Reality boulevard, p.29
Reality Boulevard, page 29
Vern was shaking his head. “They told all their relatives. The production warned they would pretty much have to go into witness protection for the six months of production. No contact with anyone. And they’d have to quit their jobs. But they’ve been glued to this show since it went on the air six years ago. They’ve seen the people who lost hundreds pounds and got new lives and makeovers and endorsement deals.”
Eric jumped back in, more agitated now. “So they’re all ready to do this, to ditch everything in their lives and go on Fat Farm. Then, at the very last minute, they get a call: ‘Sorry, false alarm. The network wants to do Celebrity Fat Farm instead.’ So it’s, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’”
Hunter had never thought of Eric as a particularly compelling storyteller, but he had her riveted.
“But wait!” says Eric. “All is not lost! Another year goes by and out of the blue, the casting director for RandWorld gives Clara and Timmy a call. “Guess what? We’re doing Fat Farm Season Seven! And congratulations, you’ve made the cut!”
“So when Vern and I get our Candidate gig bumped by two weeks, they send us out to the couple’s house in Phoenix to shoot the ‘before’ sequences. You know, the bad behavior, the pigging out, the misery, the tears, the relatives saying “We’re afraid they’re gonna die,” blah blah blah.
“So we get to their little adobe house, expecting we’re going to be shooting them eating ten pizzas a day, getting triple Drive-Through orders at McDonalds, gorging on boxes and boxes of Winchell’s donuts… all the things that were on those two audition tapes from years before.
“But as it turns out, during that year in between, this couple takes a long hard look at their lives. Clara wants to have a baby. Timmy wants to play softball on his company’s team. They realize, ‘If we keep on this way, we’ll be dead before we’re forty.’ So they make a pact together. ‘We’re going to do something about this, Fat Farm or no Fat Farm.’
“When we get there, lo and behold, they’ve already thrown out the junk food, they’re making salads, they’ve got an elliptical machine in the living room; they’re walking five miles a day; they’re feeling great and they’ve each lost about thirty or forty pounds on their own over the past six months.”
“Great twist,” said Hunter.
Vern shook his head. “The RandWorld field producer doesn’t think so. He goes ballistic. He starts berating this poor couple. Just screaming at them. ‘Why didn’t you warn us? This is outrageous! You’ve signed contracts! We’ve invested thousands! We could sue you for fraud!’ I looked at Eric, and Hunter, I have never seen him so mad. I thought he was going to deck the guy.”
“Oh, I thought about it,” Eric growled. “I actually thought about it. But you know, this is RandWorld, it’s a big company, and it’s a big job. So I went outside and had a smoke to calm down. A few minutes later, one of the PAs races out the door, gets into one of the rental cars, and tears away. Then Vern comes out and says we’re setting up for the interview.”
Both Eric and Vern were quiet for a moment, looking at one another.
“So?” Hunter asked. “It’s a happy ending? You guys did the story after all?”
Eric sneered. “Oh yeah. We did the story. We moved the elliptical machine into the garage and the PA came back with about two hundred bucks worth of supermarket junk food. After the interview, we shot them stuffing their faces for about three hours. When we were done with all the crap the PA brought in, we piled into the car and shot them gorging their way through just about every fast food drive through in Phoenix. That’s how we spent the rest of the day.”
“They both got sick after,” Vern said. “Seriously sick. Clara had to go to the ER with an intestinal blockage or something.”
“But they lived happily ever after,” Eric said. “I mean, they were on Fat Farm. I heard that by the time they got to LA to start the show taping, they’d both gained back everything they lost.”
There was nothing to say for a moment. Vern broke the silence. “This show’s such a piece of cake in comparison.”
“Piece of cake,” said Eric. “Funny.”
A white passenger van pulled through the circular driveway of the hotel and honked its horn. Hunter, Eric and Vern loaded up their gear into the van’s rear compartment and clambered together onto the second row bench seat. Another local production assistant and a gaffer sat in the furthest row back. Introductions were made. Amber, holding a clipboard, rode shotgun in the front passenger seat.
“Ready for a long night?” Amber asked.
“If you’re around, honey, it won’t be long enough,” Eric replied, winking. Amber grinned broadly at the flirtation, while Vern and Hunter exchanged knowing looks. Eric was so comfortingly predictable.
The van followed the wide, aimless streets of Primrose, Texas. A rickety grid of narrow roadways lined with small ramshackle brick houses and bare brown lawns melted into a gated community of tree-lined boulevards peppered with elegantly landscaped McMansions circa the early ‘90s Texas building boom. They turned up one of the drives toward an enormous faux-antebellum, white brick number with a prominent three-storey, pillared front portico, hung with layers of Christmas lights, faux icicles and a giant electric cross in the center. A tackier version of Tara, from Gone with The Wind.Standing on the front porch was Ella Sue Whiggins, wearing yet another impeccably tailored St. John Knits outfit, her hands on the shoulders of her twin 12-year-old sons. Ella’s hair was styled, teased and pouffed into a helmet-like bouffant more appropriate for 1965 than 2011. Her makeup was so heavy it was apparent from the driveway – thick false eyelashes, painted-on cheekbones, and peach-colored lipstick to match her peach-colored suit. She was, Hunter thought, the perfect reality show stereotype of a Texan society wife. The boys, Robbie and Buck, were dressed identically in khakis and peach colored polo shirts. Their faces wore masks of polite boredom.
