The show I'm working on right now is from the same producers as Laguna Beach, so I'm now watching Laguna on DVD, it's fucking great in that way that...well...in the way that I think it's great. A show full of hot, rich high school kids in the hottest richest place in America. You know, Reality TV.
I gotta say after taking a peek behind the curtain I'm a fan of Reality TV, at least the one I'm working on. Reality TV's gotten a bad rap, as I'm sure the indoor toilet did at one time. I don't mean reality tv like Survivor, The Bachelor,, or American Idol, those are called game shows. I'm not a big fan of game shows, but I do like reality tv, at least ones like Laguna Beach, The Real World and the one I'm working on right now. In these shows, which are not contests, real people are documented for a couple months and what happens happens. Haha. Obviously these shows are highly manufactured, but that's where my love of them comes from.
The people, many of them actors, are cast according to their dynamics and how they may clash. Casting based on conflict, brilliant. All stories are conflict and reality shows start with that in mind. Yes, the conflict arising once the camera starts shooting is pre-manufactured, but so is the conflict between Bruce Willis and the terrorists.
Once they start shooting, there is no script. The producers put the actors in places and ask them to talk about certain things, and they talk for twenty minutes to an hour and that's edited into two or three minutes.
All the footage in the meantime comes back to the Loggers, which is what I am. The Loggers make detailed notes and send them to the Story Department, who monitors arising conflicts and figures out how to best exploit them in upcoming scenes. Did JL1 mention that MS1 was a backstabber? Did MS1 say that she'd do anything to get JL1? Does JL1 like AR1? Hmmm, how can we put MS1 in a position to stab AR1 in the back?
That notation is actually the notation we use, those abbreviations.
But the story is fluid, in fact one character was going to be cut until the loggers told the story department that she was the best character, she's the only one that isn't a bitch or bimbo, so we thought she brought some balance.
As an improvisor and someone who's taken a hell of a lot of improvisation and made scripts around them I truly appreciate Reality TV.
In Steven Soderbergh's movie Bubble, he casts the movie with real people from a backwater town in Ohio and has them improvise their dialogue according to scenarios. If you hate reality tv, then you can't like Bubble. I think it's an innovative production technique and you could do far more with it than shows have so far.
And I know most people who don't like Reality TV will agree with everything I've said but still not like Reality TV because it's dishonest, because it's not real. Did you know Fargo was based on a true strory? The funny thing is that the label "Reality TV" now means this manufactured form of production. You are making tv in the "Reality TV" genre, meaning it's faked.
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