Wed, May 30, 2007

I loved Project Greenlight the way a Chinese couple loves their first male child. Watching it was a joyous, life-affirming experience, because it combined the best elements of so many awful situations. The strong personalities of a creative enterprise, the constant chaos of a film set, the unnecessary but thrilling drama of reality TV, and – best of all – the incessant meddling from a major TV network and a huge movie studio, guaranteeing the most spectacular clusterfuck possible.

The fact that the competition produced three terrible films does not at all prove that there is no such thing as an undiscovered filmmaker. Mainly, it proves that the designers of Project Greenlight have no idea how to discover, develop, and support an undiscovered filmmaker – not a problem for me, since they created a fantastically enjoyable show anyway. It's probably not possible to find and nurture an undiscovered filmmaker in the context of a reality show. You pretty much have to do it the old-fashioned way: give them episodes of Night Gallery to direct, and see what happens. The intense pressure of creating films under impossible budgets and deadlines is necessary for a show like Project Greenlight or On the Lot, but it doesn't really get at the key talents a filmmaker needs to have.

But of course there's undiscovered filmmaking talent out there. (I admit, I'm invested in this: if there's no such thing, then my dreams are even more self-deluded than usual. I'm not prepared to admit that just yet; give me another five years.) Everyone has something they'd be just great at – but only a select few get the chance. Most don't even think to try. There's a person out there who'd be a tremendous novelist, but has never had the inkling to put pen to paper, just like how the guy with the "Boardwalk" piece in every McDonald's Monopoly game just throws it away without even realizing it's stuck to his drink cup. For others, it's a matter of opportunity. If you would be awesome at managing a Gap store, the access to that role is pretty open. But if you want to be a singer or a movie director or a novelist, you've got to claw your way through a lot of bullshit. And even if you're the best of the best, there's no guarantee that you'll get a shot, because the variables are staggering. You've got to create material that showcases your talent; even getting access to decision-makers is near-impossible; there's a whole global marketplace to contend with (in the '60s we weren't buying superhero movies, we wanted dramatic stories about characters who reminded us of real people; today, vice versa). Many will enter, few will win.

Is it fair for someone to get a shortcut from a reality show? Not really. But there's always the chance they'd have made it on their own; it just would've taken longer. And TV producers – whether they're right or not – think it's something an audience is interested in watching.

The way I see it, searching for singers and models via reality TV is a waste of time. It's not that these things are easy, they're just boring. American Idol contestants can either sing or they can't. Every week, they either sing well or they don't. America's Next Top Model contestants are either born with the complexion and bone structure they need, or they aren't. (Or they puke a lot.) Who cares? They don't have anything to say. A songwriting competition – that would be something. (Or fashion design. I don't pretend to care about Project Runway – for one thing, anyone can pile a bunch of bizarre fabric into a lopsided heap and call it "couture" – but at least they're expressing themselves.) We don't need any more people who can sing or be hot or any other thing that a given percentage of the population will always be able to do; we need people who have something interesting to say. If we had enough interesting people saying interesting things, we wouldn't need reality TV in the first place.

The first thing you notice about On the Lot is that it's not a competition for directors. The contestants are all directors, but it's a competition for filmmakers. It's a huge difference, and it's evident right from the start. The first challenge the contestants face is to take a log line and craft it into a story pitch. Plenty of real-life directors do this, but plenty more skip it and leave this part to the screenwriters or producers. On the Lot admits right from the start that they're not just looking for technical acumen. There's no focus pulling challenge or lighting challenge. They're looking for writer-directors; they want storytellers who happen to work in the medium of film.

Because, face it: a director can find a spectacular cinematographer and delegate the technical stuff to him. But if he doesn't have anything to say, his work is going to be bland, flavorless, and uninteresting. (Or, White Chicks.) The challenge is, how to make that into a compelling and relatable TV competition? And it's a huge challenge. Project Greenlight experimented with separating the writing from the directing, with dismal results. They also tried making a feature film under the time constraints of a reality show – drastically unfeasible. On the Lot has decided to combine a stamina challenge with a focus group – the winning contestant will make a great short film each week for a couple of months without faltering, and will have to win America's votes along the way. This is no more likely to produce the next great undiscovered filmmaker – although they've got about half a dozen who are pretty excellent – but, hey, it's TV.

It began on a pretty good note. The story pitch separated the truly creative people from those whose submission films were a fluke. The next challenge split them into teams of three; they'd work together but be judged separately, since each would be responsible for one scene of their team's two-minute short. This produced some controversial eliminations, but it accomplished its objective perfectly. Those who stood their ground got their vision across and were judged for it. Those who wilted got run over by their teammates – either during shooting or during editing – and suffered the consequences. Then, the directors were assigned a one-page scene and given 30 minutes to prepare and an hour on a real set with a professional crew to shoot it. And the wheels came off the show entirely.

This was a great challenge, and a perfect follow-up to the team shorts. Most real directors don't make shorts, so it makes a lot of sense to vary the challenges between scenes and shorts and explore the various talents of the contestants. However, someone at Fox got nervous about losing the audience, so we never got to see the episode where the directors shot their scenes or the celebrity judges judged them. We skipped straight ahead, past the elimination of another six people, to the point where contestants were forced to make a short film in a week and then America votes. Of course this stage was inevitable, but it's a shame it came so soon.

Shorts don't really mean all that much, and the pressure is to make them funny and wacky because nobody walks away from a one minute short thinking how deep and intellectual it was. So the entire process is sort of infantilized, and it favors directors who would be fantastic sketch comedy writers (no fault of their own) and sidelines people who would be excellent directors of virtually anything else. Plus, America votes. So all questions of taste or class or intellectual expression are right out the window. Still, while some of the more contemplative or interesting filmmakers are going to fall by the wayside, it's clear that there are some staggering talents in the group. I linked to "Call Waiting", which was one of the two-minute shorts, made from concept to final cut in less than a day. It won't win Best Picture, but it's packed with great comedy moments and it tells an actual story – pretty amazing compared with some of the other entries, as well as a good 90% of the work I saw in film school (and I absolutely include myself in that bottom 90%, near the bottom). There were two or three standout performers in the individual shorts, as well. Some of these people have a real grasp of story, good cinematic instincts, and the confidence to pull it all together quickly.

The show's website is a disaster, which is really a separate issue, but it bears mention because it's a voting show. The entire contest began with over 12,000 people submitting their films, and the website features hundreds of films and continues to solicit new submissions. The contestants have profiles on the site, which they signed up for when they submitted their materials, but the profile is not tied to the show's official "contestant page" for the person, so the only way to find it is to search. (Try searching "Kenny" on a site with thousands of users.) Ideally, each of the top 36 would have an official profile page with the dopey Q-and-A as well as a link to each of their films. The celebrity judges base a lot of their benefit-of-the-doubt decisions on things we've never seen, like the one-hour scenes and the original entry submissions. Why not show us those, too, and let us factor that into our votes?

The show is very much patterned after American Idol, which means it burns a lot of empty airtime – you can watch the weekly "live results" show in four minutes on TiVo. But hidden amidst the tripe are some interesting glimpses of visionary people and extraordinary filmmakers; best of all, they've got something to say.

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