During a tour of the hotel, Weiss stumbled across a blueprint of the ballroom and photographed it. The filmmakers studied the schematics for potential entry points. Feeling that their plan to sneak in through the kitchen was foolproof, all three decided to crash. Ten minutes after entering the news conference, they were caught.
Weiss handed over his camera's media card and Torro forfeited his camera's tape; all three gave their driver's license information to Beverly Hills police but were not arrested.
"It was absolutely terrifying," Weiss said. "Luckily, we hadn't gone to the effort to do much preparation. We didn't forge a production pass. So we just looked like three idiots. That saved us."
After the Golden Globes, the men knew that they had to be more careful. Weiss became the sole infiltrator, and had no problems crashing the Screen Actors Guild Awards in late January 2008 at the Shrine.
A month later, they stormed the Grammys, fashioning a crude access badge out of the gramophone logo from a pack of commemorative Grammys playing cards. Once again, Weiss breezed by security.
But heading into what they call the "Mt. Everest of party crashes" -- the Academy Awards -- the filmmakers weren't sure they could pull it off. They assumed Globes producers had tipped off Oscars organizers about their stunt.
Nevertheless, Weiss began casing the Kodak Theatre. Taking digital photos of its back doors and alleyways, he familiarized himself with its entrances, looking for potential security weaknesses. He concluded that the theater was "like a suit of armor" with the rear end exposed. The loading dock entrance was his best bet.
They also decided that Weiss would play characters this time. Magid called it the Method-acting approach to crashing. They searched online photos of Academy Award nominees and came across Alexander Petrov, a Russian animation director whom Weiss vaguely resembled. Weiss then spent idle moments practicing a Russian accent.
"My back story was twofold," Weiss recalled. "I was an assistant who had to run out to the car to get the call sheets and bring them to the show's producer. But when I got backstage, I knew I had to get my badge off as soon as possible. Then my goal was to switch roles" to be the Russian nominee.
On the day of the show last February, Torro and Magid photographed an Oscars worker's access badge to create a realistic-looking forgery on their laptop.
