The Misses  (2012)  22 min  Raleigh/Cary, NC

Director: Nick Karner

Writer: John Lewis III

With:  John Lewis III, Rebecca Larken, Elijah Chester,

Lindsay Kilgore, Phil Stork, Brandon Oakley, Miles Snow

IMDB PLOT SYNOPSIS: Joey is having a bad day. His wife is angry with him, he's bogged down with papers, and his best friend is having women-problems of his own.

 

     This was a pilot for a proposed TV series by John Lewis III.  John and I met on the set of Mitch Lassiter’s Long Lost Friend.  I told him if he ever wanted to shoot anything, he just had to ask. He created a comedy about a guy who is just a big kid at heart and who is constantly testing his wife’s last nerve.  Some of the scenes in the script came out of real life situations.  One scene, in which he was supposed to nail a carpet to the floor, had to be faked since I couldn’t have John actually bang nails into my floor. Most scenes were done in single takes, which can be difficult but pretty impressive if you can pull them off.   My favorite scene is probably the flower shop scene. In my one contribution to the script, I wanted Brandon Oakley to do a riff on a minor character from Robin Hood: Men In Tights.  That character says things like: “I will take these cotton balls with my hand, and put them in my pocket.”  I had Brandon say similarly bizarre things. 

    He was able to get a wonderful cast together and I tried to create an Office/Arrested Development style.  We were able to get an office building to shoot his work scenes and we used my house and his apartment for John and Elijah’s scenes.  The flower scene was shot at a little shop in Cary.  We planned on making more but it was just too difficult to work out everyone’s schedules, including my own.  It was definitely a fun shoot, though.