Sophomore Year
Sam Rosenthal lived a few doors down from me in Sleeper Hall freshman year. He got involved in Shadows that second semester, and played a henchman and was also a crew member. Sophomore year, Sam and I found ourselves neighbors again, this time in Towers. We had similar ideas about the show, and shared an interest in darker and more stylized aesthetics.
Jeanne left a semester early to study abroad in London. I remember a dark, rainy night outside her apartment in Student Village, where we made plans for the future. “What do you want to do with the show?” she asked me. “Scrap the storylines and turn it into an anthology series like the Twilight Zone,” I said. She wasn't really into that idea. So I became Head Writer, and she appointed Sam the Producer and Alex Peterson the director.
On our first shoot with our new roles, it was obvious that Alex and Sam were in the wrong positions. Alex commanded the multicam setups like a pro, but we were doing more single-camera location work, and it was clear that Sam was more interested in that. So they just switched one day, outside the Brookline Holiday Inn, and it worked well.
At the end of Sophomore year, we brought the original storyline to a close, with an apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenario that consisted of some bluescreen and a few pillars from the prop room. It was a bit thin, but we did the best we could with literally no money at all.
But we still hadn't completed any episodes. The ones we shot were languishing. We needed to learn final cut pro.
The Agency
Sam and I used the Towers dining hall as an office. It was there we sat and talked, hashing out what to do and why. We were inspired by Dani, a one-off character from “Kshama”, who I think (Jeanne can speak more accurately to this) was supposed to be a law enforcement agent, investigating students' disappearances. But by the time the next episode rolled around, the actress Adrienne had disappeared (we think she moved). So we had to introduce a new character to pick up that strand of the plot, and we got Dave Rogers to be Jack Flynn, Dani's partner. And in customary Shadows fashion, Dani was killed off, off-screen, in a single line of dialogue: “Dani's dead.” We morphed things a bit, and decided to have Jack be an agent for a different organization. In this way, Dani, onscreen for only a few minutes, became the first member of The Agency.
We needed to start over, and use the structure of the series to solve production problems. We also wanted to move into territory we thought might be more fun according to our tastes. We wanted paranormal noir. With an episodic structure rather than a soap serial, we could tell a complete story in a single episode. The “agents” in this private firm could change from year to year as needed, jut like Law and Order. The Agency would remain – vague, sinister, full of mystery. We brought my character, Jakob, back as a “Bosley” figure, but it wasn't really my character. We imagined this new Jakob Resh as a weird future version of the Hawthorn University student. The truth was, we needed someone to be a dispatcher for the cases, and we needed an actor who would be reliable and available. Because I was also a member of the production team, and would be around for another two years, I stayed on as Jakob. The best part, though, was that Jakob could now switch bodies, and they could replace me with a different actor.
The Setup – Shadows and Doctor Who
I'm a huge fan of Doctor Who. I go to the convention in Los Angeles every year. Around the time Sam and I were working on the new Shadows format, I was also reading Andrew Cartmel's memoir Script Doctor. I wanted to apply his methods and philosophy to our show.
Andrew Cartmel became the Doctor Who script editor in 1987, and inherited a show on its last legs. He made several key observations. Futuristic elements didn't work. Any time the show went to a spaceship, it looked cheap and unrealistic compared to the writer's vision. Lights were too bright, costumes and props were in the wrong tone. But period drama was something the BBC did extremely well. Give them a time period, and the various departments created a rich, visually interesting, and believable setting.
Darkness hid many faults. Lowering the light levels could hide the dilapidated state of the TARDIS sets. And special effects needed to express the aspect of the story they were required to convey. They didn't necessarily need to be perfect or believable. People still harp on about that, particularly about shows like classic Doctor Who. “The special effects aren't believable,” people say, “they remind me I'm just watching TV.” Um, you are staring at a screen inside a box with flashing lights and sounds and pictures (to paraphrase Toby Hadoke). It's not real.
I tried to apply Cartmel's lessons to Shadows. First, we lowered the light levels. Set things at night, used one key light and let everything else drop into murk. We switched to single-camera shooting which allowed us to get more expressive angles and quicker setups, because the studio cams were so bulky and static. Sacrificing shot stability meant we could get more interesting compositions more quickly. When we used the studio, it was for Jakob's office, and the shabby wall flats felt appropriate for that. I saved an old filing cabinet from the trash heap, and stuck it in the prop room. Plus, the office was the only setting we would consistently need, so it made sense to have it be a studio set, as it would always be available.
We could imply versus show, use dialogue and montage to convey what the budget wouldn't let us. We could afford to be more theatrical and dialogue-driven if need be, because the noir heritage has a rich literary quality that is in keeping with it. The film Brick is an interesting example of that.
Mystery was another thing that Andrew Cartmel tried to address. On Doctor Who, the character of the Doctor became too well-known. In 1963, he had been a mysterious traveler, a fugitive from his own world, on the run from an unspoken horror. By 1987, we knew too much about him and the character had become less compelling. Cartmel rehabbed the Doctor and injected more mystery, with opaque motivations and a more manipulative streak. This McCoy-era Doctor is the direct inspiration for Jakob's somewhat sociopathic manipulation of his agents. He plays games with their lives for a greater purpose that they are not privy to.
