I’m not really sure what I expected from the screening but I think I had pictured 50 guys sitting on folding chairs and sharing a few pizzas. Instead, we had a sold out event with over 800 people in the audience.

It was a truly amazing experience, and one that proved both rewarding and valuable. Rewarding because we were able to sit back and see an audience react positively to what we had done. When you’re out there standing ankle deep in rainwater in a back alley at 3:00 a.m., you don’t know if what you’re doing actually works or not. You may think the script is good, you may think your actors are great, and you may think it will all cut together well—but you really don’t know until you get it in front of a real, live, unbiased audience.

What really surprised me most was seeing how the energy from an audience can change things. Lines that were never intended to be funny when written got huge laughs because of editing and performance. The audience would laugh, and I’d think “Oh, that was funny? Who knew?”

Doug Jones says he loved driving his old Maverick. Young girl says “What’s a Maverick?” Everyone laughs.

We had no idea this would be funny. Was it because of John McCain? Who knows?

Conversely, one of our expectedly funny and most anticipated big moments got no reaction at all. I can’t be specific because it’s a huge reveal and plot point, but suffice it to say that we expected the biggest laugh of the movie and heard only crickets. But, because we had this screening, we can look back at the editing, etc, and figure out why the desired reaction wasn’t there.

We also took advantage of the screening to solicit feedback and held two post-screening forums, one with younger viewers and one with older ones. This is where the value came in. We got a ton of excellent comments from both groups, including overwhelmingly consistent advice on how to market the movie. “It’s not a teenage angst punk movie like you may have thought, it’s a coming of age movie that will appeal to adults, too.” The great thing about doing this is that you can see which comments surface again and again as opposed to asking a few random friends one question and getting a different response each time.

Lastly, I must say how extraordinarily proud I am of our professional crew and the BSU students. We shot this film over 21 days with very little money and we have a professional quality film, or as one audience member put it, “It looks like a real movie that you’d pay to go see in the theater.”

Which is what we were hoping for while standing in that gross alley at 3:00 a.m..