Quick shoot artists

Last Sunday at 8:43 p.m., the 400-seat theater at Los Angeles Center Studios was buzzing with anticipation. It was like an opening night screening of the latest installment of “Star Wars” -- minus the guys dressed up as wookies and waving light sabers.

The event was the Instant Films Festival and the near-capacity crowd was awaiting the arrival of the seventh and final film that would complete the evening’s slate and allow the show to commence.

Launched in May 2002, Instant Films plays like an ultra-low-budget combination of HBO’s Hollywood wannabe series “Project Greenlight,” and the Learning Channel’s quickie design makeover shows “Trading Spaces” and “While You Were Out.” The setup here: Instant Films features movies written, shot, edited and screened over 48 hours.

The films were due at 6 p.m., a deadline with a definite wink factor as the first groggy director strolled in with his tape at a quarter after the hour. His arrival preceded those of most of his fellow directors by almost two hours. There is no prize for being first, other than the sense of relief that you have finished and can sit in the plush commissary at the Center Studios and have a drink while your fellow filmmakers are elsewhere attempting to coerce balky hard drives to output their completed digital films.

Three founding partners -- John Sylvain, a founder of the Annex Theater in Seattle and the Sacred Fools Theater in Los Angeles; Peter Lebow, who studied and produced theater in New York; and Charles Papert, a television and feature film cameraman -- pooled their talents and resources to organize Instant Films.

Every six to eight weeks, writers, actors, directors and their crews are gathered for a weekend in which they produce seven or eight short films. Each festival has a theme -- No. 007 had a spy motif, naturally, and this one, which was Instant Films No. 009, was summer, meaning bikinis, barbecue and blockbusters. The October Instant Films will focus on Halloween.

“They had done this for years in the theater and it was a natural progression,” says the stocky Lebow, who sports a shaved head and a goatee, and would be intimidating except for his quick smile.

Instant Films can trace its lineage directly to the Sacred Fools’ “Fast & Loose,” a 24-hour theater event with a similar premise and rules. The success of the festivals has led Instant Films to branch out into workshops, a school for actors and even a possible television project.

Although there’s an egalitarian spirit to the proceedings, this isn’t a free-for-all for filmmakers and actors. “Everybody that is involved with Instant Films is invited,” says Lebow. “This originally started out with myself, John and Charles bringing all of our friends and contacts together, and it’s grown since then, but everybody gets to meet a lot of new and exciting people that hopefully they’ll work with down the line.”

The creative talent are mainly professionals and Hollywood hopefuls. While this is essentially “no-budget,” guerrilla filmmaking and everyone is invested in the project with regard to time, the directors generally pick up the financial slack, kicking in what can amount to hundreds of dollars of their own money to cover everything from equipment rentals to makeup supplies. Most directors have their own cameras -- high-end consumer models such as Canon XL-1 -- and recent technical advances have made editing on home computers fairly easy, keeping overall costs down. The prizes aren’t exactly extravagant either -- among them, a haircut at a nearby salon, and a copy of Final Draft screenwriting software.

Chance is a big part of Instant Films’ charm; everything from the pairing of writers and directors to the casting of the movies is done by drawing pieces of paper out of envelopes. Sylvain enjoys “the serendipity of it. A really important part of what we do is the random aspect. The directors pick the writers randomly so they don’t know [who they’ll get]. That does a bunch of things. First, the writers are writing for actors they don’t know the strengths and weaknesses of, so they don’t assume anything about them. The same is true of the directors and the casts; they’re not assuming certain strengths and weakness.”

Taking a somewhat random path ourselves, we followed some of the filmmakers throughout the weekend, sticking with one of the seven groups put together in the Instant Films lottery. As Sylvain told the contestants before they went off on their filmmaking journey: “Everybody’s got to understand that you’re going to make a movie from nothing. Nothing exists right now. To do that is ... crazy.”

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The process begins

On Friday night, Instant Films No. 009 officially began when seven writers gathered in a conference room at LACS to receive instructions and draw their assignments (an eighth writer was unable to make it and received hers by proxy).

Sylvain, who looks like Falstaff as drawn by Maurice Sendak, served as the master of ceremonies as slips of paper were drawn from envelopes passed around the room. Each writer would draw one noun (for example, “surfer” or “tent pole”) and one adjective (“suntanned,” “sweaty”) that they would have to incorporate into their roughly six- or seven-page script, as well as a gender breakdown for the three- or four-person cast -- one man and two or three women or two women and two men, for example.

Some of the writers expressed concern over the extent that the directors can change the script.

Lebow answered, “I’ve seen it work both ways. I’ve seen directors ruin scripts and I’ve also seen the directors make the scripts a lot better. Just have faith, write the best script you can, then 8 a.m. [Saturday], it’s out of your hands.”

By 8 p.m. Friday, everyone had instructions and went off into the night to work -- oh, and scripts were due in 12 hours.

Come Saturday morning, the sleepy writers trudged back, pages in hand, joined by the seven directors and two dozen actors, slurping coffee and munching doughnuts. Sylvain was once again in charge of the draw and after thanking those who were on time, waiting for the stragglers and teasing some familiar faces who were late, the directors’ draw began.

