By Writer/Director Stuart Archer
The first time was a few months ago, while playing volleyball on the beach in Venice. Except that it was an actual bolt that hit me… literally, a lightning bolt ripped through the sky and knocked me and 13 others to our feet. It’s true. Google it. The second was more metaphorical, and it was the moment I realized I was stuck, not struck – Stuck.
I’ve had my fair share of online dating. At first it was embarrassing, then kinda interesting, but now it’s like a relationship in it itself. It’s on-again. It’s off-again. It’s reluctantly longer than expected. Oh my God! I’m in a relationship… with JDate.
So I began to think about this idea, how we are all “Stuck” in our ways, our judgments, our dating behaviors. ” I became obsessed with this concept, probably because they say “write what you know.” What would happen if we held up a mirror, forcing us to face our biggest obstacles in the dating world – ourselves. THAT was the inspiration for my new film entitled, #STUCK.
#Stuck is about GUY, played by Joel David Moore (Avatar, Jewtopia, Forever) and HOLLY, played by Madeline Zima (Californication, The Nanny) whom after having a one-night stand, get #STUCK in a dead-stopped traffic jam the morning after — forced to get to know each other.
On any other day, each would retreat to their lives, drunk from both the night before, and a cocktail of regret and self-loathing (sound familiar anyone?). Yet on this day, a moment that should have never happened, forces these two strangers to stop, and actually look at each other. I mean really see each other. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of someone really seeing you for who you are, you’d settle for nothing less. You’d fight for it. No doubt, it’s what drives the auto-renewal setting on my JDate account.
Years back, a little story that’s now become semi-famous recounts the time I met film critic Roger Ebert, which led to him giving a favorable review of my film Bobby Loves Mangos. However, I had to take pretty extreme measures to get him to see it. As it turned out to be fortuitous, I’ve decided to adopt the same risk-taking to love. How else are we going to find it, if we aren’t willing to risk it? Hence, by making Guy and Holly, the characters in #Stuck, void of this modus operandi (like the best of us), it will hopefully resonate with the JDaters of the world.
Now, as my film #STUCK opens, I am hoping it will inspire others (including myself) to stop – and see. To consider that otherwise dismissible match, and see them not for what they are, but for what they could be – minus the one-night-stand, or course. After all, lightning just may strike twice.
