"There's a part of me that actually wants us to fail at this test screening next week," Joel explains, "But fail enough to know we need to fix this movie and make it better." FotoKem Film and Video crews keep editing, and we're at two days to the screening. It's getting down to the wire, and they're working day and night to get the editing down. "We're getting dangerously close to locking this puppy and putting it to bed," Mike tells them. "I think it's good." John notes there's still more to do to get it to look like "a real screening." They go to Monkeyland Studios to record more lines for the screening. They all come in and help make the sound, words and script much better. "I guess that's it," John jokes. Then, FotoKem begins to piece everything else together to get it set for the screening. "This is stuff that usually takes weeks or nine months in big movies," John says. They recolor bits and pieces of the film to make it brighter. "We're cutting it real close," Mike worries.
They have one day left now, and they're still trying to put everything else together into the screening cut. "It's quicker than normal," Mike says, "It concerns me a bunch, because Bob Weinstein is going to be there." Mixing usually takes much longer than what they're doing, and they're worried they might not be able to mix everything together, and they have less than four hours to go before it's deadline. They're now down to 20 hours before the screening, but they're still going and trying to mix everything together. "It's a time consuming process," John says. It's now half past four in the morning, and they're still mixing. They finally finish at five in the morning. "The sound is good, to do what we did with one day is insane," Mike says.
At a Pacific Theaters screening, there's about 400 people there to see it, and everyone is nervous. Everyone is anxious. "I'm going to say I think it's going to go well tonight," Mike admits. "You're going to see something that's not completely done," John says, "Hopefully, it's not too rough."
"This film will live or die based on this screening," Joel says as they cut back and forth between the audience and the film as things happen during the screening. "People are sort of responding," John says excitedly. There are people screaming, yelling and reacting. They're showing some of the scenes that were previously shot that we saw filmed live. It's interesting to see everything on the screen as people are reacting. At the end, there's applause and yelling as the rough credits roll. "I think the screening was awesome," Mike says, "It was a validation of all the hard work."
"There were two moments during the screening when they audience started applauding," Marcus says. "Seeing our film being made was a dream come true," Patrick admits. Now, the audience is filling out questionnaires about the film, and they're getting tallied so that they can work with it. Joel explains how the questionnaires work. They need a score of higher than 60 for this to be good. A woman explains the scores, and they weren't as good as it should be for a movie of its kind. Chris is crushed by the numbers, and he can't believe how bad it seemed to do.