Joel Silver Assistant Premieres Hollywood Industry Spoof

One of the major advantages of attending USC film school is the connections that can be made. In the case of aspiring filmmaker and current Silver Productions employee Kirk Sullivan, among the people he got to know was future USA Network star Patrick J. Adams (Suits).

As a result, it is Adams who stars in Sullivan's ten-minute comedy short The Come Up, a spoof of the Hollywood big-budget production process that premiered tonight at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts in New York.

Shot over three days last December on the Warner Bros. lot and at Culver Studios, it comes with a savvy synopsis that sounds very much like it was written by a Tinseltown insider:

Steve (Adams), the inexhaustible PA working on-set for the biggest producer in Hollywood (Michael Pare), finds himself thrust into the action when a masked bandit takes off with the production's petty cash. Maneuvering through every department and making use of equipment in hilarious ways, Steve's chase across the movie studio turns into a wild ride through the world of filmmaking itself. The challenge for Steve is to recover the money, save the day... and somehow get his own screenplay in the hands of the producer. This sure is a tough town.

It must have been somewhat surreal for Sullivan to make his $25,000 short in between working as an assistant to Joel Silver on the sets of Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows and next year's Bullet to the Head. Not bad for a guy who just turned 30 and hails from the very small town of Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks.

An LA premiere date is still being finalized. Sullivan recently told a New York public radio station that he got the idea for his short while working on the 2010 action film The Losers with Chris Evans, where a lot of petty cash was flowing.