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Lessons from God

December 2, 2013 Go, Projects, Video

Over the weekend, I revamped my [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6WIWaqaAHgfES_7nY7BYhA) and uploaded a bunch of videos, including my 1998 short film God, starring a [young Melissa McCarthy](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d314AWqNeM&feature=share&list=PLa3qqbMuNy-oewVooX9-RlbUpMb7H_IGb):

Melissa’s amazing, and always was. I’ve loved watching someone so talented and so deserving become a star.

We shot this film after Go, but it was actually finished first.

I wrote the part for Melissa, who absolutely killed her single scene in Go. Over the next few years, I’d cast her in anything I could. She played a recurring character in my WB series D.C., and had cameos in both Charlie’s Angels. I wrote a part for her in Big Fish, but her role on Gilmore Girls kept her in Los Angeles.

Nine years later, Melissa would play her character from God again in [The Nines](https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-nines/id274169170) opposite Ryan Reynolds. ((The short is a bonus feature on the US DVD.)) Her husband Ben Falcone has a small part in the movie as well, and starred in another pilot I did called [The Remnants](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQFv0Le2DyI&feature=share&list=PLa3qqbMuNy-oewVooX9-RlbUpMb7H_IGb&index=1).

God was shot on leftover 35mm from Go, using a lot of the same crew. That’s my old apartment, my old couch, my old answering machine.

I had no particular career goal in making it; it just seemed like fun. We never submitted it to festivals. Rather, it got passed around a lot on VHS, and would often be brought up in meetings. (Casting directors in particular loved it.)

Although I had already directed second unit on Go, this was my first real directing experience beyond crappy Super-8 films in school. I learned a lot, including:

* Using metaphors to explain what you want. I told my DP that I wanted the light to feel like a breath mint. I told the hair stylist that I wanted Hot-Topic Wiccan.
* The challenges of late-90s opticals. That “god” title in the opening shot, which would be three seconds of work today, took about a week of back-and-forth approvals at a lab.
* How expensive music is. The rights to “Walking on Sunshine” cost more than the rest of the budget combined.
* How much of a homebody I am. God started a trend of my writing movies that take place in my house.

Some of the best things that came from this short were relationships with people I keep working with: Melissa, producer Dan Etheridge, composer Alex Wurman, cinematographer Giovanni Lampassi, and editor Doug Crise. They’re all still part of my life and career, which is a remarkable gift.

Related Posts

  1. Don’t make the feature version of your short
  2. The Nines on DVD
  3. The sequence of Go

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