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"Drake's Cake", Fast Food, and the Porn Store
on Bleeker
by Jason Ubaldi
Let me
start by saying that 24 hours is a short time to create
a movie---and a long time to hang out with one group of
people who are consuming nothing but fast food.
Stench aside, One Steak Left had an absolute ball at the
NYCMMM.
One Steak Left was giddy
for the weekend to arrive, and by midweek, the entire
team was ready for action. Like Nancy Reagan did in the
80’s, I attempted to instill a “Just
Say No” policy toward turning this weekend into a party…
but I learned quickly that a party was inevitable.
The great thing about NYCMMM was that despite the
cash prizes, the end product was still the brass ring and this
group of true professionals never lost sight of that.
In
order to truly absorb The One Steak Left experience,
understand this, we are a group of New York City TV
producers… with film aspirations. We are not young
(average age is around 32). We are not students. We are
not struggling filmmakers. We have families and
children. And we KNOW we had the home field advantage.
We make no apologies for this. Our home field is the
reason we went through with the whole thing.
We make TV every day--we
have an all access pass to cameras, avids, audio mixing
and music making facilities. Not to mention skilled
people who make their livings using these facilities.
However, before you hate us for our advantages, it is
important to remember that adults and family men and
women just don’t give away a weekend unless they truly
believe in the cause. I can’t imagine that there is a
sole person in the TV business who didn’t start chasing
dreams of film. Who wouldn’t want to take a day from
their lives to taste a bit of that dream? Who in the TV
business hasn’t dreamed outside of a 34 inch WEGA? And I
think these dreams are the reason that EVERYONE on this
team showed up sober and ready to work (mostly sober),
EVERYONE stayed up all night, and EVERYONE was proud of
turning a film out in under 24 hours
Further, this contest was a
chance for some of us to showcase the expanse of our
talents. WE had a chance to create something where we
were in charge of the final product. There was no
Executive Producer to “tweak” it. Nobody put their
“touch” on the finished product. We had a chance to
shine. From the TV Audience Coordinator who blossomed
as an actress, to the TV show Van Driver who suddenly
knew about lighting, to the bankruptcy lawyer (only
non-TV guy on the team) who picked up on a continuity
error that would have ruined “Drake’s Cake.” Everybody
assumed a role and ran with it.
It started at midnight. We
sent two representatives to get the genre and subject.
The writers and tech guys sat in the editing facility
office and waited. The music makers waited by their
phones in their studio. And the actors slept.
Finally the call came in- a
mystery about an unwanted gift.
Now, in the TV world, short
turnarounds are the norm. Many of us have worked in
straight news, entertainment news, and tabloid news.
Because of the ease at which we handle writing the news,
we naturally assumed that penning the script would be
the simple part---First mistake of NYCMMM.
From midnight to 2AM, the
brilliant TV writers banged their heads into one
another, while the crew patiently waited. Jealousy
between the writers began to surface, as each idea was
shot down. This was the only “uncomfortable” moment of
the entire 24 hours, excluding any sounds or smells
associated with the aforementioned fast food issue.
Finally, we decided our
best bet was to mold a story to our assets. We had
comedy writers (not mystery). We had an office setting.
And we had two actors who went beyond the 6th
grade Thanksgiving Day Play. --- Oh, did I mention we
also had two hot chicks. The answer
crystallized---Exploit the hot chick factor. [Sidenote:
the two hot chicks got us past Round 1 with unbelievable
portrayals of Dorothy and the Wicked Witch of the East
in a True Hollywood Story spoof of what happened to
these characters after Oz.]
Finally, at 2:30 we
announced to everyone that the “unwanted gift” was
crabs, and the “mystery” was “who gave our hero crabs?”
It would involve a guy incessantly itching himself, his
fiancé, and a buxom stripper. The ironic payoff was
that the guy got crabs from dancing with his grandma at
a bar mitzvah. Movie making history would ensue.
Nobody budged at our big
announcement. We guessed that they were too tired to
react. It didn’t matter---we were on our way. We called
the music guys to create a classic burlesque song, we
had the lighting guys turn one of our offices into a
stripclub, and we sent our buxom chicks to Bleeker
Street to buy stripper clothes (all night porn stores is
just another reason that this contest should never leave
NYC).
What started off funny to a
bunch of overtired writers, when writing, quickly became
a one joke, tedious script. I couldn’t help but feel
blasé about the whole “crabs” idea. I needed to get
away for a minute. I stood up and dragged myself into
the hall, passing the giggling hot chicks as they hit
one of the camera guys with an enormous dildo bought at
the all night porn store. (Note to self—Next year, keep
better tabs on the money distribution.) Even the sight
of the naughty nurse stripper outfit laid out on the
couch didn’t cheer me up.
My “non-reaction” to the
large rubber penis whacking freaked some people out. I
am the rah-rah guy. Everybody fed off each other’s
enthusiasm and my enthusiasm was supposed to be the
first domino. I felt like I was letting everyone down.
It was 6AM and the one person who should be excited, was
worn out. I went back and announced that we need to
start again. If I were them, I would have caned me.
I don’t know where it came
from or how we settled on it, but all of a sudden a film
noir mystery about a “fruitcake” given for a Secret
Santa grab bag emerged from the ashes like a great
phoenix… or perhaps someone just said, “a fruitcake is
an unwanted gift.”
I’d love to say that we
purposely named our lead character Drake in order to
make “Drake’s Cake” a cute title with a pun… but
truthfully, we named the film at the end, and the fact
that we named the character Drake and it was about a
cake was pure serendipity.
We started shooting scene 1
as soon as we finished writing it. In fact, the D.P.
didn’t fully understand where the story was even going.
For that matter, the D.P was also a little uneasy with
the abbreviated term, D.P.
The rest of the story is
only interesting in that everything from this point on
went completely smooth. Everybody fell into their roles
and settled into what it was that they do best.
Interestingly, we ALL were in the room for the shooting
of that first scene, but from that point on, we were
scattered over a four block radius.
By the time we were
shooting the fourth scene. One person would be screening
the ‘just shot’ scene three. An editor was editing the
‘just screened’ scene 2. And a runner was taking a ‘just
edited’ scene 1 off to an audio mixing facility four
blocks away for sound tweaking. Meanwhile, the writers
were still writing the ending. The circle continued
until 11:35 PM, when the last shot was edited. Being
that we already had cameras and equipment, we figured
the grand given by NYCMMM to make this film would be
wisely used in costuming and make-up. However, when I
walked out of one of the edit rooms, I saw where a small
chunk of the money went. I imagine that Charlie and
Craig had high hopes for this production grant, but as
far as I could see, it went up in smoke.
The Van Driver/Lighting
genius sparked up the van and we were on our way to
deliver “Drake’s Cake.” We didn’t really have time to
finish the credits, so our credits don’t include or
miscredit some very important people and we are sorry
for that.
We handed the tape in with
7 minutes to spare---just enough time to get some fried
food.
One
Steak Left will use the prize money to fund a future
project. Perhaps a full length feature shot and edited
with ten grand in 12 days?… Now that would be
something…
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