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CRYSTAL: Half of me just feels that Plan B is a cop-out. The judges are going to think, "These people couldn't get the story done, so they did this," and I don't know that there's any way of seeing that differently. But I also know that something like Plan B has not been done in this competition before, and the sleepwalker story still has problems. Are you going to bet on the long shot and win it all or bet on the safe thing and not take a risk? It's an all-or-nothing kind of thing.
IAN nods. It's up to him. And he's thinking -- or trying to think -- on 90 minutes of sleep in the past two days. The room is quiet, except for the hum of computers. Then he speaks.
IAN, letting out a long sigh: You know what? I like the documentary better. It captures the raw emotion. The structure's better. It tells a good story. That's what we're going with. CUT TO:
The inside of a van, sunlight streaming through the windows, the streets of San Francisco roaring past. IAN checks his watch: It's 11:45 a.m. He reaches into his pocket for the envelope of cash. There's $24 left. "On time and under budget," he jokes. Maybe they really will get jobs in Hollywood.
We see IAN handing over the DVD to his professor, relief spreading over IAN's face. They will find out in January which school wins the contest. We see IAN and PETE return equipment throughout San Francisco. We see them cleaning up the house, moving the furniture back into position, tossing out huge bags of garbage. We see IAN, as the sun sets, driving all the way to Stockton, returning his girlfriend's van. He looks beyond exhausted, his eyelids slowly descending as he crosses the bridge back into San Francisco at the end of the night. CUT TO:
A sushi restaurant in downtown San Francisco. Afternoon, a few days later. IAN has slept, and the weekend's adrenaline has finally begun to ebb. As he picks over some tempura chicken, he talks about the unlikely lessons he took away from the project.
IAN: I probably wouldn't do this ever again, but I wouldn't trade the experience we had for anything else. It pushed all of us close to the edge. If the story had worked out perfectly, we wouldn't have learned as much -- about ourselves, about everybody, about the whole process of filming. We could have made a nice little short, and that's what it would have been -- a nice little short. At least now we have something that really pushes the boundary, something that's different from everything else. We have a real story.
FADE TO BLACK
