n o w p l a y i n g - s c r i p t b i n - f a n c l u b - s t u d i o

make love to the camera



October 22, 2003 - 9:23 am

...And Start Getting Real...

Man, I should learn how to play piano. I'm adding it to the to do list. I want to get all noir and sit at a piano in a bar with a cigarette and glass of whiskey and sing piano songs with a pretty girl in a dress.

The girl will be wearing the dress.

Yeah, so hey. I'm a working boy. And it's going pretty well. I've been watching tapes of the show and reading story notes over the last few days. On Monday afternoon, my friend Robin called me and I couldn't take her call. Later, when I called her back, I got to say "Hey, sorry. I was in a story meeting."

On the really fucking cool scale, that's way up there.

Yesterday, I actually got to do a bit of work. I had to go hunt down a quote from some footage to highlight something that was going on in the show. I found something good, and soaked up some praise, and that was reassuring. Things haven't been too tough on me yet, workwise, but I think this is going to be something I can handle.

That's a big change from Monday morning, when we had our first production meeting to discuss show issues, and I felt like I was the only one in the room who didn't know the super secret unintelligible language they all seemed to be speaking.

Now let us discuss some of the multiple ways in which this job rocks.

The schedule is great. Showing up sometime before, oh, say, 10am is just fine. This usually means 945am. Luckily, this place is a ten minute drive from my apartment. No one wants to look like they're the first to leave, but everyone seems to vanish around 630, never later than 7.

Then, of course, there's the food. Cereal, bagels, fruit, pop, mixed nuts, chips, candies, granola bars, a stunning variety of Power Bar type items. It's all there in the kitchen. Help yourself. And I do. Yesterday, I ate Cheetos, just because, hey, there was a bag of Cheetos.

Oh, yeah...then there's the writing.

Everyone I know seems to be saying the same thing: How does a person write for reality television?

Well, obviously, you don't write in quite the same way you would if you were writing a fiction series. It's not like ER, and we're not sitting around saying "Hey, that bald guy should be mugged and the other bald guy should get his arm chopped off." But one does have to create story from the available material, and if that wasn't put together in some cohesive, compelling dramatic way, then you'd be watching a series about people washing their hands or sitting around waiting for something to happen or something equally mundane. All of this stuff we have on tape needs to be written out in story form, hence, writers.

Put overly simply, if you've ever written an entry or told some anecdote to a friend, you're doing this job.

For example: Let's say that a diary is a show, and that everything you do in a day is footage. Mr.GlitterPants over here chooses to entertain us with stories of haircuts and condo ownership, and that's fine. That's his show. He doesn't delve into his sordid, twisted sex life (even though that's the entry we're all waiting for). Jonny tells his stories by using his past experiences to support current anecdotes. That's his deal. Their pages wouldn't be the same, wouldn't be as interesting, if they told you about every little bit of minutiae, instead of focussing on story.

Say you go to a party. Several things happen there. You discover a new beer you really like. Your best friend gets sick and throws up. You run into your ex with someone new.

Chances are, you're going to focus on the ex if you tell a story about that party, especially if you can wrangle something interesting or telling out of it.

Is it the truth? Yeah, at least part of the truth. The interesting part, anyway. Your life may have tons of footage that captured your really interesting conversation about 'Kill Bill' on your ride over there, but that's not what's going to end up on tv.

Is it the whole story? No. You'll never see the whole story, of anything, really, no matter what. From Ralph Nader to George Bush, you'll get the truth as they see it. No one, not Michael Moore, and not Bunim-Murray, can get out the whole truth in any sort of documentary/reality program.

We're all telling our stories, and we're all writing them.

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