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Lights, Camera, Countdown: The 48-Hour Film Project Comes to Las Vegas

“Let’s make a movie!” The proliferation of affordable cameras and editing software has made such exhortations far easier to act upon than they were in the olden days of celluloid and splicing. Thanks to digital technology, more and more people every day are indulging their inner Spielbergs. With so much creativity finding its way onto hard drives and DVDs, it’s no wonder that phenomena like the 48-Hour Film Project are in growth mode.

The 48-Hour Film Project gives aspiring (and sometimes established) filmmakers the chance and the incentive to make a film from scratch — all in the space of one weekend.

The project began in 2001 in Washington, D.C., and it’s since spread around the globe to cities as far flung as Sydney and Paris. This year, thanks to the efforts of Angela Abshier, a local resident who is pursuing a career in intellectual property law, the project came to Las Vegas. Thirty-six teams had signed up when the timer started ticking at the kick-off meeting last Friday evening at the Palms.

I was there to follow the progress of Team Xenon, a group organized by William Raley, a writer and film reviewer whose day job is in the IT department at the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

William had never made a film before, never written a screenplay, and never used editing software. But what for some might seem a daunting task was to William an achievable challenge. In preparation, he acquired a new camcorder and editing software. He lined up a cast that included his Realtor, his financial advisor, two professional actors, and three friends, two of whom were willing to allow their home to be used as the movie’s location. Before filming concluded, the cast had expanded to include a stuffed owl. Oh, and me. I was supposed to be just an observer, but, as I probably should have expected, activities like filmmaking have a tendency to assimilate anyone and anything in shooting distance.

In order to keep everybody honest about the time-frame requirement, the 48-Hour Film Project requires that certain elements be included in the movies, and nobody finds out what they are until the kick-off meeting. That’s when the teams also find out what genre their film must be — one of twelve ranging from Musical/Western and Police/Detective to Horror, Romance, and Spy. This year, each film had to feature a can of hairspray and include an obsessive/compulsive character named V. Kirk. The required line of dialogue was “Looks like we’ll have to do it all over again,” and, because it was the first year the project was being held in Las Vegas, every film had to include a local landmark.

William drew “Action/Adventure” as his genre, which was a good thing, because “If I had drawn Musical/Western, I would have had to shoot myself,” he said. (Actually, he could also have opted for the “Wild Card” genre, which was available to those who just couldn’t live with whatever they drew. This year’s “Wild Card” genre was “Dark Comedy.”)

Once he knew the required elements and genre, William retired to his apartment and started writing. When he finally went to bed sometime after three in the morning, he had finished writing a seven-page script entitled “The Quest for the Rock Shaped Like Sri Lanka.” Seven pages was a good length, because the rule of thumb is that one page equals one minute, and 48-Hour Film Project films can’t be any longer than seven minutes or shorter than four minutes (excluding allowances for credits).

Shooting was set to begin at ten at the home of Gayle Schreiber and Joe Carchedi, which conveniently has a good view of the Stratosphere tower. When I arrived, William was already there, armed with cue cards, all the required release papers everybody had to sign, two knives, a bottle of soy sauce, a roll of yellow caution tape, a can of hairspray, and various other props including a rock shaped like Sri Lanka. The cast began drifting in, and shooting began around eleven.

William, who had been up since seven making cue cards and assembling props, was not only the writer, but also director, assistant director, producer, production assistant, actor, editor, cameraman, music director, and caterer. At one point, he was shining a laser pointer, filming, signaling me as to when to play a chord on a piano, and saying lines, all at once. If he lacked experience, there was no denying his natural ability to multitask.

A few hours and several script revisions later, William uttered those iconic words, “It’s a wrap.” We spent a few minutes trying to put Gayle and Joe’s house back in order and to reassure their slightly bewildered dog. Then everybody except William was done, and he went home to edit.

I met William again Sunday evening at the Palms to watch him turn in his finished opus. An oversized wind-up alarm clock was ticking away on a table in the Palms ballroom. William had beaten the deadline by at least an hour. Other exhausted-looking participants were trickling in, and I chatted with the organizer of a team that had made a spy movie. She told me that after they had spent all of Friday night filming, her dog ran away. The cast canvassed her neighborhood at dawn while still wearing shirts that said “Homeland Security.” It started me thinking that someone could probably make a pretty good movie about people who are making films for the 48-Hour Film Project.

The next event wasn’t until Tuesday night. All the films — thirty-four were completed and turned in — were screened at the Palms in three groups. William’s was in Group B, but I watched Group A as well, joining a near-capacity crowd in one of the Brenden theaters.

I had no idea what to expect, but what I experienced was truly excellent entertainment. The screenings began exactly when they were supposed to, and, after a brief introduction explaining the project and its rules, the films ran in uninterrupted succession. Some had obviously been created by professionals with access to top-notch talent and equipment. Others were humbler. But none were terrible, and some were great! The spy movie I’d heard about on Sunday had a clever story and good acting. A dark comedy about two Mormon missionaries was a well-constructed tale replete with sophisticated and appropriately sardonic humor. A “mockumentary” about the Last Supper succeeded in being hilarious without being overly sacrilegious. One film had footage shot from a helicopter, and another was shot in a Strip hotel. Robin Leach did a voiceover for a movie about a guy who dreams of being a movie star, and one film had — hands down — the most realistic vomiting sequence I have ever seen. Of course, I was partial to “The Quest for the Rock Shaped Like Sri Lanka,” which got quite a few laughs. I asked William afterwards if he thought he might participate again next year. “Yeah, but I’ll get a producer,” he said.

The 48-Hour Film Project does have winners chosen by a panel of judges, and the audience gets to vote as well. But I don’t think it’s accidental that its founders called it a “project” instead of a “contest.” What makes it fascinating is the marvelously collaborative quality of it. The result — all those short films made during the same two days and screened in tight succession — is more like a quilt than anything else. Each one is a whole, but each one contains links to all the others in the form of the prop, the character, and the line of dialogue. The result is a larger whole, and, odd as it may seem, I felt as though I had seen a good feature-length film when I emerged. I always grade a movie by whether I’m thinking about it or talking about it a few days later. As I sit here writing about the 48-Hour Film Project, I realize that I’ll still be talking about it for quite a while. And I’ll definitely go back next year. Not only does the 48-Hour Film Project provide an excellent forum for aspiring filmmakers, the screenings are a wonderful addition to the entertainment landscape here in Las Vegas.

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