Spit Me Out - A Musical
On her way out of town for good, Dina—a bubblegum-chewin’ fast-talkin’ queer grifter—makes a surprise pit stop to convince her beloved Bev to escape “the pious throttle of their small town church” (Dina’s words). But Bev—the assistant pastor with quiet charm and dry wit—isn’t so sure about leaving everything behind. Amidst escalating scrutiny from the zealous congregation, the couple wrestles with their uncertain future as they discover that even as we brokenly rip one another to shreds, each of us is aching to know love, forgiveness... and goddammit, a little bit of grace.
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Lauren LudwigDirector
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Tova KatzWriter
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Tova KatzComposer
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Juju LelliottProducer
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Matthew AndrewsProducer
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Jeffrey SimonProducer
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Kaia FerrariProducer
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Tova KatzKey Cast"Dina"
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Ilia Isorelýs PaulinoKey Cast"Bev"
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Becca BlackwellKey Cast"Pastor Paulie"
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Diana WyennChoreographer
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Ludovica IsidoriCinematographer
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Project Type:Short
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Genres:Musical, Comedy, LGBTQ+
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Runtime:24 minutes
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Completion Date:September 6, 2024
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Production Budget:100,000 USD
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Country of Origin:United States, United States
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Country of Filming:United States, United States
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Language:English
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Shooting Format:Digital
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Aspect Ratio:16:9
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:No
Lauren Ludwig (all pronouns) is a queer writer/director who specializes in comedy, interactive storytelling and creating communities for artists. Lauren uses magical realism, ritual, music, jokes, discomfort, film and live performance to ask: How do we save ourselves and each other? Lauren recently directed a pilot at FX for a metaphysical half-hour comedy that they created. They also directed American Auto on NBC, and wrote and produced Heart Shot, a queer action short for Netflix. Their indie pilot Everyone Together was an official selection at SXSW 2020 and won “Best Comedy Pilot” at SeriesFest 2020. Joyfully hopping across mediums, Lauren directed and produced Ex-Girlfiend, an animated short form series for Cake on FXX. Deeply passionate about interactive storytelling, Lauren is a founder, writer, and director for the award-winning immersive theater company Capital W. Their work has won “Best Overall Immersive Work” (Hollywood Fringe, 2017), “Best Game Design” (IndieCade Festival, 2016), and their adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet-Mobile, was published in Best Plays from American Theater Festivals (Applause, 2015). They directed the VR short film Girl which was released by the Tribeca Film Institute x Google. Lauren was a participant in NBC’s Female Forward as well as AFI’s Directing Workshop for Women. When not making their own work, Lauren is committed to helping other artists birth theirs. They were the Director of AFI’s Directing Workshop for Women and a founder of Wayward, a week-long creative retreat in the Canadian wilderness for artists of marginalized genders.
I’m fascinated by stories of people fighting against the thing they want the most.
Living in LA, it’s easy to naively imagine that you can live an out queer life anywhere now. But what if your home is remote or religious or opposes who you know yourself to be? How do you navigate the heart-breaking discord between community and self?
When I read and heard SPIT ME OUT, I knew it was an exploration of these eternally relevant themes that I’d never seen before. As a longtime student of American Christianity and its wide-ranging impact on our daily lives, I’m empathetic to the segment of people who seek transcendence and divinity in rigid strictures. When this is your cultural inheritance, breaking from it to forge a direct relationship with yourself, freedom, and God can seem impossible. Add in the recent spate of anti-LGBTQ+ laws across the nation, and a path forward can seem unclear and unsafe. These are such important questions—particularly for queer Christians—but I’ve rarely seen them explored on film. And definitely never in a musical.
Musicals are a format founded on the pleasures of variety, and Tova Katz’s incredible script, music and lyrics embrace that lineage. To meet the material, we gleefully drew on a gargantuan range of cinematic influences—from the gender-fucking camp of John Waters to the wide-eyed cinematography of SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN to the expressionist western energy of THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY to the textured realism of Andrew Haigh’s romances. How could a story about the contradictions of gay life in deep Texas draw on less? Queer stories always contain jagged edges and incongruities. Our lives and bodies are genre-bending by nature. In SPIT ME OUT, we aimed to step outside the oppressive insistence on tonal consistency that dogs so much mainstream American cinema and let the story, music, and themes shift our world moment to moment.
We hope it adds up to nothing less than the whole spectrum of the queer emotional experience in 24 minutes and one dream ballet—or at least just a relevant story about one pastor and her grifter ex deciding it’s time to stop fighting what they want the most.