2002 Great Lakes Independent Film Festival

Diet

World Premiere
Category: Narrative Short 13min 33sec
Director: Mike Meiners

A tale of power struggles in the contemporary American family. A midwestern husband (with a proper midwestern love for meat) finds himself in the clutches of a forced diet mandated by his wife. Desperately longing for a taste of greasy, fatty steak but unable to stand up to his wife’s threats, blackmail and bland salads, the husband takes to trolling for half-eaten burgers in the company trash. Unfortunately, his wife has him followed and every time he gets near a piece of juicy sumptuous flesh, there’s someone lurking in the shadows.

Plagued by repeated carnivorous interuptus and tortured by the planning of a barbecue he knows he can’t attend, the husband breaks, fleeing his house in search of joyous, artery-clogging meat. With his wife on the treadmill, he has six minutes to get out, get some meat, and get back in.

Principal Cast:
Jeff Clampitt(Husband)
Debbie Kellogg(Wife)
Joanna Briese(Receptionist)
Mike Meiners(Cashier)

Director: Mike Meiners“DIET” is the first film Mike has directed.
As an actor, he trained at Northwestern and The Second City Training Center, and performed at Chicago’s ImprovOlympic on Inside Vladimir with SNL’s Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.
After earning a Master’s degree in architecture in 2000, Mike opened Studio T/K to make creativity his job: designing, building, writing, and performing.

Last August, Mike began “DIET” as Studio T/K’s first film. Mike wrote, produced, and directed the movie, designed and built the film’s dream-sequence set, designed and animated the film’s opening animation and did the graphic design for the film’s promotional materials.