My Producer came back with the following story from the LA Film Festival

Here are some notes regarding the Beverly Hills Shorts Festival:

During the pre-party, there was an interview crew there to interview the filmmakers for the website realtvfilms.com and I had my first interview! The girl who interviewed me, Marina, saw Rehabitat and actually remembered me as “the creepy guy.” That’s the second time I’ve ever been recognized! (The first was working at Sears in 2003 and a Bay Path College student recognized me from a karaoke contest in 2001. That was cool.)

As far as the interview goes, I think it went ok. It’s one of those things where you think of something funny you could have said 5 minutes after it’s done. She introduced me as “Sean Ringer”, which is fine. I got in mentions for Theresa, Daina and the upcoming movie, Walk of Shame. The interview should be posted online in a couple weeks.

As far at the film fest, I think it went great! The LA crowd definitely “got” the movie the best out of any of the other film fests it’s been shown at. It makes sense being that they’re more inclined to laugh at the dumb-isms of an actress. Daina’s interview segments got great laughs, the arrest scene with Officer Aimee killed and when Daina referred to the nurse as “Spanish man” and saying “grassy ass”, that got the crowd howling.

The other films showing in my grouping were SO well produced that it made me feel like I was way over my head. But in a way it’s a compliment to the writing that Tex and I came up with (and the overall story that Theresa came up with) that our no-budget movie was competing with movies that had, shall we say, very LARGE budgets. Most of the other film makers were either film students at USC or post grads doing their first “big thing.”

My favorite question I got from people there were “so what film school did you go to?” Umm…yeah, I went to WNEC for Criminal Justice. Of course, WNEC got a TV studio after I graduated. That would have been so much fun, putting our backyard wrestling on WNEC TV. That was quality stuff! Come to think of it, Gateway Championship Wrestling was my first writing project…

During the Q&A session for my group, someone asked the group in front of the audience “what we shot in”, meaning what type of camera we used. Most answers were “well, I used (XYZ) cams and used (blah, blah, blah) sound stuff…” Basically stuff I don’t understand.

I was the last to answer saying “I don’t know” and the audience of film making nuts thought that was funny. Something like that happened in New Orleans and it got a laugh there, too. Used the same “joke” twice! I’m not above it…

Was there anyone famous there? Well, there was one notable actor there. Richard Riehle, who most famously played Tom in “Office Space” (he created the Jump to Conclusions Mat), was there. He was in a short film playing in my grouping. Apparently he loves doing short films with students and he does a ton of those every year. He seemed like a cool guy…

Although Rehaitat didn’t win any awards (even though I thought Daina should have won best actress…but that never goes to a comedic movie) it was exciting to be shown among all those great short movies. And it was great to see WNEC people! Thanks to Tim, Beth and Foster for coming out to Wilshire in Beverly Hills on a Sunday night! Hopefully I get to return out there soon.

Sean R.