This is the story of a small-town boy who finds himself in the big city. It’s a story that has been told before, but not about this boy, or this town.

When Zac Stuart-Pontier finished his first year at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in Greenwich Village, New York City, he didn’t grab the first bus back to Narrowsburg to enjoy the leafy refuge of familiarity. Instead, he found a day job doing the kind of work a high-school graduate can expect to do his whole life and carved out a niche in my family’s Tribeca loft to see what the summer heat would broil up for him in the big city.

Zac is a student of film. In Narrowsburg, he is a minor celebrity, having once co-starred in a movie made here by the banished director and hustler, Richie Castellano. His mom runs the local paper. But Zac is the kind of kid who would make his mark without any family connections. His easy smile and quick mind give him a head start in most situations.

The big city is someplace you can need a head start just to lag behind. A place to live is most people’s biggest challenge, especially in Manhattan. So we were happy to swap living space for Zac’s tutoring skills this spring and summer. He lives in a windowless room that used to be my husband’s home office and is destined to be my future dressing room. In short, it’s a closet. But it’s a big enough closet to fit a small bed and Zac’s I-Mac, which he hunches over sitting on a milk crate pounding out his first screenplay (Be careful, Zac—people get tickets for such behavior in Bloomberg’s city.)

By day he makes cappuccinos; by night he makes movies. When he’s not making movies, he’s helping corral my son’s attention deficits into credits for Global History. (“Making movies” in Zac’s world sometimes means driving a van through unfamiliar territory in the middle of the night because the big-city moguls he’s working with don’t have driver’s licenses). He’s living in the world of independent film—where movies get made on Grandma’s credit card and everyone knows someone who knows Bob DeNiro. In fact, Zac’s new bedroom is closer to DeNiro’s city loft than Tusten Theater is to Main Street in Narrowsburg.

At Bazzini’s, the neighborhood gourmet grocery and cafe where Zac plies his day trade, the local school kids mingle with celebrities every day. Zac is finding out what a small town New York City really is. He’s learning to take it in stride when movie stars cross his path on the way to the deli. He beams about meeting Adrian Brody recently. The Academy Award winner is a “nice guy” according to Zac, who got to meet and talk to the actor at the world premiere of his latest movie.

When he failed to take us up on an invitation to attend a screening at the recent Tribeca Film Festival, he missed his chance to nibble mini-quiches with the likes of DeNiro and Kevin Bacon and the film director Barry Levinson.

Last week, Zac was sure he recognized a familiar voice in the crowd at Bazzini’s and soon the voice appeared, attached to Chris Rock, the popular comedian. This time Zac maintained his new city decorum and missed his chance to talk to the young star. Regrets are a dime a dozen in the big city.

As the summer heat builds and the city streets blister and soften, Zac’s day job will no doubt wear on him. He may long for the small town where everyone knows his name and the deep swimming hole of the Big Eddy. But from where I sit, I’m guessing he’s home where he is right now, in the big city.