Directing film keeps teen sane as he waits for a new heart

Charlie McDonough was worried about the chocolate syrup.

The syrup - a convincing substitute for blood on black-and-white film - must look exactly the same between shots or the film will look sloppy. And that's tricky when his actor keeps smearing the sticky mess on his face.

"Where's the chocolate?" McDonough shouts to his film crew. "Where's the chocolate?"

On this Sunday morning, McDonough is a pushy director, barking orders at his crew from behind hot studio lights. But any other day he would be in small room down the hall, idly waiting for a new heart.

"I could be expecting it, literally, any day," McDonough, wearing pajama bottoms and a Led Zeppelin t-shirt, said as he lounged in his hospital room the day before the big shoot.

McDonough, 19, was born with a congenital heart defect, meaning his weak heart isn't able to pump as much oxygen through his body as it should. With less oxygen flowing through his veins, he gets tired easily and often sounds slightly out of breath, as if he'd just sprinted up a staircase.

McDonough describes his life in numbers: He had 79 to 82 percent of normal oxygen levels until he was 13, when an operation brought it up to 88. But his heart has weakened recently, and he would be at 71 to 74 percent without the medication that is constantly being pumped into his body by a small machine he slings around his shoulder.

For McDonough, those few percentage points are the difference between being able to make a movie and being trapped, helpless with exhaustion, in his bed.

"This whole thing has been a battle," he said. "I want to live, and I want to do what I want to do."

Life on 8 East

A quick-witted teenager with shaggy hair and an infectious smile, McDonough is known to charm hospital staff into bending the rules for him.

Not long after moving into his one-bed hospital room in late November, McDonough set up an illicit "porch" in the hallway outside his room, complete with chairs and a table.

"They took it down, saying, 'You can't do that,'" McDonough said.

But he pleaded with hospital staff and was allowed to keep the set-up, so long as he brought in his furniture at night. He now spends much of his free time there, schmoozing with patients and nurses.

McDonough also has a one-of-a-kind shoulder strap for the toaster-sized machine that pumps drugs into his body. Shunning a hospital-issued fanny pack, McDonough originally fashioned a strap out of medical tape so he could hide the 8-pound pump under his shirt.

But when hospital staff found out about the invention, they told McDonough it was unsafe. Instead of forcing the fanny pack on him, maintenance workers fashioned a more-secure strap.

"Charlie tends to push the limits if he can, so you try to meet him halfway," said Sue Reidy, a nurse who has managed the cardiac wing of Children's Hospital Boston for 27 years.

To keep busy, McDonough takes the pump on daily laps around the floor. With the help of a nurse and a measuring tape, McDonough measured his figure-eight-shaped route through the wings and estimates 8.6 laps is equal to a mile. He tried to walk 4 miles a day.

"The worst time of the day is when I'm laying in bed, because that's when I'm not doing anything," he said. "As long as I stay productive, I feel like I do well."

But, as the oldest patient on the cardiac floor, McDonough still struggles to keep from going stir crazy in the small wing.

So during a recent lap, he began thinking about how the corridors and stairways of the hospital would fit into a storyboard he had long since abandoned. He talked to Reidy, who is also a Needham resident, and the charge nurse lobbied the hospital administration to allow the project.

"This is really his passion, and they've allowed him to do it," said McDonough's mother, Jane Kellogg. "I never though they would allow something like this."

Death on 'Floor 17'

Like McDonough himself, the main character in "Floor 17" is trapped on a hospital floor and must wrench his heart from the hands of death if he hopes to survive.

In the film, a man wakes up in an abandoned hospital and wanders through the deserted hallways. He descends a staircase, but realizes, with growing panic, that no matter how many stairs he climbs, he can't leave the 17th floor.

The man soon realizes Death, cloaked in black and wielding a skull-topped staff, is trailing him. As he flees through the deserted corridors, he comes across his own beating heart in a plastic bag, which he clutches in his pocket as he runs.

"It's pretty much these two character clashing against each other, but Death has the upper hand," McDonough explains. "You can't kill Death, because he's already dead."

In the final scene, Death stomps on the heart as the man crawls toward a light. With Death's final stomp, the man is jolted awake by a defibrillator, gasping for air in a hospital bed.

McDonough wrote the script last year and had planned to start filming last winter but had to shelf the project when his health worsened. So far, he has shot 12 rolls of 16-millimeter film, which he shows the nurses with a beat-up-looking film projector tucked into a corner of his hospital room.

The crew wrapped up filming Sunday, Dec. 30. The production took about a dozen takes, six actors and three hot studio lights.

McDonough is in his element on the on the chaotic set, peering through the camera to frame shots, reapplying chocolate syrup on actors' faces and fiddling with medical instruments.

He barely stops when his pump runs out of medicine and a nurse sneaks on to the set to change a syringe.

The wait