The Cleaner

This piece was shot as an entry to the 48 hour film project. The competition consists of teams all being assigned a different genre, and then each team must use the same prop, and character, and line of dialog in their films. Our prop was a check book, the character - M. Montclair - housekeeper, and the line of dialog was "I can't take much more of this"The contest begins on a Friday night, and your team must write, shoot edit and score the film within 48 hours. I had gotten married a month or so before, the apartment we lived and shot in was under heavy renovation, I had a familly function I had to go to on the Sunday of the competition, and I was leaving on my honeymoon on Wednesday after the the shoot. My wife and I missed the screening of all the films. We got our assignment, Bob started making casting calls, we already knew we would use Jody Prusan, and my wife wrote the script. I went to bed at midnight, my wife woke me in the middle of the night to tell e the script needed an over arching metaphor, and at 5:30 am the script was finished. I got up to ge get the actress. We were shooting before we had secured actors to play the two police officers, and shot all of the Jody's scenes without the police, except for the last shot of the film. Thankfully we managed to cast the two roles, and the actors arrived just in time. We shot the piece, finished by 8pm (fulfilling the SAG rules), did a rough cut, and dropped it off with Ross Byron, who did a nice job of getting the film down to 8 minutes. I picked up the film, and had a friend drive me to the drop off - which was in Times Square at 7:30 pm on Sunday. We fought Manhattan traffic, and streets being closed due to street fairs, and I ran the last 8 blocks through Times Square in a suit and dress shoes to make the drop off deadline. Hope you enjoy the movie.