Making Room for Mom

So what do you do when your mom is a terrible actress, but you still want to use her in your next short film? If you're Robert Machoian, you cast her as the corpse.

Machoian (born Robert Graham), along with Northern California filmmaking collective colleague Rodriguo Ojeda-Beck, is at the 2011 Los Angeles Film Festival for June 22nd and 25th screenings of the pair's latest short, Waiting Room. Machoian's 65-year-old dad Bruce (pictured below) stars alongside mom Suzette as a man struggling to deal with the immediate first moments of a tragic personal loss.

Bruce Graham, also 65

Besides a number of other short films made under their banner 433 Pictures, Machoian and Ojeda-Beck have an intriguing web series project called American Nobodies. It's all about ordinary people who have accomplished extraordinary things, with new, compact voiceover profile pieces posted every Monday night at 9 p.m. when the show is in season.

Here's a recent episode, “Matthew,” about a guy who managed to bowl a perfect game in 2002:



Waiting Room debuted in April at the Dallas International Film Festival, where 433 shorts have screened three years running. Machoian and Ojeda-Beck, with sound assistance from Machoian's brother Ian, see themselves as experimental artists and favor a multi-media process that allows each piece of work to manifest itself organically.

[433 Pictures]