Moose Dreams

Actress Kristan King Lewman scrunches her nose and says, "That's creepy." But she's not reconsidering her role in the movie. This is the second time she's worked with Kirk on a 48 Hour film. "You lose a weekend," she says, "but you get a nice chunk of footage. As actors, that's always nice to have."

Her husband, actor Lance Lewman, doesn't object to the strange story line. "It's always like this," says Lewman, who gets a "huge creative rush" working with Kirk on 48 Hour films. "He tells you his idea, and you're saying to yourself, 'Oh this is really weird.' I think the same thing this year. A moose . . . that's nuts. But, knock on wood, this could be really cool."

Doubts about the movie pervade the set. "Are you happy with the script?" Kirk asks Eric, who worries that there's no tension building between the characters. But Kirk rules out major revisions. "This piece feels very melancholy to me, meditative," Kirk says. "I don't know why Bruno is putting his camera down. Maybe he's looking for some kind of truth, for what's real in the world." Besides, this is a fantasy film, with a moose in the lead. "This does not have to make sense," Kirk insists. "That's the rule of the day."

"Action!" Kirk commands. The camera rolls. His lips move in synchronicity with the words of the actors, who are toasting Tim Tate's lovely gay glass sculptures in the back yard of the Palisades home, while Bruno holds his camera and lurks in the background. The mandatory fire extinguisher sits to his right.

"Many have tried to imitate Tim Tate's take on glass sculpting," says the hostess of the party, played by Kristan King Lewman. "But what Tim Tate has . . . is gay glass . . . Gay glass was designed by NASA for the windshield of the space shuttle, but in Tim Tate's hands it becomes art."

Kirk stands just behind the camera operator in the shade of a tree, protecting his fair skin from the warm spring sun. In the distance, there's a powerful rumble. It's getting closer.

The sound man holds a microphone boom above the actors' heads, listening through headphones to what's being captured. "Airplane," says the sound engineer, shaking his head.

"Forget it," Kirk says. He tells the camera operator to stop rolling and the actors to stop performing. Kirk failed to realize that his beautiful shooting location lies just off a flight pattern of Reagan National Airport. Jets roar overhead every few minutes, wrecking take after take.

If glorious weather is good for outdoor filming, it's also good for mowing the lawn, as the next-door neighbor demonstrates. Meanwhile, the neighbors on the other side have kids who decide it's a nice day for screaming. Soon the dad comes out to scream at the kids for screaming, and the sound man again shakes his head. Kirk grows frustrated.

"Damn it," he says. "It's not that we're messing anything up. It's just that under these conditions filming is tough." With 29 hours left, Kirk still hasn't finished the first scene, and progress has ground to a halt.

About 5 a.m. Sunday, Kirk stumbles home from the downtown editing suite where the initial footage has been loaded into the computers. He is thrilled with the quality of the shots, and the acting, he feels, has been superb. He loves the performance of Yvonne Erickson, who plays a know-it-all Hungarian art critic named Herta. "So, dahhhling, vaht doo you know about thees gay glahs?" Herta asks Bruno during the party.

Still, the opening scene of the film outside the Hirshhorn, featuring the sad woman, remains unfilmed. And Eric, with his pen cap gnawed to a nub, has continued to complain that the Hirshhorn scene makes absolutely no sense.

Kirk gets back to his apartment and steps into the shower. Eric's voice is burning in his brain, he later says. He now realizes that Eric has been right all along: The Hirshhorn scene would only convolute an already scrambled plot. Kirk decides right then to create plan B. The most interesting character in the film, he believes, is the moose. Better to focus on him instead of the inexplicably sad woman.

Now Kirk swallows a forkful of scrambled eggs. It's about 9 Sunday morning at a Dupont Circle restaurant, and three actors have arrived. Two of them were expecting to work this morning, but Chris Cline, who plays the moose, got a surprise cast call sometime before sunrise.

"Everything's changed," Kirk tells them. He explains that the scene at the Hirshhorn Museum has been eliminated. "Now the moose is going to deliver Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial."

This is his plan to rescue the film? Chris Cline laughs.

"He's not kidding," says Lance Lewman.

Danielle Campbell looks across the stone steps, her mouth agape. The 16-year-old from Portville, N.Y., is in town for a high school a cappella competition, and she and her family have decided to take in some sights, including the Lincoln Memorial.

"Why the hell is there a moose standing here?" Danielle asks. Carla Campbell, her mother, comes over to investigate.

"I'm wondering," Carla asks, "what's the connection between a moose and the Lincoln Memorial? Is there one?"

At this point, not even Kirk is attempting to answer that kind of question. The moose stands on the spot where King gave his speech. He raises his hands -- hooves -- into to the air, as if orating. A crew member wonders if this isn't "profoundly disrespectful."

The movie "is going to be weird but oddly satisfying," Kirk says. "And I'm okay with that." But he's not okay with the pimply-faced tourists who keep accosting his actor. "Don't touch the moose," Kirk says sharply to a gaggle of middle school students. A girl punches the actor in the back. An unprovoked boy hollers at him, "You suck!"

