'Hold The Mayo'—Eagle Rock Comedy-Horror Short Film Screens Today

Who hasn’t heard the joke in which the punch line goes something like this: “If I told you, I’d have to kill you …”

Get rid of the qualifier “if,” substitute the word “kill” with “eat,” and you’ll have arrived at the premise of Hold The Mayo, a seven-and-a-half-minute film by Eagle Rock screenwriter, editor and producer Jeffrey Williams, which opens at the 14^th annual Dances With Films film festival at Laemmle Sunset 5 in West Hollywood today, Saturday, June 4.

On Friday, we wrote about Hold The Mayo and how it was filmed at Dave’s Grillin’ and Chillin,’ our neighborhood mecca for sandwiches.

Here, we tell you what inspired Williams to make this film, an “ode to frustration,” as he calls it, which revolves around an argument about a sandwich gone dreadfully wrong.

Williams—an independent TV editor and producer who is arguably Eagle Rock’s answer to Alfred Hitchcock—got the idea for Hold The Mayo during a particularly stressful day at work not long ago. He was standing in line at a Ralphs supermarket in the San Fernando Valley when he happened to watch an employee there make a crummy sandwich for an old lady.

“I saw that interaction and the whole story [for Hold The Mayo] came to me,” recalls Williams. There he was, in the middle of a bad day at work, witnessing a horrible sandwich being made by someone who couldn’t have been terribly happy with his own job.

“All my films are about being frustrated,” says Williams, echoing what many filmmakers believe is the bedrock of their craft: It’s conflict that drives a story forward.

But conflict, no matter how expertly presented, has its limits. Whatever else Hold The Mayo might be, it’s an intellectually challenging film that appears to test a viewer’s limits for extreme violence.

Add to that the fact that the entire narrative is an outlet for a single joke and you get some idea of what you’re up against while watching this film.

“I want people to walk out of this film, saying ‘what the hell was that?’” says Williams. “I want them to have a polarized reaction—to love it or hate it.”

This is one of those films that pulls you in and then, as Williams wholly intended, makes you go, “Oh God, that’s awful!”

Indeed, after watching Hold The Mayo, some viewers may find themselves uttering—or agreeing with—what a character says in one of the film’s most anticlimactic moments: “Dude, that’s f---ing disgusting.”