PHOTO OP began as sassy valentine to everything slick and silly about velvet-roped New York. I wanted to tell a stylish story with room for physical comedy, suspense, action, and romance. I knew exactly the actors deft enough to have fun making fun. As luck would have it, I also had access to the most amazing location in NYC: a brand-new upscale Tribeca loft building, 50% unoccupied; with photogenic alleys, a robotic garage, and a developer generous enough to let a crew of thirty take it over for 72 hours. With several producers urging me to shoot a short, I was aiming outside the box.

What transpired was a particular kind of Manhattan miracle. My cowriter Emily had been working as an on-camera gossip for Lifetime, regaling me with war stories of the fame factory and hitting me up for jokes about red carpets, celebutantes and the paps that snap them. Lightbulb! Here was a world where satire could be sexy and hyperbole was status quo. Writing the script was a blast, completed in one day and by the next it seemed, my producer had the entire team in place, excited to be included. As my 1st AD put it, “This script galvanized people, everyone was determined to bring their A-game.”

The blessings were plentiful. My inspired DP made the footage seem 10 times our pricetag. Our stunning multipurpose location came free, but the week after we wrapped, an Oscar-winning actress shot a cosmetics campaign at over $20,000 a day for the penthouse alone. My actors deferred their salaries, then the last day, Cheyenne Jackson got the call from Tina Fey that made him a recurring character on 30 Rock. Even with long-haul days, when we wrapped each night no one wanted to leave. Afterwards my best friend from highschool, fresh off cutting Transformers 2, edited PHOTO OP for bupkis. My first shoot went so smoothly that people kept congratulating me and asking me how long I’d been making films.

Crazy good fortune. The forecast was rain the entire weekend of our three-day shoot, but every time we stepped outside the sky cleared. How many film sets in the City let you dine by a rooftop pool or build a landscape out of truckstop snacks or stage a fake red-carpet so credible that tourists “sneak” snapshots and autographs? I’ll never forget the faces of the security guards of the Hilton next door watching a spangled Molly Ward pop out of an industrial trashcan chiding, “You call THIS a 1-bedroom?!”

I’ve never worked so hard or laughed so hard in my 38 years. I can’t for the life of me figure out why my first film was so long coming, but PHOTO OP taught me that I was already a film director. During our last setup, after a night shoot she’d spent dodging the jaws of a revolving door, the dazzling Tina Benko sidled up and elbowed me and said the words every valentine wants to hear, “Shawny, I think New York hearts you back.”

Shawn Nacol (director)