Desmond Mason in Action Short

Artist and former Oklahoma City Thunder player

Desmond Mason is the star of a new short film that launched this week on Valentine’s Day. The film, called The Guard, is an action short about a professional basketball player whose home gets invaded the night before a big game. The movie is written and directed by me, produced by Hui Cha Poos, and co-stars Desmond’s wife, Rebecca Mason. The Guard is now available for free on the Newman Springs YouTube page.

Desmond Mason is a professional artist and former Oklahoma State University basketball player who won the 2001 NBA Slam Dunk Contest and played key roles for the Bucks, Hornets, and our own Oklahoma City Thunder.

Mason made his film debut in the 2002 basketball movie Like, Mike. He made his acting debut in the 2012 Chris Kattan comedy, Crazy Enough, which I also directed and is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

The Guard is the first movie to star both Desmond and Rebecca Mason. The action sequences required the couple to train together for weeks, which was an extra challenge for Rebecca, who had recently given birth to their baby boy. The couple also worked with fight choreographers and safety coordinators to map out each shot and position during the action scenes.

Luke Thomas Eddy, a local actor who costars in the film, worked on-set with Desmond, Rebecca, and the fight choreographer to optimize each of the fight moves for safety. Eddy teaches movement and stage combat at Oklahoma City University.

The film was choreographed and produced by Hui Cha Poos. Poos is the founder of the RACE Dance Collective, the creator of RACE’s HipHop Nutcracker, and a professor of hip-hop and modern dance at the University of Central Oklahoma for the past twenty years.

Coincidentally, Poos was Rebecca Mason’s dance teacher when she was growing up.

This is the fifth film that Poos and I have produced together. In addition to The Guard, we have created two short dance films, SWIRL and The Homecoming Trilogy, and a magical realism short called Odd Sense that will premiere this summer. We also produced the feature film Finding Carlos along with Melissa Scaramucci, who co-wrote the screenplay with me based on Hui’s HipHop Nutcracker. Finding Carlos is currently available on Apple TV, iTunes, YouTube and Amazon Prime.

The Guard is based on the WB Powers, Jr. novel from Newman Springs Publishing. The short film highlights one key moment from the novel in order to hint at the larger story. Newman Springs is a full-service publishing company that works with thousands of authors across a variety of genres.

For the past four years, I have worked with Executive producer Chris Rutherford to write screenplays and produce short films based on novels from Newman Springs, Christian Faith Publishing, and a variety of book publishing companies. In 2020, I launched McDaniel Entertainment to manage all of the publishing projects and bring on collaborators like Poos and Scaramucci to create new projects. To check out this latest short film, please go to YouTube and type in Newman Springs The Guard