6:45pm Friday night, we had been waiting to hear from Mercer & Carla, our REPS in Vegas, Zuleikha answered the phone… “SCI-FI?’ with a look of shock, she put the phone down with an ‘Oh Shit…’. The Team agonizingly kicked into gear, spitting out their ideas for Sci-Fi, I paced. The phone rings again 15 minutes later… ‘Wild Card? But we didn’t ask for a Wild Card.’, Wild Cards could make Sci-Fi look easy. ‘Surprise Ending?’, ‘Really?!?’, And just like that, we were presented with the best case scenario by accident.

It was time to write. The parameters were, two actors, three if we had to, one location and above all K.I.S.S. (Keep.It.Simple.Stupid.). We came up with a great idea and Zuleikha started writing. Now we need a location. Julia suggested Rob’s house and we popped in at midnight to see if it was a viable location. It was. Then back home to flush out the script for the 7am call that was rapidly approaching.

Jacked up the next day, I picked up Amit at 6.30am and we headed to Rob’s house, he’d given me a key the night before assuring me he wouldn’t be up to let us in. The location was a bare room. We added a bed. The room needed more, so I ran back to my place with Cy (one of my oldest friends from the Carson Production days) and loaded the car with as much stuff as we could fit.

Paul made six runs to the 99¢ Store and the set finally started to look good. Time to block the scene. My brother Bailey stopped by to make sure the sound mixer he loaned me was working, (he likes good sound and it shows in the final result). As he was testing the sound with his arms extended over his head with the boom, he said, ‘You know I won the audience award for this thing’. It turned out he was a 48 Hour Alum from the second year, with the film ‘Seoul Mates’, adding just a little more pressure of the big brother, little brother variety. We got our first shot off at 10am. Our editor David Noel, another friend of Julia’s, stopped by at noon and we meet face to face for the first time and I give him what we’d shot so far and I wished him luck.

We ate pizza for lunch and then we pounded out the second half of the shots and we wrapped at 7pm. The crew was amazing!!! But this was just the beginning, shooting all day is standard, finishing it completely in twenty hours is something entirely different…