The scene is both hilarious and appalling, and later Kirk muses that "it only took a thin piece of fabric to completely void [the actor's] humanity." Kirk is prone to this kind of rumination and magnetically drawn toward abstraction. These impulses are perilously complicating his film. Despite all his moose jokes, Kirk doesn't want to make a farce. He's trying to make a film that portrays artists, however wacky, in the process of creating. But the concept is falling flat. And for the first time all weekend, a note of defeat slips into Kirk's voice. "I don't think this is going [to win]. I don't. It's just, it's awfully strange."

It's 6:35 p.m. Sunday. Fifty-five minutes remain, and Kirk nervously watches the editor, Adam Lingo, seam together the digital footage using a bank of computers. Kirk has settled on a title, "Moose Dream." "I'm starting to get a little noodley," he says to Adam. In short, hurry up.

Twenty minutes later, the film is dumped onto a tape. Kirk snatches it and runs, literally. Submitting the film even one second late means disqualification. Brad, the producer, is waiting curbside, the engine of his car running. Kirk hops in, and Brad quickly looks over his left shoulder before swinging an illegal U-turn across 17th Street NW. He doesn't see the oncoming taxi. Kirk does, and braces himself, cursing loudly. The cabbie slams his brakes. Brad flies past the cab, inches from a collision. They race to the theater on Seventh Street NW, where, with 20 minutes to spare, Kirk calmly delivers "Moose Dream" to Mark Ruppert.

"How'd it go?" Ruppert asks.

"Pretty good," answers Kirk.

Soon dozens of filmmakers are dashing down Seventh Street to submit their films on time, including a pair who ride a motorcycle recklessly down the sidewalk and another guy who pedals his bike through the open front door of the theater two minutes before the deadline. Afterward, some linger to celebrate the end of their frantic filmmaking. Joining them is a tall man in a beige suit, whose hands, gripping a bottle of beer, are the size of lion paws.

"I'm Tim Tate," he says.

"Get out of here," says an incredu-lous reporter.

"No, really, I am." He paid $500 at a charity auction for the honor of being this weekend's recurring character.

"And you're a gay glass sculptor?"

"Actually, yes, I am." He sells his work at a gallery in Bethesda. "This is a lot of fun," he says, looking at the filmmakers. "I'm just wondering what's going to happen to me in all these movies."

Kirk takes a seat at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center in Silver Spring. The lights go down, and the short movies begin flickering across the screen. Team Diamond, the kids from Oakton High, offers up a Broadway-style musical about three young people who witness the murder of a friend and have to tell the boy's mother that he's dead. A slapstick western solves Washington's wide-open spaces problem by presenting a trio of rowdy cowboys settling in suburbia. A mockumentary chronicles the struggles of a childless B-list movie actress, who tells her agent that she needs money and sperm.

Of the 100 teams that began the film competition, 78 submitted movies on time, 20 turned them in late, and two disappeared, says Ruppert. Three judges have whittled the on-time submissions down to 24 top films being screened tonight. Kirk is delighted -- and surprised -- that "Moose Dream" made the cut. "WE ARE WORTHY!" he writes in an e-mail to his team.

"Moose Dream" begins with a deliberately out-of-focus shot of the moose at the Lincoln Memorial. There's no sound, except an eerie series of high clarinet-like notes. The audience chuckles at the improbability of the scene. Kirk crosses his arms, and his tense face relaxes when an acquaintance in the next row spins around to give him a thumbs-up. When the credits roll, the audience responds with polite, if confused, applause.

The lights come up. Mark Ruppert and Liz Langston announce 24 awards, from Best Original Song to Best Special Effects. Filmmakers waltz to the front of the theater to collect their certificates, but Kirk's name hasn't been called. His pale blue eyes get wider as the award for Best Film is about to be announced. And it goes to . . . "Owensville," a family film about a Mormon missionary who can't ride a bike.

"Oh, my God," Kirk gasps. "We've been blanked."

The theater empties, and the filmmakers congregate in the lobby. Kirk congratulates a few winners, but he looks dejected.

A few days later Kirk announces that he's done with the 48 Hour Film Project. "I've given it everything I can," he says, but he doesn't think he's cut out for making fictional movies. "I have a strong storytelling bent . . . but I just don't sit around conjuring up dramatic circumstance. I feel I'm much better suited for making documentaries."

In fact, he's already found a subject. It's a weirder-than-fiction tale involving looted native Hawaiian artifacts, the mafia and a mysterious death. Kirk says that perhaps he'll pitch the story, with himself as the director, to National Geographic, the Discovery Channel or PBS. With any luck, he'll be spending some time in Hawaii, where not a single moose resides.

Tyler Currie is a contributing writer for the Magazine. To see a clip from "Moose Dream," go to www.washington.com/moosedream.