The biggest obstacle facing Shadows was the institutional structure itself. And it probably still is. Because the actors and production team turn over every four years no matter what, the show struggles to build and maintain institutional memory. By switching to a procedural format, in which each “case” takes place over the course of a single episode, we could circumvent this problem. We only needed an actor for a semester. It also allowed for more flexibility. “The Prisoner's Dilemma” is a weird almost abstract concept that is surreal and somewhat opaque. In the same semester, Jay Fuller's “Pest Control” was a great comedy – which I wish we had done more of. Jay was always much better at comedy writing than I was, and the humorous moments in our collaborations were usually Jay's contribution. The show could be whatever we wanted it to be for the course of 30 minutes. And in the next episode, could be something different. It just needed to take place in the same universe.
To solve the casting problem, we turned to one final homage to Doctor Who – the regeneration. Having different agents over the course of time could work, as long as the Agency itself (or more importantly, the universe it occupied) remained as an anchor. But we felt that we needed a character to remain for continuity as well. Thus, Jakob became not just a person, but an alien parasitic being with a latent backstory, who could jump from body to body as needed. I think originally, we had conceived of him as changing bodies more frequently, perhaps every episode. But when you get Garytt in there as Jakob, you understandably want to keep him around for as long as possible. And I think it was probably our most successful choice. We killed my Jakob off as quickly as possible, introduced the regeneration in “Salesman” and never looked back. I was free to direct “The Prisoner's Dilemma” the following semester, and the show was free to keep going forward, staying the same and changing rapidly at the same time.
The Board of Directors
“Mystery” is an essential ingredient that Doctor Who periodically runs out of. In any long-running show, we come to a point where the audience knows too much, and needs to be introduced to a new big thing to discover. The X-Files dealt with this multiple times, as did Doctor Who. Andrew Cartmel had to fix this in the late 80's, and more recently, Steven Moffat has had to do the same thing with the 11th Doctor – reign in the knowledge, up the mystery. Shadows would face the same problem in the future. What happens when you find out too much about Jakob? Now, the backstory we created for him was never quite revealed all the way, in fact we dropped it and ran off into other directions. Which is fine, but it was always there if we needed it. The Board of Directors was an extra card to play.
We created Jakob's secret backstory, the stuff about the parasites trying to take over the world, the idea that Jakob was a parasite creature who had rebelled against them. The Board of Directors were Jakob's mysterious bosses. I think the idea was that they would turn out to be aliens as well, waging a covert proxy war, but that was something we were never planning to reveal. It was just like Cartmel's instructions to new Doctor Who writers. He gave them a sortof secret description of who the Doctor really was, with direction to be mindful of it but to never actually state it. In this way, the flavor of mystery seeped into the last two seasons of Doctor Who, informing the characterization across many stories without overpowering or calling attention to the red thread.
We never returned to the Board of Directors. I think they are only mentioned maybe three times in the series. That might always change, should they be needed. At the very least, it's a card to play, a clause to invoke if the audience comes to know too much. The effect was simple enough – a string of christmas lights taped to a black velvet curtain, waved gently with a piercing sound effect.
Wilbur
Akin to James Bond's Q, Jay came up with the idea of the Agency having a gadget man. It's a great idea – a simple, effective way to deliver plot devices to characters as needed. Plot devices are often maligned. Sometimes rightly so. But at their best, they are simply tools for skipping ahead to the important bits. In a half-hour drama, they can be essential to cut through red tape.
Good examples of plot devices are the sonic screwdriver and the psychic paper in Doctor Who. A locked door is a mundane and common obstacle. In a story that requires all the time it has to deal with more pressing issues, the locked door is just unnecessary, but it's part of the reality of life. Doors are typically locked. People are typically suspicious of eccentric strangers in blue boxes. Enter the sonic screwdriver and psychic paper, and suddenly the mundane obstacle breezes by. The Doctor rushes full steam into the awaiting plot. Of course, these two examples can also be cited as instances of Plot Device Fatigue, when everything, even the Big Stuff, gets solved by the wave of a magic wand.
Wilbur himself didn't quite work. We ran into two problems with Wilbur – tone and casting. In retrospect, we needed to either tone down the humor of Wilbur or inject more levity into the surrounding story. My tendency was toward relentless darkness. Jay was keen to add more humor to balance that out. Jay achieved that balance later on in the series, particularly with “Pest Control” which I think is the funniest episode the show has done, and one of the most well-written. Here, I screwed up and didn't adjust the two tones properly to coexist in a productive way.
Casting didn't help. Once John McGuinness was cast, the character was locked into an expiration date. Even if John had been available in later semesters, at some point he would cease to be. We hadn't learned the Rob O'Reilly lesson as well as we thought. (Rob was cast in “Kshama” as a homeless man, who was pivotal to the plot. In the following episode, he blew us off, leaving us in the lurch at the last minute). What we should have done was create a position instead of a character, and establish quickly that the position would change people regularly.
What's the Point?
I'm bothering to write all this for two reasons. I think the wiki and the blog are important. The show has created a community over the years, but it's a community in bubbles – groups of people who work together and graduate – that don't interact with any of the other groups. Shadows is, after all, designed to be a resource to students. But it can't do that effectively without history and continuity.
The other reason is that, when I joined the show, I had no information about it. There weren't any episodes available to view. The original series tapes languished in the cupboard, dusty and forgotten. When I left there was only one 3/4” u-matic tape deck left.
Documenting the series in this way allows institutional memory to develop. The wiki was not a tool that existed ten years ago. But it's available now, and has proven effective in many different applications. We have seen how, because of the nature of the college production environment, institutional memory developed by small groups is not easily or successfully preserved or passed on. I was hoping that by rearranging the work flow, this problem could be solved. But there need to be outside resources, non-people resources, to store and perpetuate knowledge about the show. Only a wiki can address this need. I hope it will, because Shadows has been, and continues to be, a powerful tool for learning the craft of series drama.
It's also a lot of fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment