“Totally Sick” at the Queens World Film Festival/New Webinar for Writers

Happy Friday!  I Just Found Out Last Night! This past September, my friend Adam Nadler’s award-winning film, Totally Sick, was featured at the Glendale International Film Festival. And now Totally Sick is screening this Saturday, November 8, at 3:15 pm at Kaufman Astoria Studios as part of the Queens World Film Festival! It will show at the historic Zukor Screening Room. If you’re in town, you won’t want to miss it! Get your tickets now at: https://queensworldfilmfestival.org/films/totally-sick/    Screenwriters and filmmakers make countless decisions, big and small, throughout the creative process, from shaping the story to bringing it to life on screen. We asked Adam about how he cast the film, and this is what he wrote:  While casting my film “Totally Sick,” I kept thinking back to Mike Nichols’s famous line, “Casting is 80 percent of success, and correcting casting mistakes an additional 10 percent.” In other words, don’t get it wrong. “Totally Sick” is a comedy about two cynical, potty-mouthed New Yorkers who have the worst one-night stand ever only to wake up to discover that one of them is seriously ill. But while casting the male lead turned out to be easy—Phil Rivo was perfect for the role—we were having trouble casting the female part. Not that we didn’t audition some great actors. We did, and came very close to casting a number of them. The problem was, well, they didn’t quite have the comedic rhythm I was looking for, and that would pair properly with Phil’s. At one point, we even delayed the shoot for six months because we wanted to make sure we had the casting right. Finally, I called an excellent casting director named Adrienne Stern, whom I’d worked with previously, and she got right to the point. “You need a comedian,” she said without hesitation. That, she said, would give us exactly the comic alchemy we were looking for. And she was spot-on. I immediately started auditioning female comedians—on the phone, on Zoom, in person. I even cast one at 9am one day, two weeks before the shoot, only to have her agent cancel the deal literally two hours later, without explanation. Running out of time, I suddenly heard from a well-known comedian named Kerri Louise, whom I had reached out to a week or so earlier, but who’d been on vacation. But now she was back and happy to audition. The moment she opened her mouth we all knew she was perfect for the role. Her attitude, intonation, and comic timing were impeccable, and paired perfectly with Phil’s. Kerri is a seasoned professional, with appearances on the Showtime Comedy Special Funny Women of a Certain Age and as a finalist on NBC’s Last Comic Standing. We cast her immediately, and she truly made the part her own, making my job directing her almost effortless. And the results are right there on the screen for everyone to see. Mike Nichols was right.

Webinar Recap

Whether we’re writers, filmmakers, or simply navigating daily life, making decisions can be challenging and often frustrating. This week’s Beyond Happiness webinar tackled the topic of decision-making and how to tap into our creative subconscious to uncover the truths that guide our choices. Before we began, I noted  two common pitfalls: we often make decisions with others in mind before considering ourselves, and we can lose clarity when we worry too much about what others will think.

Some gentle stretching and the Self-Acknowledgment Hug calmed our minds and brought us to our center. Then, I asked each participant to choose a word or image that represented “decision-making.” The responses included: farm, calculator, landing in a cornfield, my mother’s hands, my cat, and unpredictability. Using he Word of the Day Clustering technique, we discovered four more words that came to mind and added those around our initial word. The stories that emerged from the exercise were humorous, insightful, and inspiring!

Shelli’s story about being “in the doghouse” at work for making unpopular decisions was both honest and funny. She wrote about decorating that doghouse to make it comfortable since she was there often. Another participant described crossing a rushing stream by dropping heavy stones to form her own path, making decisions as she went—an important lesson about trusting ourselves and moving forward even in uncertainty.

The group closed by discussing decision-making where other people were a part of the process—creative disagreements, partnerships, and marriage. I offered the idea of a “third right answer”: a solution that honors both perspectives without making either person wrong. It’s a concept that the group wanted to explore further in a future session.