Errand Boys is a dry comedy about Martin (Justin Lader) and Shorty (Diego Kontarovsky), two inept hitmen trying to pull off a simple job. Considering how close I was to the production, it's difficult for me to say how successfully it was pulled off. James in particular is extremely critical of his performance at the end, but I have always found it appropriately hilarious. And the rest seems to work fine. But in order to judge how good it is, we must examine the story.

It all started with James and Robert's basic premise, which detailed the beginning of the scene in the car where we have to kill someone, but can't read the name correctly. Justin and I developed ideas for the individual characters' personalities and started taking it in an undetermined direction. For a while, we couldn't think of an appropriate ending. At one point, I suggested Shorty taking the money to a hooker, but having the hooker figure out that it's counterfeit. I think my subconscious reasoning behind that was that after his friend died, Shorty would end the movie by doing the most useless, inept thing possible. Eventually, we landed on the ending as it is now. Its success, I suppose, is up to the viewer, but I think the only important thing is that neither errand boy ends up anywhere near Rio. In retrospect, maybe we probably should've played up the lofty goal of Rio a little more, as we considered it the boys' ultimate driving force.

You might wonder why there is no script on the Errand Boys website. This is mainly because every dialogue-driven scene was improvised on set. But we did have a physical script in the form of an outline we printed out, that James and Robert sketched little storyboards on. When we finished shooting, one of them threw it away in the waste paper basket they had in their dorm. Feeling an emotional attachment to it, I pulled it out of the trash and took it home. Sometime later in our lives, James and Robert asked me for that copy because there seemed to be no other existing version of the script, and they wanted to put it online. At this point, I couldn't remember where I put it, but I knew it was somewhere in my apartment. As of this writing (more than 2 years later), I still have not located it. But when I do, hoo boy.

Here is what the Dastolis have to say about Errand Boys:

ROBERT:

"Errand Boys is one of the only projects where we can place the exact date and location for when the concept was born. It was December 12, 2003, and we were sitting in Orlando International Airport waiting for our flight back to JFK to go home to Stamford, Connecticut. I think the dialogue between James and I included something like 'we should make something with Justin and Diego in it,' and then hitmen, bumbling fools, and Donny Copeland were thrown in."

JAMES:

"Justin and Diego asked us to delay one of the shoots by a week. We told them we couldn't because of deadlines. It could have been an entirely different movie if we had delayed it, and it is interesting to postulate on where the differences would have been. Of course, had we waited, Matt London's epic trailer to The Guardians would never have been able to be completed."

Thank God for that.

You know, writing these reviews has made me realize how lucky I am to have lived out the dream of murdering Donny Copeland on screen. Yes, I criticize his acting a lot, and to be fair, I leave my own acting up for criticism. The only thing I must say in my defense is that when Dastolis were shooting Justin over my shoulder in the car, I wasn't so much acting as I was just saying the lines for Justin, thinking in my head that all my real coverage was going to happen later. Then, they did one take of me and were ready to pack it up because the sun was moving. Luckily, they ended up getting more takes. I only tell this story to illustrate exactly how haphazard some of these Dastoli Digital shoots really are. As James explains above, Justin and I didn't even want to shoot it that weekend, but trying to get James to delay a shoot by a week is like trying to run a crooked racket while one of his protagonists is around. It ain't gonna happen.