“Welcome to Chez Whiggins,” Ella announced, pronouncing the word ‘Shezz’.
As the crew unloaded the van, Ella insisted on showing Amber and Hunter around the manse. “Amber, honey, you were here once before, dear, but I never did give you the official tour,” she dripped in her sugary twang. They wandered through room after echoey room. At each stop, Ella regaled them with a full inventory – oriental rugs and Ming vases, and antique this and reproduction that. There was fabric everywhere, gold and green and red and orange; layers and layers of fabric on settees, bedspreads, window treatments. And every layer of fabric had a story. By the time they were done with the entire 18-room circuit, Eric, Vern and David and Ricky, the gaffers, had long since finished setting up for Ella’s interview and were lounging in the plush living room wing chairs, flipping through coffee table copies of Architectural Digest and Southern Living.
When Ella saw that the interview was ready, she turned toward the rear of the house and bellowed at the top of her voice, “Martha!”
A heavyset African American woman in a neatly pressed pink domestics uniform burst out of the door that separated the enormous formal dining room from the kitchen area, carrying what looked to be a professional makeup kit and a basket of hair products.
“Since y’all won’t provide me with hair and makeup for these things,” Ella said, voice sweet but tone accusatory, “I’ll just have to make do with Martha here.”
“Well, Ella, since you already have a hair and makeup person backstage tonight for your speech...” Amber began.
“Oh, I’m absolutely certain that those Real Housewife ladies get all the hair and makeup they so desire,” Ella replied. “Twenty-four seven, prob’ly. Guess I’m just not as important to Prime Network as those gals are to Bravo.”
“That’s not true,” Amber said. “This is just such a different style of show.”
“Oh, don’t you worry about me darlin’,” Ella said with a wink. “I’m a make-do girl from way back in the day.”
“That fucking production coordinator back in LA,” Amber whispered to Hunter. “She saves a few bucks on makeup and hair and I’m the one who gets abused out here in the field. Ian is going to hear about this.”
Vern positioned Ella on the sofa and mic’d her up, as Martha pouffed her boss’s already towering hair and slapped another layer of powder on her face. Hunter sat down on the dining room chair positioned next to the camera and scanned the sheet of notes she’d made on the plane, quietly reviewing the areas their conversation needed to cover. Interviewing was among her very best skills, and she didn’t like to dilute the connection between herself and her subject by reading from a list. She relied on her instinct, her listening skills, and her personal method that mixed acting scene-work, neural-linguistic programming cues, and as much genuine empathy as she could muster. As she put her notes away, Amber leaned over and handed her a typed list.
“What’s this?” Hunter said, already annoyed.
“That’s what we need from the interview,” Amber said.
“Isn’t that up to me?”
“No, it’s not.” Amber leaned in closer to Hunter, whispering now. “I’m the story producer, and Dexter’s got to put all these pieces together in the editing room. Ella’s arc is already well-established, and we need these statements from her to tie everything together.”
Hunter squinted down at the sheet in front of her. It wasn’t a list of questions. It was a list of answers.
1. Randy Milliken hates America. All Democrats hate America.
2. Gay marriage and the homosexual agenda are destroying America.
3. Illegal immigration is destroying Texas.
4. Terrorists are getting over our borders with the illegal immigrants.
5. America is a white, heterosexual, Christian nation.
6. My staff doesn’t hate me. Where would you get that idea?
7. When you are running for office, there’s no such thing as going too far.
Hunter was astonished. “You’re saying you want me to put these words in her mouth?”
“Well, as close as possible. The other candidates are more comfortable with this kind of thing, so we can be a little more direct about it with them. Ella needs… well, she needs some more manipulating. If worse comes to worst, just get her talking around them. We can Frankenbite the phrases together in editing if she won’t say them verbatim.”
Hunter looked down at the paper again, then up at Amber. “Why?” she asked.
“Because that’s her character in this drama. She really does say a lot of this stuff, at least behind the scenes, but we need to get it clearly on camera. To make her series arc come together.”
“Excuse me,” Hunter said to Ella, in the most polite tone she could muster. “I’ll be right back and then we can get started.” With that, she got out of her seat and walked into the kitchen, pulling out her cell phone and dialing Ian’s number. An exasperated Amber followed close behind her.
“What are you doing?” she hissed, after the kitchen door closed behind them.
“Calling Ian. Feeding lines to interviewees was not in the arrangement we discussed.”
“Jesus, Hunter. What’s the big deal here? Haven’t you ever done soft-scripted before?”
