Jared:

Troy and I came up with this movie while visiting family in Park City, Utah before the Sundance Film Festival. Troy had just returned from shooting a documentary in Hawaii so he had his camera and wireless mics with him. We figured, well, crap, we're here, we've got this stuff, we should shoot something. On Tuesday, Troy and I went snowboarding and tossed around ideas on the ski lift. We talked about politics and how people can blindly accepted so many blatant, stupid lies. Then we talked about our last year in Park City, when we got lost after watching The Machinist at Sundance and nearly froze to death wandering posh, rustic neighborhoods. By the end of the day we had the plot to Lucky John.

On Wednesday I wrote the script. Our aunt, Kim Page, an actress and producer with Crazy Parkite Productions, called around to wrangle us some extra actresses. Troy and I decided to play the main parts ourselves for the sake of convenience. I guess I assumed that the reason I sucked in my previous movies was because there hadn't been enough snow. Thankfully we had plenty of snow for this movie so I wasn't all that bad. We shot Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday morning, right up until my flight back to San Diego.

Then I sat on the footage for over a year before editing it. Jamaal Harley, a recording artist and friend from SDSU, provided original composition and set us up with tracks from the band Nice Day, making for a soundtrack way better than our movie likely deserved.

This is the first Mongrel Pictures short to actually screen in a theater (outside of San Diego BestFest screenings, which counts for so very, very little). Kim managed to get our movie shown to the program director of the Park City Follies, an annual community showcase, and she was so stoked about it she had it integrated into the program. Somewhere around 2,000 people show up for four showings each year. Unfortunately, as the only short movie in the program, we got placed in the intermission. I was pretty bummed initially, but also confused. I figured that people would just leave the theater for intermission to go buy booze and candy and completely disregard the movie as background ambience.

They gave me a ticket for the first night so I went to go and watch myself freezing to death in the intermission alone. As the first act of the Follies ended, the lights came up and I settled in. People were slow to stand, slow to scoot down the rows toward the aisles. After five minutes of uninterrupted intermission, the movie starts playing. People start hushing each other. And after just a couple minutes everybody was in their seat again. It went over pretty well, lots of laughs where we hoped there'd be and an unexpected level of sympathy for the poor asshole on the screen. In fact, it went so well, the booze companies that sponsored the thing were so pissed at losing profits that they decided not to run the movie during the final showing. Too bad nobody told the audience. Apparently word had gotten out that there was a movie worth half-a-crap during the intermission, so when the lights came up, everybody just sat there waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Until the Follies started again.

And that's the greatest gift Utah has ever given me. The gift of sober disappointment.

Quinn:

You can start to see a pattern here, can't you? There's a lack of me in these films!!!! That's my only criticism. This one really came together with the completion of the score. It was shocking to see what an impact the music makes on a film. I enjoyed watching the finished product. It's not your typical Mongrel film but it has it moments.