It's never fun to go first, especially in a room full of people who don't know what to expect, but Bill Elias confidently climbed on stage, stuck his hand in the red-floppy hat and pulled out his inspiration.

Then the emcee shared it with the crowd:

"Holiday film."

Elias beamed a sarcastic kind of half-grin, and the crowd whooped its approval. Because if this guy was stuck with the holiday film, they probably wouldn't have to make one.

We tend to think of moviemaking in Hollywood terms, of explosions and superheroes and $200 million budgets, of box-office openings and starlets with lap-dogs. This is not the sphere in which The 48 Hour Film Project operates.

It holds its opening ceremonies in a bar on a Friday night. It demands that its participants script, film and edit a four- to seven-minute film in a single weekend. It requires that all cast and crew be volunteers, that each film include a particular character, a prop and a line of dialogue. Filmmakers pluck their genres from a hat. Finished movies are due at a different bar on Sunday night, 48 hours later.

Elias, a 37-year-old aspiring director from Durham, didn't seem discouraged after the drawing, even as other teams landed what seemed to be easier genres: horror, action/adventure, comedy. Before leaving the Greensboro bar and heading for Pittsboro to begin work, he already had a least one idea for the movie.

"I think it fits in with our genre," said Elias, who seemed every bit the moviemaker by 1) politely declining to reveal just what this idea was and 2) wearing a brown newsboy cap tipped just-so atop his noggin.

"Somehow. At least in my head. I'll have to see if my ideas fit in with the others'."

Getting the idea

Started in 2001 by filmmaking friends in Washington, D.C., The 48 Hour Film Project has grown into a national competition, with screenings this year in more than 30 cities. Each city produces a winning film that competes against the other winners, and an ultimate champion is eventually crowned.

To meet the Greensboro contest's qualifications, this movie would have to include a TV personality named Ben or Barbara Jones. There would need to be bubble wrap. And somewhere along the way, a character would have to say, "It's just like my mother always said..."

Organizers held the filmmakers at the bar until 7 p.m., to make sure no one would get any extra filmmaking time.

Elias and his crew -- dubbed "Untied Artists" -- adjourned immediately to a home in Pittsboro to begin hashing out the plot. There was much back and forth, a lot of "what ifs" and "I think thats...," but the ideas didn't seem to be getting very far.

Then at 8:46 p.m., Elias became good-humoredly decisive: "Kazoos are gonna be involved in this."

As team leader and director of the project, Elias was, in some ways, ultimately in charge, but he and a couple of filmmaking buddies from Piedmont Community College in Yanceyville produced the effort. Derrick Brown, 28, of Advance, and Jon Dorety, 22, of Winston-Salem, like Elias, are aiming for careers in the filmmaking industry.

They hoped to finish the script on Friday night, film on Saturday and finish editing on Sunday. Perhaps this movie would be something they could use to show prospective employers.

So they kept swirling ideas around the dining room table, into the kitchen and even outside in the driveway. By 11:30 p.m., they had settled on the nutshell idea: They would invent their holiday, which would riff on the biblical story of the fall of the walls of Jericho. There would be a bad guy, another guy who works to drive the bad guy out of the neighborhood and dark humor.

A couple of ideas that didn't make it: a slogan for Jericho's Auto Sales, "We bring down the credit walls between you and your car;" and a suggestion that a church could baptize its followers by enveloping them in bubble wrap and rolling them down a hill.

Action! Really!

The guys hoped that they would have a script ready first thing Saturday morning for the cast and crew to follow. But it was more like a handful of handwritten pages with sketched out ideas for dialogue.

The actors, mainly friends of friends and some others who heard about the project through e-mail, would have to improvise. That was OK. The movie only needed to be four minutes long.

By Saturday afternoon, the house was filled with probably 20 volunteer actors and crew members, handling all sorts of lighting and camera equipment.

Dave Lawler, who was chosen to play Saul, watched a scene being filmed in the living room. It was after noon and he had yet to see the script.

"I'm supposedly this really bad person," said Lawler, 34, when asked what he knew about his character. When he's not lending his talents to the world of independent moviemaking, Lawler works in marketing.

"Then it ends with some dramatic ending, I'm sure," said Lawler, shaking his head. "I think they might kill me."

The group ran through a party scene and then a scene on the porch in which the main character tries to recruit a neighbor to help him drive out Saul.

Working against the time limit, actors would rehearse their lines off camera for a minute or two, film them and move on to the next scene. They stopped once briefly when a family dog, banished to the garage during the filmmaking, wouldn't stop barking.

They paused again for sandwiches.

A glitch and a debut

The crew filmed into the evening on Saturday. They completed editing on Sunday.

The film was due back in Greensboro on Sunday night, and the Untied Artists made it just in time.

It wasn't until later that they discovered their movie had some glitches. Editing issues meant major pieces of sound were missing, including a line that identified the required character.

Their movie would not be eligible for the contest.

"It's not the ideal way to make a directorial debut," said Elias, a couple of days later.

But even films that didn't meet the requirements would be screened in the historic Carolina Theatre in downtown Greensboro. So on Saturday, Elias joined a handful of the cast and crew to see it.

Just as he was the first to pick from the hat, Elias was the first director to see his movie on the screen. There were several hundred people in the theater and a few murmurs from the audience when the dialogue went missing, but a nice round of applause at the end of "Jericho's Stand."

Afterward, the filmmakers and actors joined with those from other projects for a meet-and-greet session.

Elias, who admitted he was nervous before the screening, seemed relieved that the experience was over. Although his producing partners are up for another go-round next year, Elias, for now, has no plans to make another film in 48 hours.

"I'm kind of eager to move on," Elias said.

And then he laughed, perhaps thinking about the couple of hundred dollars he spent and the more than 100 hours he put into the planning and production of a movie with glitches.

"It was fun once."

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