Bottom Floor is a Twilight Zone-esque tale about an asshole businessman named Joseph Cardiff (Justin Lader) who gets his comeuppance when his elevator hits... the bottom floor. At its release, some of James and Robert's contemporaries considered this to be their best work to date. I would certainly agree that there's not much wrong with it. There are terrible echoes in the UCF Teaching Academy, which is where they shot the building lobby. I'm not sure why they didn't re-dub that part, considering they always re-dub everything they ever make. Other than that, I think it's a fantastic short. Except of course for the one detail that has bothered the shit out of me ever since I first saw it. And what's remarkable is that I don't believe I've ever vocalized this to anyone ever before, including James and Robert:

When Dominick Vicchiullo is pulling papers out of Cardiff's briefcase, they say certain words on them that seem to indicate the sins he is guilty of. They read, respectively, as follows: GREED, LIAR, ARROGANCE, SELFISH, and INSOLENCE. Can anyone guess what my problem is with these words being grouped together? If not, I'll tell you. The first one is a noun describing a quality. The second is a noun describing a person. The third is once again a noun describing a quality. The fourth is a fucking adjective. And the fifth is, yet again, a noun describing a quality. If they had replaced LIAR with DISHONESTY and SELFISH with... well, GREED again, then the list would be grammatically consistent. But, as it is, the biggest sin being committed here is SHITTY WORD WRITING.

You know, I never bothered to think about this until now, but Bottom Floor is the first Dastoli Digital film I was ever involved in. It all happened the day they walked up to me after a class and said, "Don't shave for a few days. We need you to play a bum." Had they known how long it would take for my beard to come in at the time, they might not have bothered. I suppose we made up for this a year later, when I spent months growing a ridiculous beard to play a caveman in the dark for three seconds.

Here is what Robert has to say about Bottom Floor:

ROBERT:

"When we were making the black void section of Bottom Floor, we put the brightness of our monitor to the highest setting it could go to make sure that we had crushed the blacks enough so that it looked like a black void (we had shot it in a dark auditorium with a lot of seats in the background). Later in April, when the DVD had just been completed and we were showing it to a bunch of people on a very bright TV, we went absolutely crazy when we found out that we had not crushed the blacks enough (and our monitor could not be made bright enough) in a couple of shots and you could still see some of the faint shapes of the auditorium seats. That night we went back to those shots and crushed the blacks a little more. We didn't change the completion date of the movie to include this, as we deemed it an adjustment primarily for the DVD release (the web version was never changed)."

I was there that night, and watching James and Robert go crazy at this discovery was more entertaining than the movie. I can still remember James pointing his finger at Robert, exclaiming, "That is still a fucking useable dvd!" I guess they probably sent it to one of the crappier festivals no one cares about.

Here is what James has to say about Bottom Floor:

JAMES:

"If I had to do it all over again, I'd change at least four things: They really would be in front of a black void, the cigar would really be smoking, and the desks would really be there."

James, I think we both know that's bullshit.