E-Mail This Article to a Friend FILM SPEED 48 hours of creativity BY CAMILLE DODERO

Around 8:30 last Friday night, Scott Palmer finished scribbling the production notes for an untitled short film on a dry-erase board. The outline read:

Genre: Spy.

Character: J. Withers, former child actor.

Line of dialogue: "I’m not really like this."

Prop: a string of pearls.

Half-moon pizza crusts, part-empty warm beers, and grease-splotched paper plates littered a nearby coffee table. Eight film-crew members, six men and two women in jeans, sat around the baseball-hatted senior film producer discussing how to develop the fictional protagonist J. Withers. Should Withers be a man in drag? Since they had access to a horse farm in Canton, should they make him a horse? Or should they cast him as a freaky, delusional stalker? Most of the folks mulling this over were full-time employees of Cramer, an integrated-media productions company in Norwood that recently created a Jordan’s Furniture television ad spoofing The Apprentice. Although they were all nestled in the business’s industrial-park headquarters, this wasn’t a company project.

This was the second hour of the 48 Hour Film Project, an international competition of novice and professional filmmakers scrambling to write, direct, shoot, and edit four-to-eight-minute movies in one caffienated, bleary-eyed weekend. Created by producer/filmmaker Mark Ruppert, who poached the idea from a 24-hour play-writing contest, the 48 Hour Film Project started in Washington, DC, four years ago and has since spread to 30 cities, including Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Dublin. This year, Boston and Philadelphia were the first two cities to hold their 2005 rounds; here, 62 groups got slots in the challenge, an all-time record in 48HFP’s five-year history. One of them was Cramer’s L-train Productions, a 10-person group helmed by producer Laura Asselin.

Last weekend’s set-up went like this. At seven o’clock on Friday at Kenmore Square’s Boston Beer Works, 48 Hour Film Project organizers handed out slips of paper listing four variables, specific to each film, that had to appear in the finished products: genre, character, line of dialogue, prop. That way, the short films wouldn’t be overly repetitive; and contestants couldn’t start shooting their films before the allotted weekend. Screen Actors Guild members could be called, locations could be scouted ahead of time, but the finished products had to be turned in at Beer Works on Sunday at seven.

Now in Norwood, L-train Productions had already nailed down a few things. J. Withers would not be a drag queen or a horse; he’d be a pathetic former child star of a goofy ’80s-era sit-com whose career has since taken a nose-dive. Over the past 20 years, Withers has become scarily obsessed with the actress who’d played his mother, convincing himself that she was his true mommy and stalking her relentlessly. Kevin Banks, sometime Phoenix illustrator and Palmer’s high-school buddy, would play Withers.

One of the L-train Productions’ crew members, a bright fella with a pierced eyebrow, a Sox hat, and Chuck Taylors, pointed out that this set-up really didn’t fall into the "spy" genre. Just because Withers was spy-ing didn’t mean this was an espionage flick. This was more E! True Hollywood Story by way of Psycho than anything derivative of James Bond. So Palmer suggested that they make Withers’s former sit-com about a family of spies — called, appropriately, Family Spies.

Wha-la!

Not long after, L-train’s premise started to unravel. The woman slated to play Withers’s mom, a Screen Actors Guild member who’d agreed to be on standby this weekend, declined to participate. Her back-up also canceled. It was getting late on Friday, and they were way behind schedule. How would they ever get this done in time?

In the end, "Family Spies" made the Sunday-evening deadline, unlike more than 20 percent of the other entrants. Withers stalks his former on-screen sibling instead of his mother. Two antique lamps broke during the filming, the cops came, and Palmer got six hours of sleep.

"There was no really good conflict," says Palmer. "We’re all still friends."

"Family Spies" screens with 12 other 48 Hour Film Project entries this Thursday, April 14 at 7:30 and 9 p.m. at the Kendall Square Cinema, One Kendall Square, Cambridge; call (617) 499-1996. More final cuts will screen next Tuesday, April 19 and Wednesday, April 20 at Harvard Square’s Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge; call (617) 876-6837.