Colin Campbell, an Instant Films veteran, stepped up. “I’m very nervous,” he said. He had no idea that the name of the writer he would pull out would be Gail Lerner -- who happens to be his wife and his collaborator on the Oscar-nominated live-action short “Seraglio.”

Papert, who resembles a compact Jon Favreau, called the directors draw “the scariest part of this process for me, except when you’re almost out of time and the screening’s about to happen and you’re still trying to get your film finished. Am I going to get a great script? Am I going to get great actors?”

A veteran Steadicam operator, Papert would be directing his seventh Instant Film entry. He drew Dan Cohn and Jeremy Miller’s script “The Girl’s Guide to Summer” and a cast that included Nancy Calabrese, Jenna Fischer, Tom Chalmers and Marty Yu. A table reading determined which roles the actors would take and after some discussion it was decided to set the film in the early ‘60s.

Next came finding locations. The cellphones and Palm Pilots came out en masse. Line producer Jonathan Goldstein began breaking down scenes on his laptop. As a last-ditch solution, Calabrese called a woman with whom she’d been friends since elementary school to see if her parents’ Santa Monica home might be available. She said she’d check.

Minutes later, with the “Girl’s Guide” team holding its breath, Calabrese’s phone rang.

“We’re in!”

Goldstein began calling crew members to give them the address and a time for the shoot: noon Saturday. Papert, assistant director Amy Jo Traicoff and the actors made a quick trip to Hollywood to look for costumes, but this yielded only a shirt for Yu. The rest of the wardrobe would need to come from the actors’ own closets before they headed to Santa Monica.

Papert had decided to go with what for an Instant Film was a huge crew of 14 people -- three or four people in addition to the director is more typical.

As the crew began to arrive and set up, it discovered that behind the beautiful yellow house in an upscale Santa Monica neighborhood lay a location gold mine. In addition to a stylish, rock-rimmed swimming pool and cabana -- which would serve as the movie’s interior set (and double for craft services) -- there was a trailer where actors could change clothes, get makeup done and hang out between shots.

The backyard was quickly turned into a fairly professional-looking movie set. Papert and his crew spent the rest of the day racing the sun, then worked late, wrapping after midnight.

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The drive to deadline

Less than 20 hours after getting the script, Papert had his footage, but it still needed to be edited. Beginning Saturday evening, editor Maxx Gillman worked all night until he had a rough cut.

“Max is completely sleep-deprived. I’m not much better,” said Papert, describing post-production. “We’re both really burnt, but we’re trying to make this thing come in on the deadline. I also have to manage the live show, so I had to leave at a certain point with an unfinished film I’ve never seen in completion.”

Inside the LACS theater on Sunday night, the Beach Boys faded out on the sound system and Lebow ran to the front and whipped the crowd into even more of a frenzy. Beach balls were bouncing around like it was Dodger Stadium. He welcomed the audience and introduced Sylvain, who played host for the rest of the evening.

The seventh film arrived and the screening finally got underway. From the “Lazy Days of Summer’s” stressed-out novelist taking a break to the befuddled screenwriters who receive a primer on comic books prior to a pitch session in “The Masked Champion IV,” the audience was treated to an evening of humorous, well-paced films, five of which made judicious use of swimming pools, while a sixth featured a hot tub.

Here’s how Sylvain characterized the ninth edition of Instant Films: “I think the quality was higher. I think that we had a better caliber of directors and writers. It ran smoother technically. I think we figured a way to do two and three movies in a row, which helped the show flow. We used to interrupt it after each one.”

Once the last film screened and the cast and crew were introduced, ballot boxes were brought out and the audience voted on various awards before heading out to a party at the center’s commissary.

Papert looked relieved. Being responsible for directing the live show as well as seeing the completed version of “The Girl’s Guide to Summer” for the first time, he had a lot riding on Sunday night’s screening.

“I thought that all the jokes we worked on and nuanced and took a certain direction played to the audience. I heard laughs where I expected to hear laughs. I even heard laughs in places where I didn’t expect to hear them, which is always a thrill.”

Back at the party, the DJ cut the sound and Sylvain hollered for people’s attention so that he could announce the awards. Though “The Mindless Surfer” -- the last film completed -- took the award for best editing, and best cinematography honors went to “Lazy Days of Summer,” the balance of prizes went to the Colin Campbell-Gail Lerner collaboration, “Tan Lines: The Suntanned Bikini.” Lerner cleverly solved the challenge of having drawn the noun “bikini” for an all-male cast and the gender-bending comedy was rewarded by winning best picture, director, writer and cast, which included a very brave performance by Dean Cameron.

The films range from seven to nine minutes long; the top two films from this competition, “Tan Lines” and “Lazy Days,” are posted to www.instantfilms.tv. Some directors will even rework their films and enter them in other festivals.

Sylvain sums up the appeal of Instant Films for participants: “These are creative people who are having a fantastic time. They are being presented with an insane challenge and they all get together and do it. And that’s why they got into it, that’s why they started doing theater in junior high. ‘I’m here to tell stories, I’m here to figure out insane problems really quickly.’ People really love that aspect of it. I mean, people have to stay up all weekend but then they’re done!”

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Instant Films No. 010

Where: Los Angeles Center Studios, 450 S. Bixel St., downtown L.A.

When: Oct. 14, 8 p.m. (or so)

Price: $10 to $15

Contact: www.instantfilms.tv