Last night, the entire cast and crew (minus Clint and Sumi, who were dearly missed) gathered at Brewvies for the first screening of the film we devoted our August to. This was the first time anyone – including me, Mike, and Derek — had seen the entire movie in its finished form; we’d been too busy working on it piecemeal (and exporting the finished product) to actually review what we’d done.
Pretty darn cool.
Just seeing our name on the marquee was a thrill. Then we got inside, and we started to get nervous. It didn’t help that the screening before us (a rowdy showing of Back to the Future) had started late, which meant that we couldn’t get into the theater until 9:35 — for a screening that was supposed to start at 9:00.
Finally, at a quarter to ten, the film got started, and I started to relax. My biggest fear had been that we’d have some last-minute trouble with the massive QuickTime file we’d exported, but it seemed to play fine, and as I sat in a plush chair at the back of the theater, flanked by my fellow Four-Week Feature team members, with the movie’s opening sequence unfolding on the screen in front of us, I felt a palpable sense of relief.
Of course, it couldn’t last.
Five minutes from the end of the movie — just as the story was reaching its emotional climax — the sound cut off. Completely. Derek dashed back into the projection booth, but as it turned out, there was nothing to be done; somehow, the audio file we’d grafted onto our QuickTime movie was five minutes shorter than the movie itself. We paused the film and scrambled as best we could, passing out microphones to cast members so that they could recite their lines as the images played in silence — but of course most of them couldn’t remember their lines, so that attempt only made things more awkward. The sequence that the whole movie had been building towards — the sequence that was supposed to redeem the somewhat rambling quality of the fim’s middle section — was deprived of the music and the few key lines of dialogue that made it work. It was insanely frustrating. We had come so close to having a successful first screening. Couldn’t our luck have held for just a few minutes more?
Ultimately, we had a nice time anyway. It was fun seeing our Utah-based cast members again, and people seemed to enjoy the movie (we even got laughs!), and afterward we had drinks at Brewvies and a very pleasant late-night meal at Denny’s. Not only that, but the folks at Brewvies felt bad about our late start, so they didn’t charge us a penny for the screening! That was a very gracious gesture, and much appreciated.
All in all, the evening could have gone a lot worse — and now we know what to fix in time for the New York screening! Priority number one: Watch the whole movie before the screening starts.
I may have to let Derek take on that task. I’ll be spending the next three days driving across the country with Lee Gillentine and a bunch of Derek’s film equipment. From road-trip movie to actual road-trip! What a wild summer it continues to be …
-KB
Solid ideas.