2 years ago

Welcome to a very special Day 5 edition of Up Close and Uncomfortable! When it came time to think about which prodding question we should ask the Day 5 cast and crew, there was only one option:





What’s the longest amount of time you’ve ever stayed awake, and why?





Joel Heyman (Bill)

Ironically, the longest I’ve gone without sleep is about five days, which was actually during the filming of Day 5.





The worst part of staying awake for five straight days is the stitches (the tetanus shot was’t too bad, actually). I should clarify, the worst part of staying awake for three straight days is hitting your face against a concrete parking lot while at full sprint at 11:00 at night while the crew is trying to film a shot. Don’t get me wrong, it makes for a great shot, but it’s really not worth all the paperwork.





Despite all the paperwork, and the not really sleeping again part, Day 4 isn’t too bad. This is where you get all the sympathy from the crew and passers-by. They’ll say things like, “What happened to your face?!” and “Has the makeup department seen that?!”





Day 4 is the exciting day because this is when all the siphoning of gasoline takes place. (Spoiler alert: my character does this at one point.) Have you ever siphoned gasoline from a real live gasoline tank from a real live ‘96 Ford Mustang? Go for the 97 octane, that’s where all the buzz is at. You’ll say things like, “Where day am I?” and “How numbers work?”





You’ll also get to hear things from the director like (this really happened), “Joel, suck harder.” (This is in reference to the aforementioned siphoning, and most definitely not anything else.)





Needless to say, Day 5 is awesome. I didn’t sleep that day either, because it doesn’t really matter at that point because you won’t remember it, and also, you’re probably dead anyway. Despite being dead, I was told there IS actually footage of Day 5, so I guess I did live after all, and was able to accomplish my lifelong goal of being awake for five days straight.





So, in closing:

- Tylenol 3

- Chris yells at people

- Day 5 is awesome





Stephanie Drapeau (Ally)









Sleeplessness isn't something I welcome. Actually, I avoid it at all cost. But flash back to my childhood, and I had a very different stance. My first sleepless experiences were born of a challenge designed to revolt against all parental-imposed rules... a challenge that if I won, I felt would define my sense of independence. But even within the context of candy-fueled slumber parties and all-consuming laugh attacks, I failed miserably. Sleep inevitably had its way by 2 am and all hopes for a superhuman childhood were deflated.





Flash forward to my teenage years where I found less-than-recommendable methodologies to help this process along. Here, it was all-night raves and other rebellious feats that allowed me to survive (though barely) a couple of sleepless nights in a row. I unequivocally don't suggest trying this, by the way, as my triumph of sleeplessness was, in essence, a disaster of sorts.





College presented its own night-bender-challenges. By that point in my life, I understood that memory consolidation had a direct relationship to sleep, so I avoided the age-old practice of cramming as best as I could. But the ideal born of my understanding didn't always pan out, especially when my studies and my social life collided, leaving me in a sleepless puffy-eyed haze.





Since then, one could call me a total wimp in the sleepless arena. Since I no longer have parents to revolt against and my sleep-deficient experiments have left me less-than-wanting for further exploration, I relish in a good 8 hour snooze session. These days, there are few things worthy of trading in my sleep for, but I'll throw in the towel when it comes to filming. I suppose the buzz of filmmaking keeps me ticking despite the diminished hours on the pillow. In light of that, the Day 5 sleep-deprived nights were manageable. In fact, within the context of the story at hand, I actually sort of welcomed it; or at least, I didn't fight it. It was nice to finally have a scenario where the more tired I felt and the more haggard I looked, the more believable I could be. This is the only time I've ever had this luxury, so I milked it for what it was worth. Or maybe... when all was said and done... this Day 5 bout of sleeplessness was just the kid in me still kicking; a kid looking for a good excuse to break the mold... to find a cause worthy of kicking the body-clock to the curb and calling in the slumber party!





Walker Satterwhite (Sam)









The longest I ever stayed up was 24 hours. It was the last day of 6th grade and I decided to stay up all night! I took a 2 liter Dr Pepper, popcorn, and a huge bag of Sour Patch Kids to my room and binge watched YouTube videos until 7:00 a.m. I felt pretty accomplished, but compared to my character Sam on Day 5, it was an epic fail!





Jesse C. Boyd (Jake)









The longest I have ever stayed awake was for almost two days. I was filming on a shoot in North Carolina that ended up being a 12-hour day. Then I had to get into a car and drive two hours to the airport and fly to Chicago to shoot another 13-hour day.





I couldn't sleep on the plane. The adrenaline after a shoot always keeps me awake, and of course I had to prepare for the following shoot. It was my first day on that set and it was snowing and freezing cold. I didn't really have time to think about how tired I was until that final shot of the night. Immediately after the final cut, I felt like a zombie. I slept very heavily that night.





