It is a common practice these days to create lists of the best of everything. Yeah, okay, fine. My project is a little different. Say I get to be king of the cable movie channel. My challenge is to come up with a list of movies to fill as much air time as possible with the following three constraints:

1. Time slots can be broken on any quarter-hour (e.g., if a movie is 99 minutes long, it will fill a 105-minute time slot).
2. The movie must be one I have seen. (Still a fairly big list.)
3. No two movies may have a common cast member.

That last one is the real killer. Take a look at what happens to the potential films I can have just by including these three films (and yes, these are probably my three favorite movies of all time, in some order):

The Apartment		Casablanca		Singin' In The Rain
Cast Member	Films Eliminated	Cast Member	Films Eliminated	Cast Member	Films Eliminated
Jack Lemmon	Mister Roberts	Peter Lorre	Arsenic and Old Lace	Gene Kelly	On The Town
	The Fortune Cookie	Claude Rains	Here Comes Mr. Jordan		Inherit The Wind
	Some Like It Hot	S. Z. Sakall	Yankee Doodle Dandy	Kathleen Freeman	The Blues Brothers
	The Odd Couple	Humphrey Bogart	Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid	Jean Hagen	Adam's Rib
	The Great Race		The Maltese Falcon	Rita Moreno	West Side Story
	Good Neighbor Sam		Key Largo	Debbie Reynolds	Charlotte's Web
Ray Walston	Johnny Dangerously			Millard Mitchell	Winchester '73
	The Sting
Fred MacMurray	The Absent-Minded Professor
	Double Indemnity
	The Shaggy Dog

It seemed like every time I would add a movie, at least one (and more like five) would be disqualified. As I added movies to the list, it got harder and harder. I did make a few exceptions. I allowed a few repeats for people who were uncredited in at least one film; the most notable is Richard Dreyfuss in Mr. Holland's Opus and The Graduate. At any rate, this is the list, as I have it now:

	Friday	Saturday	Sunday	Monday
00:00		Miracle On 34th Street	Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade	Days of Thunder
01:00
		The Hudsucker Proxy		Cold Turkey
02:00
			Lethal Weapon 4
03:00
				UHF
		Gray Lady Down
04:00
			The Man Who Knew Too Much
05:00
				My Blue Heaven
		Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
06:00
			The Sound of Music
07:00				High Anxiety
		Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
08:00	Short Circuit
				Ferris Bueller's Day Off
09:00
		Charade
	Rio Bravo		Meet Me In St. Louis
10:00
				Hoosiers
11:00
		Desk Set
			The Music Man
12:00
	Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace
				Stand and Deliver
13:00
		The Graduate
14:00
				Dead Poets Society
			Holiday Inn
	The Truman Show
15:00
		Das Boot
16:00
			Guys and Dolls
	As Good As It Gets			Mr. Holland's Opus
17:00
18:00
19:00	When Harry Met Sally	Casablanca	Singin' In The Rain	The Apartment
20:00
	The Cutting Edge	12 Angry Men	Titanic
21:00
				Horse Feathers
22:00
	Toy Story	Monty Python and the Holy Grail		Airplane!
23:00