New York - May 01, 2003

Midnight Run

Filmmaking Competition

Attention, all shoppers: Would the hipster in aisle five with the digicam please report to his inner Scorsese?

It’s time to get discovered at Midnight Movie Making Madness, a filmmaking competition that’s open to everyone in the whole wide world.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make a movie in 24 hours.

Assuming, that is, you make it to the finals. There are 24 geographically arranged heats in the first round. Filmmakers are assigned a theme (as in, the genre is comedy, the subject a paint-sniffing artist) and have two weeks to make the movie from scratch. Each winner gets $1,000 and entry into the finals, wherein they get 24 hours to write, direct, and edit a movie. The topic is selected at the midnight announcement (last year’s story: a fairy tale about a pathological liar), and then they’re off. After a big public screening, the audience votes for the grand-prize winner of $10,000.

Which might not be enough to finance a whole feature but should just cover the deli’s craft-services tab.

For more information and to register, visit nycmidnight.com.

  Film Buff