Month: July 2013

Reality television producer Troy DeVolld talked to the AV Club:

TDV: Like with journalism, it’s choosing your moments, choosing what to discard, being able to rearrange that order. Timelines are a big thing in reality TV. Over the course of four months, you’re trying to find six or eight scenes that relate to each other that you can make an episode out of.

AVC: Is a “Frankenbite” another way reality shows condense timelines?

TDV: A Frankenbite, by definition, is just when you take original spoken material and you cut it into a smaller, or different, version of itself. There’s a big difference between the Frankenbiting that you’re probably thinking about most often and the Frankenbite that actually has to happen for a show. If I say, “Yesterday I went to the mall, I bought a lemonade, I rode the kids’ train, and then I bought a pair of pants,” but all I needed to know is there’s a pair of pants, I will Frankenbite it down into, “I went to the mall and I bought a pair of pants.” Because after all, a reality show’s only half an hour to an hour long, and you can’t have somebody, every time they open their mouth, take 20 or 25 seconds to relay the thought. So Frankenbiting should be for the compression of time.

When you are Frankenbiting for the purpose of making someone say something they didn’t say, then there’s a whole ethical thing that comes into play, which is you don’t want someone to say something that isn’t authentic to their character.

But I could take that same sentence that says, “Today, I went to the mall and bought pants” [and say], “Well, there was a scene where she went to a boutique, and it wasn’t at the mall, and I want to set up the top of the scene. And somewhere else she says, ‘My friend at the boutique.’” I could say, “Today I went to the [cut] boutique [cut] and bought pants.” So I’m changing the location. I’m not doing anything sinister. It’s sort of mixing the spackle to hold the show together without having to redo the interviews.

AVC: Do you think you’re held to a different standard of authenticity because it’s a visual medium?

TDV: Exactly. You can’t see the ellipses in reality TV when we’re putting portions of a thought together. So many people are sloppy as bejesus about it. You just hear the shift in pitch when people are speaking. …

AVC: But you’re not actually putting words in their mouths?

TDV: No. In a scene, I might have to say, “Can you guys please have a conversation about what happened last Thursday, because I can’t make sense of these two scenes without you talking about how you got from this point to this point; something happened off-camera.” There are certain things you’re going to have to ask for. Interview content is a little bit different, because there are some people that come in and they’re like, “What do you want me to say?” It’s like, “Well, I want you to answer these questions.” So whenever I write questions for people, I always start with the phrase, “If this is true…” because you’re going to drive the person bananas if you’re like, “So, tell me about how much you hate so and so.” Then they shut off, and they don’t want to work with you anymore.

Previous Dish on reality TV here, here, and here.

Heather Havrilesky assesses the questions tackled by Chuck Klosterman in his new book, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and Imagined):

If Batman were real, and you knew that a vigilante was killing criminals without due process, would you root for him or want him arrested? What about Bernard Goetz, who became a hero to many New Yorkers in 1985 for stopping four black teenagers from mugging him on the subway (by, uh, shooting them) but who fell out of favor as soon as people figured out he was “weird,” as Klosterman puts it? Why is Batman seen as a hero, when Goetz is seen a villain? Could it all boil down to a strong jaw, black tights and an excellent sports car?

Obviously, it’s more complicated than that. But one thing you can say about Klosterman is that he’s unafraid of complications. In exploring why “the qualities that we value in the unreal (Batman) are somehow verboten in reality (Goetz),” Klosterman analyzes 1) the state of crime in New York City in 1985; 2) the pressures on Goetz after becoming an “overnight” celebrity; 3) the plot of “Death Wish“; 4) that Goetz said, after the shooting, “I wanted to kill those guys”; 5) the subsequent crimes committed by the teenagers in question; 6) Goetz’s alleged history of racist statements; 7) the ways public perceptions of Goetz split down bipartisan lines, 8) Goetz’s habit of sharing his New York City apartment with squirrels; 9) that Batman is cool and can’t be interrogated by reporters.

Once Klosterman has sifted through all these factors and also considered Ted Bundy, French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville, sci-fi novelist Norman Spinrad and Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho,” he finally concludes that, “[t]he reason things unacceptable in life are acceptable in fiction is because fiction is the only way we can comfortably examine the morally obscene.”

