48 hours

I participated in a 48-hour film project last weekend. The film project is being held in 33 cities around the United States. This is the fourth year the project has come to Cincinnati.

The premise is this: film teams meet with the city organizer on Friday night to turn in on all their paper work and confirm participation (there was a $125 entry fee). Teams are divided into 4 groups. Each group will then draw lots to determine what genre their film must be made in (genres includes horror, comedy, silent film, science fiction, drama, western, spy, etc.). After that, each team is given a line, a prop and a character that must appear in the film. For Cincinnati, those 3 components were ‘That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard’, an egg, and a preacher named Paula/Paul Schwartz.

And that is that. Once the genres and parameters and handed out, everyone is released and has 48 hours to complete a film and turn it in. Each film had a required minimum length of 4 minutes and a maximum of 7 minutes.

I have a friend who is a producer/editor in Cincinnati that decided he was going to put together a team to compete in the project. I invited myself on his team as a writer. The ability to say ‘I am a writer on a film team’ was worth the commitment. Mark (the producer) and I showed up Friday down at Media Bridges (the locale for 48-hour kick off meeting) not knowing if we were even going to be able to compete in the project. 48 teams had already signed up and they had turned away all new entrants. We were put on the ‘waiting list’ and showed up in the hope that one of the teams flaked out.

At this point, I was struggling with a bout of laziness and fear. The reality of spending my weekend working on a film had lost its sexiness. I hate working. And I was doubting my ability to generate an original script. I wanted out. I was praying that all 48 teams would show up and we would not be allowed to compete. I could have claimed that I had ‘made an effort’. All I wanted at this point was to go to the Reds game and numb myself with beer.

Alas, I was not so lucky. Exactly 47 teams showed up to the project launch. We made the cut. 1 team away. Now we were committed. Fear expanded my chest cavity. We drew Science Fiction. And just like that, we were heading out into the night to create a moive. I wanted to hide under a table.

Back at the editors house the film crew started to roll in. Ideas were kicked around. At some point during the previous week, the writing team (which consisted of Mark and I) had decided to do build a story around the urban legend of people conspiring to seduce patrons in bars and removing their kidneys after rendering them unconscious. This was Mark’s idea and he loved it. I had never heard of this urban legend and I thought it was stupid. We would disagree again. Regardless of my attempts to convince him that a kidney heist was folly, it remained central in our minds. I was unable to generate ideas without revolving them around a kidney.

Our cast consisted of 2 guys and a girl. We wanted the two guys to be friends and to both be chasing the woman, for different reasons. We hoped to capture this in parallel without letting the audience know the motives of each guy. This is where the kidney thing came in – we wanted one guy needing a kidney transplant and the other just trying to get laid. We wanted the woman to be playing them both. While we were trying to nail down the plot with the crew, I mumbled ‘maybe the woman could be an alien on an intergalactic scavenger hunt’ – this drew ooohs and ahhhs from the crew. So then we tried to add that component. The plot became confusing so the kidney stuff was dropped. We didn’t have much left.

At this point, we did not have confidence in our female lead. Mark got an email from a girl that night indicating that she was willing to be in our film. The message included head shots and her resume. She was a red head. We shrugged and gave her a call. The first thing out of her mouth was ‘I should probably tell you that I am only 16-years old so I can’t do any nude scenes. Everything else is OK’. We were speechless. I was struck giddy and demanded that Mark hire this woman immediately. He refused.

It was getting on 11:30 and we had not started on a script and barely had an outline to the story. The crew had been hanging around and would not let us breathe, let alone write. Now the house was empty, save Mark and I. It was time to create a story. It did not go well. Mark and I have fundamental differences on what we believe is quality. At least, that was the case on this night. There is no one to blame, it was just a matter of taste. We could not agree on the dialogue or the direction of the story. Our heads repeatedly slammed together. In our efforts for diplomacy, we found compromises to split the gap between the discrepancies. What happened was that we created a story that neither of us liked.

Panic set in at 2am. Our brains were fried. We read over what we had (4 pages of compromises) and were appalled. The script was awful – or so we thought at the time. This was the very point were I emphatically announced to Mark that ‘I do not want my name associated with this film in any way, shape or form’. I was disgusted and wanted out. This was the low point. Mark was punch drunk with fatigue and laughed me off. We grinded out 2 more pages of script in an hour to wrap a bow around what had become a colossal crap sandwich. I left the war room with my head down. The dislike Mark and I had at each other at that moment was thick and real. I drove home in silence. I felt like I had failed.

I crashed for 4 hours and was snapped awake by the rumbling of my phone. My sleep was deep enough that I woke up forgetting the script debacle that was the night before. My memory soon came back. I shuffled to my car and drove in the cold rain to the first shoot. I was a broken man. We were shooting at two locations – a bar in Northside and a warehouse in Covington. The bar was first. It was a dive off the main drag in Northside that I would have never gone to if I lived in Cincinnati for 100 years. The place was called C&D, a window-less drinkery for Northside locals. The inside was rustic and it felt like the kind of bar we were thinking of when we wrote the script. The crew was busy running in cable and lights and microphones. The talent looked over the script. I could not bring myself to look at it and busied myself by jamming doughnuts into my mouth.

The crew was good. The sound and light guys knew what they were doing. Their professionalism rejuvenated me. I snapped into action and started working with the actors on their lines. The female actress we had recruited had bailed on us so we were waiting for her replacement – the 19-year old niece of the director. We started filming the scenes with the guys. Suddenly the script did not seem so bad. I had a small role as the bartender and was busy keeping everyone’s drinks filled. We claimed this was for accuracy. 7am beers on no sleep go straight to the brain stem. We were high school kids drinking in our dad’s basement. The laughs rolled in.

Our female lead showed up. She looked like Jessica Simpson. Her eyes were huge. We all immediately fell in love with her. I imagined her version of the set – 10 strung out, unshaven men surrounded by cables and extension cords in a seedy Northside bar at 9am on a Saturday - and all of them staring at her like they had been in prison for 5 years. She was with her mother who served as her agent/chaperone. It was good that she was there.

It was noon and we were still filming when the bar regulars showed up for their Saturday medicine. They circled the door like vultures as we raced to finish. They were not pleased. We had interrupted their Saturday routine. We moved the filming to the pool room and escaped further wrath.

The filming moved on to the warehouse. It was an old icehouse, now just another abandoned building in Covington. It was perfect. The directors put together some great shots while I clowned around with random junk that was left around the building. I was given dirty looks. We finished up at 9pm – a solid 15 hours of movie making. The vans packed and the doors locked, the crew shared handshakes and smiles. We felt like something had been accomplished.

You don’t eat well on a movie set. My intake for the day was as follows: 2 doughnuts, 25 secondhand cigarettes in close quarters, 5 beers, 1 first-hand cigarette, 7 pieces of pizza (one cold) and 2.5 red bulls. People that eat like that die before they are 40.

The movie was edited the next day. I stopped by the editing room around 4pm and watched the final cut. It looked great. It sounded great. Only problem was the story was weak. And that’s a big problem.

I am not sure how it happened, but somewhere along the line we took a wrong turn in creating a clever story and came up with an unoriginal, B-level, science fiction/slasher film. With a few nude scenes, this could have aired at 3am on Cinemax. I am sure that red head would be game, though we’ll have to wait two years until she turns 18 before we can film the sequel.

If anyone would like to watch ‘The Scavenger’, you can watch it here on YouTube. The 7-minute short is what I like to call ‘cinema’.