and I realized that what was important was putting family first, and realizing that my dad needed me,” he said, describing his move back home after many spending years in Los Angeles. “We had somewhat been estranged in a lot of ways, because of circumstances.”

“My dad was from the streets of Brooklyn. He had nothing. He was raised by his mother, who had mental illness,” Stein explained. “His sister was the one who really took him under her wing, protected him...he was selling fruit at a fruit stand as a teenager. Basically, they’d go from one apartment to the next, they’d get three months free rent, and then they’d find their stuff on the street.”

“He was very smart,” Stein added. “He went to Brooklyn College. He really was a bright guy, and he had no family support. He was small for his age, and he was bullied a lot, and he learned to fight to protect himself.”

Soon thereafter, Stein said, mob-connected figures were paying his father to throw fights. Many of these remarkable recollections are contained in interviews that the younger Stein filmed with his dad, material that shaped the “The Final Fight” and its documentary predecessor.

Hair, who plays Martin Cohen in the upcoming film, is partly tasked with portraying a haunting alternative reality—that of a man forced into a basement, left painfully alone in his twilight years, with his recollections unheard by the people around him.

Hair told Our Town of how, in prepping for the role, he drew from a reservoir of “his own struggles” with the passage of time. “There was a time when—and I’m not bragging—I was one of the best voice-over artists in the world,” he said. “I know what it’s like to build a career, and I also know what it’s like when your world starts changing.”

Davis, who plays Scott Cohen, made a point of not portraying him as a caricature. After all, he implied that the gravity of Stein’s script would make that impossible anyway: “There are universal feelings and emotions that you can see from reading the script. I wanted to play it as real as possible.”

“At this point in my life, you get to a point where if you’re lucky enough to have parents who are still alive, you start to see them start to fade,” Davis added. “In reality, in my life, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s just something I can relate to.”

In a further twist, it appears that the film may just double back on reality in another sense, as Stein is also advocating for the passage of a City Council bill that could make alterations to the guardianship system.

Known as Intro-3018, and supported by East Side City Council Member Virginia Maloney, it would create a commission that would “identify challenges, share best practices, and develop expert recommendations on ways to improve the provision and receipt of Article 81 guardianship services in New York City.”