[youtube http://youtu.be/zMmE8RLieiA]

Twenty years after the release of The Firm, Sean Fennessey asks why the legal thriller “has almost completely disappeared from the movies”:

Much has been made in recent years of the loss of the mid-tier adult drama, a category that the 30-to-49-year-old demographic once came out for in relative droves, to see their (beautiful) peers endure pain and loss in the face of love. For all the hand-wringing in Hollywood lamenting the loss of, say, a contemporary Terms of Endearment at the hands of Iron Man 3, the genres that have truly been shed are the legal thriller and its cousins, the erotic thriller (save the occasional Steven Soderbergh or Danny Boyle homage) and the rarely executed comic thriller. …

Fewer big-studio films are in production than have been in decades. It’s never been harder to get the somewhat expensive movies in the middle ground made without fantastical source material. This week, the New York Times reported that the number of employed screenwriters in Hollywood has dropped for a third consecutive year. The superhero economy has boxed out opportunities, to be sure. TV writing gigs, coincidentally, are up. That’s also where you’ll find all the legal thrillers. ABC’s breakout Scandal? Legal thriller. Homeland? Kind of a legal thriller. Castle? Believe it. The Good Wife? You get the picture. Though, harking back to Grisham is likely not the answer. (See: last year’s drab The Firm TV reboot.) Hollywood has long exploited the inefficiencies of storytelling, seizing on the hidden popularities of its stories. There’s room for a revival. Go make some more movie stars, and let them speechify.

Sharan Shetty argues the big-screen courtroom drama is in even worse shape:

The courtroom drama has been subjected to some misguided genre mixing, as in 2005’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which bizarrely used a trial as the framing device for, you guessed it, an exorcism. But even the comical takes that were big hits not that long ago–My Cousin Vinny and Legally Blonde, for example–have stopped getting made, and a movie like The Lincoln Lawyer, which Fennessey correctly praises, is an exception to the rule. The law film–whether legal thriller or courtroom drama–may make an occasional appearance, but its death sentence, issued some time ago by Hollywood executives, has clearly been passed. You’re more likely to find celebrity-centered courtroom drama outside the silver screen than on it.

“Instruction art” is a way for exhibitions to continue ad infinitum:

Art created from instructions—or the idea that instructions can be a part of the process—has fascinated Hans Ulrich Obrist, a curator, for decades. Instruction art offers the possibility that art can live on through instructions the way that music lives on through compositions. This is the idea behind “Do It”, a concept Mr Obrist came up with, which calls on artists to create instructions for making art. Twelve artists participated in his inaugural “Do It” exhibition at the Kunsthalle Ritter in Austria in 1994. Since then shows of “Do It” art have taken place in cities around the world. More than 250 artists have contributed instructions to the project, including Louise Bourgeois, Mike Kelley, Damien Hirst, Anna Halprin, Marina Abramovic and others.

To mark the 20th anniversary of “Do It”, Independent Curators International and D.A.P. have released “Do It: The Compendium”, a thick, orange, 448-page manual, like an art recipe book, filled with artists’ instructions and essays. …

Meant to be executed at a gallery, museum, at home—anywhere really—some of the instructions are direct and easy to realise. Ugo Rondinone tells the reader to sit down, “light a cigarette” or not, and look out the window or at a wall until something happens. Ai Weiwei offers directions on how to construct a device that can be used to spray paint on CCTV surveillance cameras. Tracey Emin instructs readers to place 27 bottles of different sizes and colours on a table and then wrap them in a reel of red cotton, “like a strange web that joins them all together”.

Other instructions are more bizarre and conceptual. Maurizio Cattelan, a practical joker in the art world, instructs curators to wear only underwear and shoes to a show’s opening. Ms Abramovic offers a recipe for mixing breast milk with “milk of the sperm” to drink during earthquake nights. Nicholas Hlobo tells an ambitious curator to “install a work of mine on the moon”.  “Most of [the instructions] can in theory be realised,” says Mr Obrist, though he concedes that “some are unlikely to be realised.”

Laura Bennett flags a hilariously overacted Snowden biopic:

She considers the dramatic appeal of whistleblowers:

Some of these characters, while prickly, were redeemed by the moral straightforwardness of their crusade; others were clearly propelled by murkier intentions. Their onscreen treatment reflects the full spectrum of cultural attitudes toward whistleblowers: derision, suspicion, tentative admiration for the sheer commitment to a cause. … From Snowden’s earliest interview there were echoes of [“Enlightened” protagonist] Amy Jellicoe: half prophet, half loose cannon. There was something of Amy’s deluded narcissism in his ridiculous claim that he was going public with his identity so as not to make the story about himself, while the media cloud around him swirled. And like Amy he seemed partly driven by the numbness and the tedium of office life, his own sense of being a drone in the service of evil.

Meanwhile, Brad Plumer charts evidence that people are indeed far more interested in Snowden’s own saga than the programs he revealed:

He adds:

Maybe that’s not too surprising. The Snowden story is, after all, genuinely fascinating — not least after he disappeared into the bowels of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport and was then thought to be hiding on the president of Bolivia’s plane (he wasn’t, in turned out). But a few weeks ago, some reporters were worried that the Snowden circus would distract from broader coverage of the NSA’s surveillance programs themselves. “Snowden’s flight and its surrounding geopolitics are a good story; what he made public is a better one,” wrote Ben Smith. And, at least for now, the flight seems to be crowding out everything else.

Recent Dish on Snowden here and here.