Pre-production for The Myth of the American Sleepover began with a nap.

Director David Mitchell and I arrived in Michigan after a grueling 49-hour road trip with enough time to squeeze in a power nap before we had to audition an actress who was leaving for Germany the following day.

We had not intended such an abusive drive from Los Angeles to Detroit, but the combination of desert winds and curving mountain roads had delayed us and we were committed to being in Detroit to read the actress once more before she left the country for a month. To make up time, we drove nearly nonstop. We rested for only a couple of hours each night, the first night staying at a La Quinta in Rifle, Colorado, the second night at a Holiday Inn Express in Rock Island, Illinois. At not in…

It was difficult to justify paying for a room for only a couple of hours, so instead we parked in the guest lots of these establishments and dozed just long enough to safely resume our computer navigated course. I think we would have paid to sleep in bonafide beds had it not meant unloading the car. We crossed the country in a Jeep Wrangler soft top that was packed to the seams with three months of provisions. To be cliché, our entire lives were in that Jeep.

David and I are college friends on a mission to make our first feature film as a producing/directing team--myself serving as the producer, he as the director. Two years ago we set out with the script, a prospective budget for 1.5 million and a production strategy to suit. Since then we have condensed the script, reshuffled our crew and scaled down to a micro-budget. Using both hands we can list off the categories to which we are allotting money. We love to make jokes about how poor we are – concocting bizarre scenarios wherein we camp out in his sister’s backyard to save money during pre-production. (For the record we are renting a house.) And yeah, I guess we’re broke, but I still think what we are doing is pretty great.

It is good to finally be out of development – a phase which seemed never-ending and was punctuated by weekly production meetings at the Coffee Bean on Hillhurst. The hours of research and networking seem distant in comparison to where we are now. Our venture is self-financed and our crew built out of loyalty. We are lucky that the people loyal to us also happen to be some of the most talented people we know.

There is a ‘to-do’ list covering a wall in our basement and just the two of us working feverishly to check it all off. Calling us short staffed would be an understatement – but things are getting done and by July 1,--we start shooting on July 2-- everything will be crossed off.

As we work towards this goal, a daily pattern is starting to emerge. Each morning begins at the kitchen table where we strategize for the day over a bowl of oatmeal. Over the next twelve hours we go through a series of highs and lows as certain things work out in our favor and others disappoint us. We gain a gaffer, lose a production designer. Each small victory is short-lived as we must scramble to the next task-- otherwise the list will never get checked off. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, tuna for dinner. (The possibility exists that the latter may lead to eventual mercury poisoning, but for now we are too focused to worry about such things.) Every so often we break up the day with a callback or a location scout. There is the occasional meeting at the ‘Bou, Caribou Coffee and the only place with consistently free Wi-Fi.

Our highlight from last week was riding around in a police car ‘scouting’ the parade route for the city’s Fourth of July parade, which we will be participating in as part of our shoot. The production value of the actual parade surpasses anything we could have staged and reaffirms our decision to come back to Michigan where the community is enthusiastic about the prospect of shooting a film and supportive of our project.

Our cast list is not yet official, but over the course of the last six months we have found a pretty amazing group of actors, mostly local, that we are very excited about working with. Looking back, we put an incredible amount of energy into the casting process. We could not afford a casting director so we did it ourselves. We contacted friends and local filmmakers to help us find a space to hold auditions in, to help get the word out and to ultimately help run the auditions. On the day of, David would tape the actors, and I would read opposite of them. My acting career amounts to the freshman theatre course I took in college and which I may or may not have passed. Once we started holding callbacks and pairing actors together, it was amazingly satisfying to see the scenes play out in a way they never had with me as the reader. We are very proud of the cast we’ve assembled. One benefit of being so über low-budget is that we were able to abandon the idea of “name talent” and cast who we want.

We have now turned our focus to finding and securing our locations. And recently, it was this effort that led us to being locked in a stairwell in an abandoned building in downtown Detroit. We were only trapped for 15 to 20 minutes before a very confused building attendant came to our rescue. I think about us locked in that stairwell, banging on the glass, and I laugh and I wonder what ridiculous thing will be the crowning moment of tomorrow.

We will do this, or something like it, 34 more times and somewhere around day 25 our crew will begin to arrive to take their place in the mix.

This is the portrait of our lives as we trudge through pre-production. We are doing our best to remember that we are doing something really great, and we should enjoy it for everything that it is.

To learn more about the film and filmmakers visit www.americansleepover.com.