The Last Playboys, a 10-minute-long film written and directed by two Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) students, will be screened at the Princeton Student Film Festival this week.
Rising juniors Luke Momo and Nevin Kelly-Fair, made the film as part of Campus MovieFest, a festival held at the Rose Hill campus in April. Participants were given six days to create a five-minute film, but Momo and Kelly-Fair went a step further, splitting The Last Playboys into two parts.
The movie follows the romantic and social misadventures of Kelly-Fair and fellow Fordham students Daniel Camou and David Moses over the course of a single evening, as they attempt to blend in at a fashion show. It will be screened Thursday, July 20 at the Princeton Public Library.
Momo, a philosophy and visual arts double major who also has a small role in the film, said the script was inspired by his and Kelly-Fair’s own interactions and friendships at Fordham.
“It all comes down to, ‘How do you approach other people? Are you on the surface or genuine?’ This is kind of a comic extrapolation of that,” he said.
A huge fan of film, Momo also founded the Fordham Filmmaking Club. He said he hopes viewers of The Last Playboys will note the diverse influences of both French director François Truffaut’s Les Mistons and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut in the film.
Part of the fun of making the film, he said, was trying to see how much could be done in an extremely short time frame, almost entirely with Fordham’s resources. The students edited the film on campus roughly 20 feet away from where the fashion show sequence was staged.
“It’s great to see just how much you can do with the space that you have,” he said.
For Kelly-Fair, a double major in philosophy and film and television, shooting three-quarters of the film in six hours proved to be “biting off more than we could chew.” But working with friends made it worth the effort.
“You can make fun stories on very, very small budgets, and people will want to see them and enjoy them. We thought it would be fun at the end of the year to make a big film with lots of friends,” he said.
“We’ve made smaller films before, with small groups of people, and we wanted to expand outward and see how well we could push ourselves.”
Another of Momo and Kelly-Fair’s films, a short dark comedy/thriller called Dead Dog
will also be screened this month, on July 22 at the San Francisco Frozen Film Festival.
