Three Movies in Three Weeks: A Multitude of Sins Part 1

In which I decide to make a movie.

While pre-production for "Proud Mary" was getting under way, I was taking on some new responsibilities at First Sundays, the monthly short comedy film festival that I'd been screening movies for since about a year back.

One of my new responsibilities was to produce a film each month for the next month's festival.

First Sundays shows about an hour and a half of short comedy on the first sunday of each month. At the end of each month's show, brave members of the audience tick a box at the bottom of their ballots to enter their names in a drawing. The winning audience member gets to star in a film for the next month. The audience then suggests a title.

I had starred in an audience film in November, "Smooth Milkshake," (which, look at that, is now online), and I'd produced maybe three projects, only one of which made people angry at me, and then there was some stuff I'd done at school, and I hadn't really found anyone else to do it and I'd just finished reading Rebel Without a Crew.

Long story short, I decided to direct the March for April audience film myself.

The title I got was "A Multitude of Sins," and my actor was a tall, gorgeous North Carolina import and male housekeeper named Vaughn. We talked at the afterparty about the various sins we'd committed, and I came up with an idea.

Now, before I went in to the show to find out my title and actor, I knew I wanted to do a few things. I knew I wanted someone to get hit by a truck because I had gotten hit by a truck outside my apartment and that's the kind of experience that sticks with you. And I knew I wanted a lot of movement and action and a lot of plot crammed in to my six minutes, almost a breakneck pace.

And then I didn't want to have to ask anyone else for help.

My script was about a Texan who falls in love with his cousin and follows her to New York City, but then it turns out she's a lesbian and he ends up with the girl reporter who's better for him because they're not related.

About midway through writing the script, I figured out that the real love triangle was between the Texan, his cousin and his truck.

I also worked in a lot of ideas from my conversations with Vaughn - living in a closet, moving to New York City from the south and falling in love with the place, etc.

Now, at this point in my career, I considered myself an expert on thinking on a budget. The key, as any good independent film director will tell you, are using the resources you already have available to you. For example, before Victor writes a movie, he has everyone on the cast and crew write out the locations they can get access to. Very smart.

I thought Codename Bronco had a truck I could use, so I felt comfortable using that in the script. I had a Southerner, and he made himself available any time he wasn't working, so I could drag him all over the city. I had my beautiful actresses who I thought would be down for this sort of thing. I set everything during the day because I didn't have any lights and I wasn't sure if we would be able to see anything if I shot at night.

Then I had myself - I hadn't exactly directed before, but I'd been successful at organizing these things, and I felt confident that if I kept my crew as small and mobile as possible (i.e., it was just me), I could handle the logistics of the shoot.

What I didn't have was a lot of time. I wrote the script within four days of meeting Vaughn, but I agonized it for about a week after that because it seemed like such a dumb idea, just because of that problem.

I mean, the script was fine - a little weird, a little funny, very strong story arc - but I had lots of locations and people getting knocked down by killer trucks and lots of odd little moments that, all together, made things pretty complicated. So I sent it to Jay.

Jay asked me if I was crazy. He said it was way too complicated. He admitted that I might be able to do it if I had a truck and all the locations in the script, but, yeah, he still thought I was crazy.

I looked at my script again. My instincts were the same as Jay's. I thought about starting over - the current script was too ambitious for an audience film, with the crazy running all over the city and the story arcs and everything, but I decided that this was just my writing style, and I didn't want to just scrap the whole script.

I looked at my script again. There wasn't any particular part of the script I didn't think was beyond my abilities to do on my own. It was just the confluence of all these little moving parts that could prove to be too much, like how ninjas can kill you with 1,000 paper cuts.

Like a good producer, I started breaking down the script. I divided it in to four different categories of things I could shoot together. It didn't look impossible when I did it that way. At some point, I decided to go ahead with the script I had.