Elisabeth Sperling has a B.A. from Harvard University, an M.A. from Columbia Teachers College, held an endowed chair in the history department at the Horace Mann School in New York, and was awarded a Klingenstein Fellowship for a year’s study at Columbia University and a Fulbright Fellowship to China. She has been working in documentary filmmaking since 2005, and has worked on such films as The Witnesses, Perfect Disasters, Jewish-Americans for Obama, and Scapegoat on Trial, prior to One Night Stand, which will be her first as director.

Trish Dalton has directed and produced pieces for Amazon, Kashi, Danskin, About.com, Beiersdorf, Pepsi, Cossette, IDEO, illy, Cole Haan, and National Geographic. Recently, she directed and produced Bordering on Treason, Southmost U.S.A, and One Night Stand. She was also involved in various roles with Keras & Manis, Why Are We In Afghanistan, Farm Sanctuary, and Tiffany’s Story. Her films have been been featured at a variety of festivals and have won numerous awards. Today, she is traveling the nation to create documentaries of small businesses.

Elisabeth and Trish introduced the project that One Night Stand catalogs, the 24 hour musical, and how it comes together. They discussed how a group of successful and well-known writers, composers, actors, and others comes together for a 24 hour period, and envisions, writes, practices, and puts on a musical in New York to benefit charity. These people have usually never worked together either. Clearly, there are myriad challenges involved in this process, as creativity and then production must be accomplished in a very condensed timeframe. There are a great many lessons for all innovators in this show, and Ms. Sperling and Ms. Dalton particularly stressed the necessity of coming up with new ideas in the same way that improv works – nobody every says “that’s a bad idea,” they always say “yes, and also…” and in this way, everyone’s ideas come out and are developed by the group.

One Night Stand is available through iTunes at the following link https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/one-night-stand/id594398288?ls=1 and the film’s Facebook page is at https://www.facebook.com/OneNightStandTheMovie.