I actually am one of those people who doesn't need a lot of sleep – five hours and I'm good – but I definitely need those five hours or I am a complete nightmare.





Lee Eddy (Lex)









I was awake for 72 hours straight when I was in labor. It took that long for my kid to decide to make his way-past-due entrance.





As awful as it may sound, I enjoyed passing the time. We (me, husband, and soon-to-be-born son listening in) binged an entire season of House Of Cards, some Breaking Bad, watched Galaxy Quest, and even studied a couple of Lamaze videos on YouTube (as we had not really studied up on the technique and figured it was a good time to do so).





We tried to ignore the piercing screams of women in other rooms while simultaneously tuning intently in for the teeny baby cries that instantly followed the most blood curdling screeches I've ever heard. Our doctor came in a couple times and we had many small talk conversations. I recall that he'd just bought a couch prior to coming in and there was discussion about the benefits of microfiber cushions. Very heady stuff.





Finally, the kid decided he could hang with us face-to-face. The YouTube Lamaze videos came in handy, and after it was all said and done with, I had a kick ass baby that I got to take home. Win!





I've barely slept since. (<--- obligatory new parent joke)





Katie Folger (Meredith)









A year ago at this time was NUTSO NUTS NUTS! I was shooting a feature called The Honor Farm which was one whole month of overnight shoots in the woods, which leaves you with a billion bug bites, a little cranky, and feeling really out of your mind – which probably could have been very helpful leading up to this shoot now that I think about it, hahaha. We were like freaking vampires, waking up at 4pm and going to bed at 7am every single day…for a MONTH.





But the real kicker is, two days before I started shooting this film, there was a MASSIVE flood in Austin, and I happened to live in a one bedroom at the time that was in THE lowest valley of the city – and my car was taken out, and the entire complex was surrounded by like nine feet of water. Noah’s ark type of shit. So… they were doing repairs on my complex the whole time of the shoot, and because I was sleeping during the day, they were BANGING HAMMERS EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. I was SO mad, I remember stomping on the floor like a child to make it very clear I wasn’t happy with the noise, hehehehe. In retrospect, all hilarious, these misfortunes.





And the final piece of this magical story is that the last day of shooting that film, we wrapped around 11pm – and I, the extremist that I tend to be, had decided after this shoot I wanted to go to Europe and travel by myself for two months. So I had to catch a flight to Europe at 5AM the next day. I didn’t go to sleep that night, ‘cause I was celebrating the wrap and the journey ahead with my friends at a bar, and then I went to go see a dude I was kinda seeing at the time (extremist AND a romantic, WHAT A COMBO)! So then there I was, on almost a twenty four hour journey of flights to Germany. The great thing about it was I was basically knocked out the entire time, and I never sleep on flights. And then… JET LAG!





So... it felt like I didn’t really sleep for three months. I don’t think I recovered from this erratic sleep pattern until February of this year. Then I started unashamedly sleeping in until 10 every day.





The end. XO





Jen Brown (Beth)











I've had a love-hate relationship with insomnia on and off for most of my life. It resulted in a lot of half-done art projects at 3:00 a.m., watching terrible-yet-comforting ‘80s VHS movies (usually Tapeheads because watching a young John Cusack and Tim Robbins is like a big warm hug), and half-heartedly attempting to organize my room and then getting distracted when I inevitably found something I thought was gone for good.





There was one especially memorable bad string where I slept maybe a total of five hours over the course of three days. When I wasn't attempting to sleep, I was binge watching MASH like it was my job. Keep in mind, this was before I had every streaming device ever, so it was all via basic cable late night marathons. I eventually fell asleep on the third day, and I remember dreaming about Alan Alda in variously strange situations for like three straight nights afterward. But, that is far from the worst thing on earth because Alan Alda is the boss.





Josh Flanagan (Executive Producer, Co-creator, Director, Writer)

I did a few 48 hour stints when I was in the army. You do these 24-hour guard shifts where you're required to stay awake, and there's usually a threshold around 3 or 4 in the morning where you're ready to crash... but once you press through you're suddenly not tired anymore. I did one over Easter weekend once, guarding an ammo surplus. We watched Mean Girls 3 times on one of those portable DVD players. My entire infantry platoon stopped what they were doing to watch. True story. Moral of the story, you don't get a lot of sleep in the army. And none for Gretchen Weiners.





Chris Demarais (Co-creator, Writer, Director)

Lack of sleep is commonplace in college, but there was one particular time that nearly killed me. A week of finals was climaxing with the deadline for an episode of The Wingmen, a comedy show I produced at the student TV station. I had not slept in over two days, and as I edited at 2:00 a.m., I felt myself start to shut down, unable to function.





However, my good friends Brad and Zach Anner encouraged me to keep going so we wouldn't miss our deadline and risk losing our prime-time spot on the channel. I pushed on, but eventually hit a breaking point.





