Party people, raise your gimlets aloft: Northern Lights assistant editor Scott Rankin has won top honors at AICE New York's Trailer Park competition. Now in its third year, the annual contest requires editors to reconfigure a popular film into one from a totally different genre. Last year's event saw PS260's Robert Ryang ingeniously reinvent The Shining into a sappy story about a fatherless child and a frustrated author. Rankin's big idea? To recast the Tom Cruise cheesewheel known as Cocktail as a Bollywood romp. Here's how it all came together:

Be honest: how many times had you seen Cocktail before taking on this project?
I can't lie; if I were trapped on a desert island, and could take only one film, it would be Cocktail. That film has it all: views, Cruise and booze.

How did you come up with the basic idea to combine Cocktail with Bollywood?
I happened to be watching it at the time I read the contest guidelines; I got about 20 minutes in when I realized it needed to be a musical. There is no more earnest actor on the planet than Tom Cruise. There's actually a court order forbidding irony within 200 feet of his house. Combine him with an incredibly overwrought, self-important film like Cocktail and it's kind of surprising it wasn't made as a musical in the first place. I guess Huey Lewis said no.

How long did the trailer take to complete?
It was about two solid weeks of work. The first was spent trying to figure out how to make Tom Cruise sing. Once I had that, I spent a lost weekend writing and cutting and re-writing and re-cutting to try to form a coherent story. The final week was spent finishing the picture, which consisted mainly of rotoscoping and resizing Elizabeth Shue's hair to keep it in picture-safe. We also did a VO record with Greg Stebner and a mix with Conrad Sanguineti at Phantom Audio.

Was it daunting knowing the winner would have to follow Ryan's The Shining remake from last year?
Ryan's trailer is really very brilliant, and it's so different from the Bollywood Caakthal cut that it's hard to compare the two. I think they're both fun in their own ways. It's a little like comparing apples to Hindi-singing apples.

Who would win in a fight: 1984 Tom Cruise or 2006 Tom Cruise?
I think it depends entirely on the venue. I think 1984 Cruise has the moves and would win any kind of a boxing or wrestling event. 2006 Cruise may have lost a step, but what he's lost physically he makes up for with crazy. If they had a light-bulb eating contest, 2006 Cruise would win hands down.

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