12 Films. 12 Weeks. There are worse ways to spend a summer.

CONTENT ADVISORY: The MPAA would give our film an R-Rating for Hard Language, Adult Themes and Activity, and Sexually- Oriented Nudity.

NSFW, dude.

(best part, now you’ll really watch the movie)

Also available on YouTube: Part 1. Part 2

(9/3/09): Also available in black and white!

I shouldn’t feel great right now. I haven’t seen my baby for eight days, the first time away since she was born in March. Tonight was the second all-nighter of the week. I’ve had a caffeine/exhaustion headache for the better part of three days. But I do feel great…my friends and I just made a movie . We built something that works all on its own.

Keith asked me last month to come out here from LA to direct one of his 12 in 12 movies. I’d scored Captivated and Spirits already, and everyone on the project seemed like good people to me. We decided to plan the movie kind of the way we planned scenes in improv comedy when Keith and I did GAD’S together at Amherst: choose a location, find some actors, get a title from the audience and see what you come up with in a day’s time.

He and Mike wanted to be able to act together, and since one or both of them has been behind the camera all summer, had never had the chance. Fittingly, we ended up writing a script where two characters each have their own storyline, and spend the better part of a night away from the other…

What resulted was a 7-page script with more locations than was wise, and the difficult task of shooting enough material in a way that you could manage to tell two stories in under 10 minutes. At that we failed. “Hero” runs an almost even 13min. As for the stories, that’s for you to see and tell us if we got the job done.

Being a director, you get to be a proxy hero. Your name goes first in the credit crawl, everyone looks to you for your opinion, beautiful young women fawningly pour you bottomless cups of coffee…. But really, you are getting credit where credit is only partially due. I’ve thanked everyone who worked on this movie already, but I have to raise another cold one to all of them. This trip to New York would have turned out very differently had I not had the benefit of their help and their company.

Did you notice I wove the title of the film into the tapestry of my blogpost?

Now stop reading and (re)watch the damn movie.

My Lights at the End of This Week's Tunnel

Wild and Crazy Guys.

Posted by Michael (not Mike, Michael)