Hunter stopped short. Of course, she knew what soft-scripted reality was. Garret had raged against it daily during the Writer’s Strike of 2008. According to his accusatory homilies that included his infamous and oft-repeated blacklisting speech, uncredited writers created storylines, scene-by-scene beats, and sometimes even dialogue for the so-called ‘real people’ playing themselves in docu-soaps. Garret’s beef with the concept of soft-scripted, or semi-scripted, or reality-docu-soap hybrid, or whatever you called it, was that like being a little bit pregnant, you couldn’t be just a little bit scripted. You either were or you weren’t. Therefore, the people coming up with the storylines should be credited as writers and given Writer’s Guild protections and benefits. Hunter didn’t really think of herself as a writer, but her traditional film school training maintained that if you had to fabricate your own drama to make a story work, then you either weren’t a real documentarian, or you’d picked the wrong subject.
Ian picked up on the other end of the line immediately. “What’s up? Shouldn’t you be in the middle of your shoot?”
“Yeah,” she said, glowering at Amber as she spoke. “We’re just about to start our first interview. But here’s the thing – Amber just handed me a list of lines to feed to Ella. You never told me this thing was soft-scripted.”
The line was quiet for a moment. “You know, you and I just talked about this. About you being open to different styles of working.”
“So what is the show then? A weak drama? A showcase of political stereotypes? Please, enlighten me now, since you didn’t see the need before you hired me.”
The voice on the other end of the phone sounded tired. “I was afraid you might react this way. That’s why I left the story beat pages out of your production packet. I wanted you to get excited by the concept before you judged it. You said it yourself, they’re great characters, it’s an awesome pilot. I didn’t want to give you an excuse to back out before you realized it.”
“You haven’t changed at all, have you?”
“I want you on the show, Hunter. I care about you.”
“This is caring?”
“So, you’re afraid won’t be able to pull it off?
“Of course I can pull it off!” Hunter’s ego flared. “That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“This type of production, it’s -”
“It’s what, Hunter? It ‘offends’ you? It’s ‘beneath’ you? Please. You think your Lights and Sirens pieces were so ‘pure’? You’re going to tell me there wasn’t a time when you didn’t feed a cop or a doctor a line to parrot back to you? You didn’t set up a ‘surprise’ reunion, just to capture that happy ending? And what about all those big-budget re-enactments? Oh, I’m sure the sainted Marty Maltzman and his minions went to the ends of the earth to make sure those were nth-degree accurate. You told me yourself a long time ago, there’s no real objectivity once you bring a camera into the picture.”
Hunter didn’t have a comeback. She knew there was no truth in the notion of a ‘God’s eye view’, whether or not you trumpeted your training in classic cinéma vérité. Even a hidden camera, the literal ‘fly on the wall’, could only record the tiny portion of the world conscribed within the circle of its lens. Then, there was editing. The very selection of one shot over another shot, of one camera angle over another. Right there, you manufactured a narrative point of view where none had existed before. Quantum physics posits that the act of observation fundamentally changes the nature of the object observed. This is a law of nature.
“Okay,” she whispered into the phone. “But you really expect me to make Ella Whiggins say these lines?”
“Look, are you a professional or aren’t you?” Ian sounded angry now. “Maybe that was my mistake, because I always took you for professional, if nothing else. If you’re not, then by all means, just walk off the job right now. I’ll have production put you on a flight back to LA and I’m sure Amber Beller will do more than a competent job of stepping into your place.”
Hunter looked over at Amber, who had a smug smile pasted on her pretty face. Hunter let out a long, defeated breath.
“You know I’m not going to do that,” she sighed. “I just wish you’d been up front with me from the beginning.” Quietly, she hit end call.
“Do you need help with this?” Amber asked sweetly. “Because I’ve done interviews before and I’ll be happy to take over.”
“No,” Hunter sighed. “Let’s just do it.”
Chapter 18: Orangy Sky
Weeks had passed since his East Coast junket and Marty still hadn’t heard back from A&E or National Geographic about Firejumpers!. Zev said this wasn’t unusual in today’s market, but Marty was used to a certain level of respect and responsiveness. The longer he heard nothing but crickets from New York and DC, the more his increasingly painful ulcer churned. This was the first time in his career that he’d ever approached being ‘unemployed’, and it was causing him so much angst that he was buying antacids by the case. Marty came from a family that believed dignity meant getting up in the morning, going to your place of business, and putting your nose to the grindstone. His father had literally dropped dead on the job, in the middle of measuring a ream of chintz fabric for an ottoman. The Maltzmans died with their boots on.
“You might think about hiring a casting director,” Zev suggested, over lunch at The Palm. “The Steve Fremonts, the Ian Rands – they either have their own casting departments, or they make an arrangement with an independent contractor already in the loop. Reality TV casting director – it’s the career of the future.”
“I guess I am prehistoric,” Marty said. “Because just the concept of ‘casting’ for documentary style television – we used to call that ‘research.’ You research your topic and do the footwork out there in the field. You make contact with your subjects, you pre-interview them, you bond with them, you convince them to do your film –”
