The Shooting of a Shoot-From-the-Hip Movie

The trail from story conception to the big screen is usually a long and arduous one. It took “Batman” nine years to get there. In the case of “The Unsinkable Shecky Moskowitz,” it took three months.

“Shecky Moskowitz,” the story of a cruise-ship waiter who dreams of taking over the job of the ship’s comic, is a comedy that was filmed almost entirely on board a small, weathered cruise ship that sailed in May from New Orleans to Cancun, Mexico, with a cargo of 50 beauty queens. The $800,000 film took three days to write, a day to cast, two days to prepare and a week of on-board shooting plus two days of pick-up shots.

The main character in “Shecky Moskowitz” is a waiter (MTV’s Adam Sandler) who receives comic instruction from the Guru of Comedy, portrayed in a brief uncredited cameo by Milton Berle. The film’s cast includes Burt Young (“Rocky”) as Gen. Noriega, who is intent on assassinating one of the beauties for saying that he smells like a pizza (“What kind of a pizza?” one of his aides asks). His mistress is portrayed by movie veteran Terry Moore.

“The film has a bizarre thesis,” said Young, whose scenes were shot in Los Angeles after the cruise. “When they told me how it came about, I had to help them. I like young film makers who make things happen. They had no money. When I showed up to shoot my scenes at Paramount, we didn’t even get into the studio. They could only afford to rent the tip of a building outside the studio gates.”

Theater audiences who want to grab the film by first-time writer-director Valerie Breiman will have to get up early in the morning. The Nuart Theater in West Los Angeles has agreed to make room for the film, in between its heavy schedule of Oscar-qualifying screenings, today and Sunday at 10:30 a.m.

The unusual film project got started when independent producer Randolf Turrow was asked to judge a teen beauty pageant in Palm Springs. As a publicity stunt, the pageant promoters were renting a cruise ship and packing it with current and former beauty contest winners from across the United States.

“They said they didn’t have enough guys going on the boat,” Turrow said. “So I decided to call some of my friends and put together a crew to film this ocean quest. The deal was a free cruise, all expenses paid, in the Caribbean.”

Before setting sail, Turrow telephoned a friend in Texas, Mark Schultz, who agreed to put up the film’s production and distribution budget, hoping to cash in on his investment in theaters and video rights.

Six days before cast-off, all Turrow needed was a script. He turned to Breiman, an actress and aspiring screenwriter who is one of the female leads in his last film, “A Tale of Two Sisters.”

“The insanity of the whole thing was trying to shoot the whole film in six days,” said co-producer Adam Rifkin, who plays a sleazy rock star. “The key was to kick in the adrenaline and don’t even think that it can’t be done.”