Vivien at the Haven found this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/movies/27tvset.html?
By DAVID CARR
Published: April 27, 2006
Where does bad television come from?
Tribeca Film Festival
Judy Greer and David Duchovny, foreground, in "The TV Set."
Readers’ Opinions
Forum: Movies
"The TV Set," a movie that has its premiere tomorrow night at
the Tribeca Film Festival, considers the question of agency, or
blame, for the dreck that generally p***** for the modern sitcom.
As fate, or the process, would have it, everyone who touches the
mythical pilot at the heart of the film manages to leave it a
little worse for wear, most notably Lenny, the ferocious executive
played by Sigourney Weaver. But there is enough complicity to
go around: the sensitive but compliant director, the assistant
director looking to make his own statement, the clueless actor
who goes over the top and stays there. "The TV Set" manages to do
for sitcoms what Christopher Guest's "Big Picture" did for the
movie business: peel back the skin of the beast to reveal all
its ungainly, moving parts.
This is a television industry where everyone smiles and wears
earth tones while calmly tearing the arms and legs off a creative
piece or work. "The TV Set" teeters on burlesque: a show called
"**** Wars" is held out as a monumental programming achievement.
But the people who worked on the film swear on their next gig
that a version of almost every vignette has happened to them.
"I don't think of this movie as strictly satire," said Jake
Kasdan, a veteran of the pilot process and the writer, the
director and a producer of "The TV Set." "Everything that
happens in this movie is moved over just a couple of inches
from what someone might say to you. I thought if we depicted
the process in a very detailed, re****torial way, that the
satire would be embedded within."
Lenny, who is a reprise of "Alien" -- only this time Ms. Weaver
plays the monster -- is not a long walk from the real thing,
Mr. Kasdan said.
"She is totally believable to me," he said. "She speaks her
inner monologue in a way that is a bit stylized, but I can
guarantee you there are people in the television business
who think and act very much in the way she does."
David Duchovny plays Mike, a writer and director who has
conceived "The Wexler Chronicles" as a cut-above sitcom
premised on the young lead's struggle to get past the suicide
of his brother. Mike has a good track record as a writer,
and executives at the Panda Network like the whole
gravitas-combined-with-giggles motif. Except that part
about gravitas.
"There is a feeling among some of us -- well, is it absolutely
necessary that the brother committed suicide?" Lenny asks.
Mike's manager, Alice (Judy Greer), who serves as translator
and fulcrum throughout the movie, steps in to make sure it
sounds as if all the people are on the same page when they
are actually not in the same book. At one point he turns to
her and asks: "Do you ever get tired of doing that thing?
Bending the truth so it is less objectionable?"
Ms. Greer found that verisimilitude was not a problem,
especially in a particularly uncomfortable audition scene that
lays plain the differences between the director and the studio.
"The audition scene was so close to the money, it totally
freaked me out," Ms. Greer said. "There's a part where they
were talking about how the actress 'didn't let her cuteness
get in the way of her prettiness.' They really talk like that.
It's amazing."
Beneath the patina of civility -- this is Los Angeles after all
-- the characters are going for the throat in the belief that
there is some magic formula to get on the schedule and grind
out ratings. But there is not a lot of suspense about which way
things will turn out. By the time it is finished, the show is
called "Call Me Crazy" and features comedic inflection points
that include bodily gas.
With chronic back problems and a professionally hapless affect,
Mr. Duchovny's character bears little resemblance to the
mystical agent he played in "The X-Files"; instead he comes
across as a decent man who ends up doing bad work because
he is blown about by forces beyond his control.
"Each scene is a different version of the same lie," Mr.
Duchovny said. "In show business everyone is trying to make
it better, but the sheer number of people, plus the fact
that nobody really knows what they are doing, makes it
almost impossible to do something good."
At 31, Mr. Kasdan is already experienced at working in a medium
that has a reflexive tendency toward bland, born of the need
to reach huge numbers. He worked with the writer and director
Judd Apatow on the series "Freaks and Geeks," which had critics
hugging themselves and audiences staying away in droves.
As the son of the film director Lawrence Kasdan, he grew up
with an understanding that doing creative work in a mass
medium is sometimes akin to driving a race car through Jell-O.
"There has been a lot of material about the decadence and
darkness in Hollywood, but very little about the average
working writer or television executive," Mr. Kasdan said.
"It is a very creative and chaotic system that is defined
by the fact that no one is really making a commitment.
At least with a movie, at some point, people agree to make
it and it happens. With television you never get in the clear.
You end up working to endlessly please everyone.
A pilot is really a marketing pitch."
As a director he worked on "Freaks and Geeks" and "Undeclared,"
a short-lived 2001 series. And he now has three films under
his belt ("Zero Effect," "Orange County" and "The TV Set")
at a very tender age.
"Jake is deceptively relaxed, but firm in what he wants,"
Mr. Duchovny said. "The movie does a great job of demonstrating
that when you are making a pilot, the crucible is a lot hotter."
Ms. Weaver, who has worked primarily in film, said that she did
not know much about the television world but sensed that Mr.
Kasdan knew more than he wanted to.
"I had to rely on Jake," she said. "I watch a few television
shows, but I had no idea what went on backstage in television
the way it is now."
Ms. Weaver is the daughter of a former NBC executive who brought
opera and ballet to the network. That is a long way from
"**** Wars," a hootchy-suffused reality show that she celebrates
with gusto during the upfronts. (In interviews, everyone
associated with the movie grimly wondered whether the name
and/or concept for "**** Wars" would be kidnapped and cross
over into current reality programming.)
"This was a real eye-opener for me," Ms. Weaver said, adding
that she based her maniacal studio executive on a friend who
works for a nonprofit and is completely passionate about what
she does. Lenny is no less passionate, but apparently has
very little on that whole inner-life thing.
Mr. Apatow, who served as a producer on "The TV Set" and knows
his way around an audience -- he was a writer of "The 40-Year-Old
Virgin" -- said there was an op****tunity to sell out every
single day a project was under way.
"It is compressed reality," he said. "All of those things in
the movie have happened, maybe not on the same day or the
same project, but we have friends who are working on pilots,
and they call us everyday with a new nightmare."
After doing his own pilots in the last few years to very mixed
effect, it must have felt nice to be part of a movie that
renders those tiny horrors transparent, no?
"That's the terrible thing about television," Mr. Apatow said.
"You never get your revenge. The person you feel slighted
by ends up losing his job, disappearing or doing very well.
Time goes by, and you lose all of your anger."
|