"Guys, you can wake me up in an hour. We'll still have enough time, I think."





They protested, but nothing could stop me as I plopped into Zach's bed, instantly asleep.





Unbeknownst to me, my two "friends" sprang into action, changing all of the clocks in the house up three hours and hiding my phone. They then shook me awake.





"Chris, wake up, you overslept! It's almost 5:00 a.m. and Aaron needs to start exporting it in two hours!"





"Man, I feel so weird. Like I barely slept at all." But with our deadline looming, I dove back into the edit, working faster than ever.





After a couple hours, I started to panic. "Call Aaron, guys, he should be here by now. It's past seven."





Then, looking out the window, I continued, "Wow, I can't believe the sun isn't up. I guess the days are starting to get a lot shorter."





With their ploy falling apart, the guys finally let me know why they weren’t as worried about running out of time. And I laughed it off, because even though my friends are assholes, we suddenly had two extra hours to make our deadline.





Barbara Dunkelman (Flip)

The longest I’ve stayed awake was about 36 hours. And why? You can probably guess… University finals. I was the type of kid who procrastinated like crazy, and every year I would tell myself “you’re going to start studying weeks in advance, you’re going to review your notes every week, you’re going to do all your projects weeks before they’re due…” Yeah, didn’t do a single one of those. Sorry Mom and Dad. So, of course, here I am two days before my finals in both accounting and finance, and I don’t honestly know a single thing. I ended up basically living at my school library. I’d leave every few hours to get food or to look at the sunlight, but ended up being there for and studying for 36 hours, and then straight into my exams.





I don’t remember the exams, I don’t remember anything from Finance or Accounting, but I DO remember ordering a chai tea latte at Starbucks and calling it a “tai chi” latte and getting laughed at. I think I slept for 17 hours after I got home.





Aaron Marquis (Porn Star 2)

When I was a senior in college, about fifty years ago, I took an experimental production class with Chris during the winter called "The Uncanny." It was one of those joke/hippie courses where the teacher walks in with no plan, encourages others to share their thoughts and feelings, no matter how stupid and unrelated they are to the class, and anything and everything is considered "art."

Anyway, it came time for Chris and me to make our final project, and we decided that we were going to strut our stuff and make TWO videos. Both would deal with cannibalism (which is uncanny), and one of them would be in 3-D (which is fucking sweet).





Right. Well, we shot the videos and started editing them about a week before they were due and quickly ran into a problem – editing a 3-D movie takes a hell of a lot of time. The computers just couldn't handle it. And Chris and I, having done a lot of production work, ran the numbers to figure out what we'd have to do to get the project done. It didn't look good.





For the next three days, we wouldn't be sleeping. I mean really not sleeping. There was literally no time for it if we wanted to finish the videos. So, we loaded up on energy drinks, coffee, and sugar, and got to work in the frigid, dark little editing room at school. It was the hardest thing I've ever done to my body.





Actually, the first 30 hours weren't so bad. You get tired, sure, but your body really does kick in its second, third, and even fourth winds. It's after that 30 hours that things get interesting. First, it's auditory hallucinations, which you think would be fun, but are actually irksome when you're editing. It's impossible to mix audio when you hear your grandma yelling at you about coming to Thanksgiving, especially when she's been dead for five years. After that, visual things happen. For me, it was moving shadowy figures in my peripheral vision. Bogeymen. Weird stuff. After a few hours of that, you find that your head is sort of floating above your body, as if it's a balloon and your neck is a string.





I looked over at Chris and used him as a sort of mirror to judge how I must look. Big mistake. He looked like a victim of some incurable disease – dark eye circles, clammy pale skin, twitchy, covered in herpes. I'm not sure if the last one was due to lack of sleep. Anyway, we were both in bad shape.





Then something happened. We were nearly finished with the project, and on the brink of involuntarily shutting down, when the door to the editing bay burst open. In the doorway stood a man wearing a green felt elf outfit with a twinkle in his eye. He said his name was "Napkin the Elf" and that he had a Christmas miracle to tell everyone: it was snowing outside. In Texas.





Chris looked at me. Was this real? He and I got up – the first time in hours – and followed Napkin outside. As soon as we got out, we felt thousands of little fluffy snowflakes settling on our heads. It was beautiful, quiet. Napkin ran around clicking his belled heels, while I lay on my back and let the snow cover me, not knowing if I'd fallen asleep hours ago and was dreaming.





Chris and I finished the project an hour before class and presented it to our disinterested peers. After we finished, we still had to sit through eight hours of presentations, which means Chris quickly fell asleep. I couldn't wake him up the rest of class and decided to leave him there after it was all over. I proceeded to go home and sleep for 36 hours.





Five days without sleep? I barely lived through three.





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Day 5 premieres Sunday, June 19, at 4:00 p.m. CT. The first episode will be available to the public, so spread the word!