NOLA-set film seeks test audience

The crew of “Laundry Day” on set after a day of filming.

After moving from Los Angeles in 2006, filmmaker Randy Mack found himself most at home in the part of town where the lower French Quarter meets the Marigny triangle. The neighborhood’s people and its haunts — Checkpoint Charlie’s, The Blue Nile and the Dragon’s Den, among others — got under Mack’s skin enough to inspire his latest feature, “Laundry Day.”

“I was looking for a feature project to do that I could set in the parts of New Orleans that I really like,” said Mack. “I wrote the script over a couple of years while I figured out exactly how I would make a movie in a town that doesn’t have a lot of financing and development. Eventually I realized that I’m just going to have to do it myself, kind of the old school guerrilla way.”

So Mack tailored the script to a certain kind of production style which would be “down and dirty and fast moving and high energy.”

The film boasts an all-New Orleans cast, crew and creative team and uses a non-linear format to tell the story of a fight in a 24-hour bar/Laundromat between a gutterpunk, a drug dealer, a musician and a bartender. The cast includes Billy Slaughter, Kerry Cahill, Dave Davis and new discovery Samantha Huffman, aka Sam Aquatic from the NOLA circus community.

“The story itself comes from an experience I had when I was new to the city and over the course of many years I learned eventually learned about the event and how it happened,” said Mack. “I thought it’d be interesting to make a film where you experience an event in the beginning where it doesn’t make any sense, and then over the course of the movie, the event becomes more and more and more clear.”

The film’s first test screening will be held Thursday, September 11^th at 3 PM at Indywood Theater (628 Elysian Fields) in the Marigny. A question-and-answer session moderated by New Orleans filmmaker Glen Pitre will follow.

The audience will be chosen via random lottery from those on the film’s mailing list. (To sign up and become eligible for the lottery, visit www.LaundryDayFilm.com. Winners will be selected at random and notified via email by Sunday, September 7.)

“Basically, we are, we want to test the film before a genuine, an audience that isn’t biased in favor of us,” said Mack, explaining the benefits of the lottery. “It’s the first time we’re ever showing it in front of the public, so it’s going to be very scary and exciting.”

You can view the official trailer for “Laundry Day” below.