Ten Men and a Movie: 1 900 Drinking Buddy

Laughter is a very serious business. Production photo from the set. Director Ray Lai (center) speaks with his two lead actors Johnny Skourtis , left and Randall Park before shooting a key beer drinking scene .*

Last week was the official screening of 1 900 Drinking Buddy , a short film we wrote last fall. It’s a 12 min short directed by Ray Lai, and produced by Susan Havens and Andrew DeJohns. Drinking Buddy tells the story of Barry, a traveling salesman who, finding himself alone in a strange city, enlists the services of a rather unique service provider.



We were one of 4 shorts screened before a standing room only crowd of a few hundred people, and we are pleased to report the screening went great. People laughed in all the right places, and the 2 leads were outstanding.

It is strange but extremely gratifying thing to hear a room full of people respond to something you’ve written (We’re used to hearing a room break out in laughter at our words, as we were Gov’t speechwriters back in our homeland. But this time the laughter was intentional.)

We were very pleased with how the film came out, and we can say this w/out sounding like shameless self promoters because a lot of people were involved in bringing this from a 12 pp script to a 12 minute film.

The institution we are enrolled in (the exact institution shall go unnamed, as we wish to hide our location from our sworn enemies) prides itself on replicating the studio experience, and the screening was no exception. Of the 4 films that were screened, ours was the only one where the writer was invited to participate in the bows afterwards. One film left the writers name off the credits entirely.

All in all, it was a great experience, and we’ll be sure to send out the DVD as soon as it's available. We cannot post it to to the world wide web yet, because it is still eligible for submission to a number of film festivals.

Postscript
About a week after we wrapped, we came upon this guy. We’ve got the 14 pounds, now if we can just scrape together the airfare…


*Yes, this was shot in LA. It was 63 degrees when the above photo was taken, hence the wool hats and heavy winter jackets.