I made a movie back in 2010 called Dead Season. The first day of the shoot was drawing near and we still hadn’t found the girl to play the main part. My producer and I were starting to worry. We had seen so many people for the part and no one was working out. After he put up one more desperate Craigslist ad we decided to take a break and look at funny videos on-line to lighten the mood. After watching cats and corgis do silly things for a bit we started talking about a filmmaker we knew of from back in Boston where we went to school (We live in LA now) who made some really odd stuff and decided to look them up. We found their website and started clicking around on their videos. One video in particular made us laugh so hard we thought we were going to die. It was a fan video of Friday the 13th… and it was ridiculous. It started with girls kissing, getting naked, standing by a white van, and then getting killed by Jason. One of the actresses was hilariously bad and had a very silly fake name (I’ll call her Red Rosey Petal for now, since that is similar enough) and we watched her scenes over and over again until our eyes bled tears of joy. I can’t express in writing how amazingly awful it was. After that we moved on to a trailer to another film. This one looked really bad as well but the girl in the trailer caught my eye. I turned to the producer and said, “That girl there. She is the type of girl I want for the role. I want someone exactly like that. She is perfect!” The producer agreed, but we couldn’t figure out what her name was and we went back to doing some other work.
The next morning I woke up on the producer's couch with the laptop next to me after about an hour of sleep. The producer and I had to run an errand over at the SAG office, so we got up and headed out the door. As we drove back from SAG to the producer’s apartment I noticed a white van heading towards me in the other lane. I said, “That looks just like the van from the awful Friday the 13th video we watched last night.” As it got closer I said, “Hey the girl in that van looks like the girl from the awful Friday the 13th video we watched last night too.” The producer said, “I think it IS her!” We both stopped in traffic right next to each other. I rolled down my window and made her roll down hers and asked, ‘Hey, were you in a Friday the 13th fan video?” Shocked, she replied, “Yes…” I said back, “Is your name Red Rosey Petal?” She replied, “I am! You are the first person ever to recognize me in my entire life!” Then the light changed and we drove away as she watched us dumbfounded. The producer and I laughed like crazy at the odds that the girl from the random video we watched the night before that was made in Boston would happen to pull up next to us the next day. We drove back to the apartment.
Once inside, my producer sat down and checked his e-mail. We had received only one reply from any of the ads we put up the night before. The girl who responded had seen our post on Cragslist. We clicked on her resume and a link to some of the things she was in. It brought us directly to the website we had been looking at the night before. She was the girl I had randomly pointed to and said, “She is the type of girl I want for the role. She is perfect!” Out of all the people in the entire world… I pointed at ONE and the next day that ONE girl whose name I didn’t even know was the only person to respond to our ad. AND the other girl whose video we watched pulled up next to us in her van. Needless to say the girl who responded to the ad got the part and she is the star of Dead Season.