A satirical mystery that lampoons America's obsession with youth and beauty in and age in which the greatest sin is to age
 Maury Cooper, Rocco Sisto, Phoebe Price |
Writer/Director: Daria Price Comedy Short TRT: 29:30 Shooting Format: Super 16mm Available Formats: Digibeta, DVCam, MiniDV, DVD, BetaSP, VHS Production Company: Under The Sign, LLC |
Synopsis
A satirical mystery in which America’s obsession with youth and beauty hits critical mass, when a gorgeous young corpse turns out to be made of more plastic than flesh and a high-profile divorce turns into a war over the value of an older woman’s new body parts. When the husband’s attorney claims that those parts should be figured into the settlement along with the couple’s other non-liquid assets, his wife’s attorney (The Soprano's Aida Turturro) counterattacks with an impassioned “survival of the fittest” defense of all women who "live in an age when the greatest sin of all for a woman is to age!”
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Story & Cast
Simone Study & MarLee Candell
Al Walker (James Kiberd) comes home from a trip abroad to discover that his wife, Eve (Marie De Cicco), is sporting a new pair of buttocks and that his teenage daughter, Iris (Rachel Alvarado), has just had another nose job. And when mother and daughter go compulsively jogging and discover a corpse, they react more to how gorgeous the poor girl is than to the fact that she’s dead!
Detectives Tortoni and Gabor (Rocco Sisto and Antoinette Peragine) learn that the dead Vicky (Phoebe Price) had a couple of ribs removed to narrow her waist and that she shared the same plastic surgeon as Eve Walker, who is by now embroiled in a high-profile televised divorce. Al’s attorney (Michael Crider) is insisting that Eve’s new body parts are “community property acquired during the marriage and should be figured into the settlement along with the Walker’s other non-liquid assets.”
Appalled that a woman’s body be valued like real estate, his wife’s attorney (Aida Turturro) delivers an impassioned “survival of the fittest” defense of all women. Proclaiming that “in this age we live in, the greatest sin of all for a woman is to age,” she pleads that Eve not be punished for her self-mutilating battle to better herself in a society obsessed with youth and beauty!
Meanwhile, the detectives have started to wonder if a member of the Walker family might be a suspect. No sooner have they discovered the twisted circumstances of Vicky’s death, than the divorce judge issues his landmark verdict! It spawns a new kind of recovery group across the land—for “victims of poor body image.”
Detectives Tortoni and Gabor (Rocco Sisto and Antoinette Peragine) learn that the dead Vicky (Phoebe Price) had a couple of ribs removed to narrow her waist and that she shared the same plastic surgeon as Eve Walker, who is by now embroiled in a high-profile televised divorce. Al’s attorney (Michael Crider) is insisting that Eve’s new body parts are “community property acquired during the marriage and should be figured into the settlement along with the Walker’s other non-liquid assets.”
Appalled that a woman’s body be valued like real estate, his wife’s attorney (Aida Turturro) delivers an impassioned “survival of the fittest” defense of all women. Proclaiming that “in this age we live in, the greatest sin of all for a woman is to age,” she pleads that Eve not be punished for her self-mutilating battle to better herself in a society obsessed with youth and beauty!
Meanwhile, the detectives have started to wonder if a member of the Walker family might be a suspect. No sooner have they discovered the twisted circumstances of Vicky’s death, than the divorce judge issues his landmark verdict! It spawns a new kind of recovery group across the land—for “victims of poor body image.”
War Story - Two Shoots
Midway through the original shoot, the lead actor, Rocco Sisto, was in a serious car accident on the way home from location. I spent the night with him in the emergency room, getting ready to pull the plug—on the film, not him—but Rocco insisted that I continue shooting around him and that “someday” we’d finish the film. Ribs and pelvis broken, knee shattered, Rocco was on morphine—and I wished I were. So I didn’t pull the plug, but the rest of that shoot was hell, shooting whatever scenes could be flatly split down the middle, in the hopes that somewhere, someday, I’d shoot the reverses as well as the entirely missing scenes. “Someday” turned out to be seven months later, when Rocco was finally healed and could return to LA. By then, Rocco’s co-lead, Antoinette Peragine, announced she was five months pregnant and showing! I squeezed her into the original wardrobe, dressed my apartment to cheat for all reverses of the original locations, and with a tiny crew and a new DP – who not only had to match those reverses but amazingly did it all without a gaffer or grip – we shot the rest of the film and even added some new bits I’d come up with during those 6 months that I was trying to edit half a film that was missing half its cast.