DIrector StatEment

BOOKED begins when high schoolers Kenny Harris and Owen Mitchell, longtime best friends and avid theatre geeks, are snubbed for the lead roles in their senior musical. The same went for my real-life friends Chesney Mitchell and Eli Owens our senior year of college in the midst of pursuing our BFAs in Musical Theatre, and they approached me with the idea to make a film out of it - to actualize an opportunity that they deserved. Naturally, I gave them an emphatic, “Yes!” and thus began our journey with BOOKED.

Largely in our second semester our senior year of college, at the height of the Omicron wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we developed a feature screenplay in mere months, shot a feature film in just 15 days with the bare minimum of resources, and spent just over a year in post-production, which took place across four states as our editing team graduated and dispersed across the country. Our entire team, cast, and crew were all first-timers when it came to making a feature film. We knew next to nothing about what we were doing except that we absolutely loved doing it. That said, the process of making this film came with a lot of hurdles, the most significant being that time was not on our side as our graduation was fast approaching. The lack of time, resources, and experience all lent itself well, though, to developing a true camaraderie amongst our whole team, and we were able to create something together that we are all extremely proud of.

From the get-go, our writing team aimed to make BOOKED a love letter to the process that brought us to where we were when we wrote it. The three of us were in the fourth year of our BFA Musical Theatre program at the time, and reflecting on our journeys up to that point, it was incredibly clear that our film was bound to be a comedy. Just four years earlier, each of us would enter the tiniest hotel rooms, wearing our hearts on our sleeves, not-so-discreetly begging for a spot in one of these elite programs that our Broadway idols all went to. We would sing and dance and yell and sweat and cry all for a degree to pursue a career with no degree requirements. The screenplay seemed to write itself, and we spent hours upon hours every night after classes crafting the dry humor of our script, working to maintain realism but allowing for farce in the moments that called for it. I planned and sketched shots with our Director of Photography, also a student, and we discussed in depth how we could best emphasize moments of levity versus those of drama through the camera. I spent months in dark rooms editing both in person and virtually with our other editors, prioritizing the pace of the film, making sure that each scene conveys its intended tone, and what a joy it was to do this with a screenplay that I find so relatable and near to my heart.

BOOKED explores the complex dynamics of childhood friendships, suburban familial tribulations, the triviality of high school theatre, and the comical yet completely real and highly competitive process that is auditioning for drama school. We hope audiences leave BOOKED feeling lighter. If we have brought a smile to someone’s face, then we’ve done our job. We also hope our film encourages younger audiences to throw caution to the wind and pursue the dreams that many are quick to call impractical. BOOKED is about two kids who choose to embrace their inner child and go for it, and all the obstacles they face along the way, and when we made this film, we were a couple of kids who did just that. We are so excited to finally share BOOKED with the rest of the impractical dreamers out there.