The Andrew Extravaganza

The Alamo Drafthouse chain of movie theaters held a film making competition to promote the new Jack Black movie Be Kind Rewind. The task of the competition was to create a short (five minutes, plus credits) remake of a movie. After a couple days of discussion our group came to the obvious conclusion that Top Gun would be a perfect choice.

Our goal was to capture the iconic scenes while still telling the story, we didn't want to shoot a trailer or a highlight reel. We shot the movie in basically three days at locations around Austin, then maybe a week of post-production and soundtrack recording.

We remade Top Gun like Max Fischer and the Max Fischer Players remade Serpico in Rushmore. We recreated the dialogue, shots, cuts, and music without mugging for the camera. We played it straight.

To clarify: we played it straight in the sense that we avoided mugging for the camera and hamming it up, but we remained devoutly faithful to the heavy gay undertones of the original.

The only thing better than our acting in this film would be the musical talent of our two lead actors, Goose and Maverick. Those two, along with help from the brothers Fick, reworked the legendary cuts from the soundtrack:

Top Gun Anthem
Danger Zone
Playing With the Boys
Take My Breath Away
Take My Breath Away - Jeff's (Goose) full length cover

There were well over 100 entries to the contest. A lot of shit, a lot of really good stuff too. You can check out every entry at Filmmaking Frenzy.com, though I'm not sure how long the videos will be hosted at that site.

Some of my favorites:
Die Hard
Apocalypse Now
Say Anything
Taxi Driver (this one is brilliant)
Top Gun