It was spring, when a young man's thoughts turn to the eternal conflct of the vagina vs. religious guys in white shirts.

Or something.  Last April (2005), five enterprising characters with precisely that on their minds descended on the Where Eagles Dare theatre in midtown Manhattan, stripped it to the walls, and set about filming the nine-minute short film Raw Power.  The five characters were Dan Roentsch (writer/director), Charles Willey (actor), Karen Rosario (actor), Sal Parlanti (camera operator), and Gaspare "Gap" Corollo (assistant camera), and of the five only Roentsch had lived with the project for more than a week.

An idea, a script, a re-write, a bunch of re-writes, a storyboard and some other pre-production later, Roentsch was ready to cast. Finding the man to play "the man" was easy. New York theatre and film veteran Charles Willey was in Roentsch's mind as the character from the very beginning. Roentsch and Willey had studied acting together at Syracuse University many, many moons earlier, and had worked together on several projects during and after.

Finding the woman was harder. "The woman" was based on a character in Roentsch's LumpenBlog! — the character "Moliere" — but LumpenBlog! is a comic novel of sorts and Raw Power was to be, well, not comical. Roentsch offered the part to two actors before finding Karen Rosario at an open audtion for film actors and students at the New York Film Academy.  Rosario read the script, took the part, and put the ball gag in her mouth.

A veteran of Off- and Off-Off Broadway for close to twenty years, Roentsch knew that nearly every theatre space in Manhattan, when stripped to the walls, looks like somebody's cellar. Walls painted black, windows painted out ... but with very high ceilings and a lighting grid. So he contacted John Chatterton, the manager of the Where Eagles Dare Theatre (about a block from Madison Square Garden), and booked the theatre and studio space. After three days of rehearsal, Raw Power was shot in thirteen hours spread over two days.

Raw Power was shot on a Panasonic DVX-AG100A camera, and edited on a Mac using Final Cut and Motion.