48 Hour Film Project 2007

Last weekend I had the pleasure of participating in the LA 48 Hour Film Project. The basic premise of the contest is every team is given a genre, a character's name, his/her occupation, a prop, and a line of dialogue. Then each team has 48 hours to write, film, and edit their movie, then turn it in. The movies are screened a week later and various awards are handed out based on merit. This year, the top film wins $10,000... pretty nice.

My friends and I used to make cheesy movies in my basement on weekends since we couldn't drive and weren't exactly the coolest kids in school. I usually wrote and directed everything. My friend Chris would be the star, and I'd play some kind of small role as my creative writing skills far outweigh my acting skills. The subjects were mainly inside jokes that made fun of friends in our inner circle. Personally I thought they were all gems.

My cousin, Steve, has been making movies since his son was about four years old, which is roughly 12 years now. Every Christmas, he would write a script that put his boy as the main character. I helped out a couple times but it was mainly his show. After my family opened presents on Christmas Eve, we'd all gather around the TV to watch my cousin's movie. They were pretty much hit or miss. I remember a couple being kinda funny, and many that I'd just shake my head at.

The other person on our team was this guy I've been working with for about six months but have only started talking to him in the last month named Robbie. Not coincidentally, that's when they moved his desk next to mine. Turned out we have a lot in common and especially get along when talking about comedy. He's actually a stand-up comic and aspiring comedy writer, so I invited him to join my cousin and I for the project. He happily accepted.

Last Friday we made our way to the Landmark Theater in West LA for the Kickoff event. This year there were 84 teams. That's a lot. They broke us up by screening groups. When the event starts, every team picks a film genre out of a hat. The three of us knew one thing. We cannot draw the genre of Drama. We all had comic minds and the thought of doing something serious made us cringe. So the time came to pick the genre and what did we draw? Yup... Drame. What a mofo. But, we learn that if any team is not happy with their genre they could stay behind and choose a wild card. However if you do that, the wild card genre you draw is final. While we kicked around some drama ideas, the guy in charge was ready to announce the other items for the film. The character we had to include was Frederick Laino, a foreign exchange student. The prop we needed was a bumper sticker. Finally, the line of dialogue was, "Hey, my mom gave me that." The starting gun sounded and the teams were off. We decided to stay behind and take a wild card genre. Two other teams and us ended up with "Sports Movie." We all got excited and darted out of the theater.

On the walk back to my place we tossed ideas back and forth about what we could do. Many good ideas came up, but we wanted to do something that hadn't been done before. I can't remember who, but someone said Racquetball. I immediately knew that was the one. My gym has a racquetball court and all the equipment. I knew we could secure a court for a couple hours to shoot the footage, and we could come up with some zany plot. So we all agreed that was the sport to use. My cousin even came up with the perfect title for a racquetball movie: "Blue Balls." The next step was to get some beers and go up to my roof to write the script.

Writing the script while tossing back beers & screwdrivers was one of the most fun things I've ever done. You know that if you are cracking up when you come up with ideas and put them down on paper, it's probably going to be funny on film. All we wanted was to keep it simple so filming wouldn't be so difficult. By 11:30pm, we had our script done. My cousin went to bed, Robbie went home, but I stayed up to write the theme song to the movie. I went to bed around 1:30am feeling confident.

I woke up at 8am on Saturday and my confidence was gone. All I could think about was everything that could possibly go wrong. Brothers and sisters, the old saying is true... what ever can go wrong, will go wrong. You always need a plan B. So before Robbie arrived, I sat down at my laptop and mapped out all the possible workarounds if we couldn't get our first options. Jim Derwin... always prepared.

At 11am, Robbie finally came over and we were on our way to buy some outfits and a few props. Our next stop was to pick up my buddy Tom so we could use his office for our opening scene. Of course we get to Tom's place and he's not there. I even called him when we left to tell him we were on our way. So without hesitating I grabbed the guys and we headed off to buy some more things that we needed anyway and weren't far from Tom's so if he called, we could get back quickly. Sure enough when we were a couple blocks away Tom called and said he was ready. I had to hold him off until we were done shopping. We got back to Tom's and picked him up to go to his office. We get to his office on 3rd St Promenade and there isn't one parking space in the whole garage. When I was about to get into another garage, he realized he wouldn't be able to get into his office because he gave his key to one of his editors. Unbelieveable. Here it was 2pm and we hadn't filmed a damn thing. Seemed like all the fun we had writing the script was going down the drain.

My cousin suggested that we head to the racquetball court and get all that footage and figure out what to do about the office scene later. We agreed and headed for my gym in Marina Del Rey. Robbie and I played a few rounds of racquetball to get a feel for the game (neither of us had played more than a couple times). Meanwhile my cousin was in the locker room changing into his character, Frederick Laino, a foreign exchange student from Spain, and the finest racquetball referee there ever was. Like champs, we got all of the footage we needed in about two hours. Then we sent Steve off to the Venice boardwalk to find a bumper sticker while Robbie and I went back to my house to film some "montage" footage. Steve was able to find a guy who made custom bumper stickers, so we had him make one that said, "Got Blue Balls?"

Saturday night, my cousin and I did as much editing as we could and dubbed in some voiceovers where necessary. All we needed to do was film the office scene with Tom, re-shoot some continuity issues back at the gym, and a shot of me driving off into the sunset with my bumper sticker on the back. I woke up again at 8am and we got all the shots we needed before Robbie came back over. Then we hit Tom's place and filmed everything there. That was a wrap! Robbie had to leave so Steve and I finished editing and turned our movie in around 7pm Sunday.

I'll let you all judge for yourself. Here it is...