The Story of Millie

We'll Be Right Back, But First ...

2011-05-25T18:23:00.000-07:00

smoke gets in yer eyes, life gets in yer way, and gainful employment has pretty much commandeered most available writing time for the past long while. as we muck out the closets and attics this summer, we shall unearth the archive and get back to this.

meanwhile, keep wearing those snazzy duckhead jeans.

In which we Do Do that Voo Doo that We Do so Well

2009-07-15T10:24:00.000-07:00

Here we are waiting for the schedule change that will allow us to shift over from live shows to taping the shows (something to do with the painfully slow commissioning of all that new equipment). Hi-jinx continue unabated (one of these shows' cold open is a fake crawl for the-then Lexington cable company, complete with the same awful typeface and orange background; Keith has an excellent future as a forger), while all n sundry are reporting various Odd Encounters with citizens n taxpayers. Dougie's is typical: in his tale he's on the studio floor doing something or other with a grand high poobah from state government in prepping for the Sunday public interest show, while the grandee fixes him with the steely eye of command, then ahems and States for the Record: "You're on that Monsterpiece show. That's pretty funny." In parsing this comment, the group is divided on whether it's pretty funny that Dougie is on the show, the show is pretty funny, or someone broke wind (which is always funny but seldom pretty).

Meanwhile, the next movie up in our story is Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things. After the letdown from Plan 9, we're just crankin' them out. Many years later, I come to realize that there are three rules of creativity and the Children show illustrates these rules quite handily. The rules are:

Just sit down and crank it out every day. Keeps the craftsmanship in shape.
Don't assume beforehand it will be a masterpiece, a signficant event, or anything out of the ordinary. The work won't conform to your expectations.
If it wants to go in a different direction than you intended, take that road. You can always backtrack if you have to; but if you force your original intention, you'll always wind up in a cul-de-sac.

We knew from our up-front research that this was a Bob Clark laff riot, and were quite prepared to lade the show up with Porky's references. We did not expect to find that this was quite an effective little retelling of Sake's The Monkey's Paw. Barb was off auditioning that week, both in and out of town, so the first time she would see the script would be after it went into production (this being in the Dark Dark Ages before email and whiteboard wikis, however in the world could we do our work I wonder? The kinder remain amazed when we describe these legendary days. No, revise that last to read: The kinder remain bored when we describe these legendary days). Two center-of-show gags wrote themselves:

Since the conceit of the movie is that the Beloved Son returns from the dead, it seemed logical to resurrect Dougie from the dead. Actually he was not dead, but merrily toiling away in Master Control; he had not been on the floor during show for months, which limited Millie's opportunities to act with him. So we pulled the Dead Guy mask from the trunk, put it on Dougie, and had him interrupt Millie's learned discourse on the movie with the immortal entrance line "Here I am, Millie, back from the dead!" Keith put Little Jeff on audio (an amusing choice, since the two of them tended to spontaneously combust when in close proximity) so that Dougie could step away from the board. Once I had written "Here I am, Millie, back from the dead!", the follow-up line flowed automatically: "P-U, Dougie, you stink!" and the topper just fell right on top of it, right on cue: "That's because I'm dead." I don't remember any other writing session where the lines just flowed like that.
As has been noted by the Teeming Masses, Dougie was armed with one or two Dr. Demento albums for audio cuts, which albums included the equally immortal Ogden Edsel tone pome, "Dead Puppies Aren't Much Fun". Well, why not? The script called for this to to be staged like the Beatles' Hey Jude video, where the camera pulls back to show the population of a small city gradually filling the stage for the interminable Na na na nas. (This being the Dark Dark Ages as noted, I was rewarded with blank stares with the reference to the Beatles and their Hey Jude video. So much for shared cultural heritage.)

We didn't have the population of a small city available to rush the MT set on cue, as our pathetic little band of studio groupies had long since found other ways to amuse themselves at 2AM Sunday morning, but there were a few night owls in the newsroom who came down to feel the love. This represented the last appearance of Wags (the Obnoxious Battery Powered Puppy), with Millie pulling out the Infamous Cast-Iron Skillet to dispatch Wags to the Doggie Hereafter in spite of management's directives to administer no further on-air whackings to small adorable creatures. Keith interrupts Millie to stay her hand in administering corporal punishment to Wags because (cue music).

Somewhere someone's going to find that cut and post it. Dougie had put a hot mic into Master Control, and you can hear Dougie and Keith singing along with the track.

In which we need a new Plan

2009-07-12T04:46:00.000-07:00

So three cheers and a tiger for us, victory is ours, darn the torpedos and full speed ahead, and just in time too because we were in the run-up to Plan 9 From Outer Space and had Great Plans for appropriate related video mischief. Plan 9, as all fanboys n grrls knew, was The Worst Movie Ever Made. I actually saw a snatch of Plan 9 as a wee prat, on the 4PM after school monster movie program (a desperation move by the local ABC outlet to combat the NBC affiliate's capture of the kids market with its Kowboy Kartoons, the CBS affiliate's capture of the kid's market with its Paramount Popeyes, and the indy station's subversive Three Stooges hour, as it was programmed with American International rubber-suit pictures and ultimately replaced by Dialing for Dollars) -- dimly recall being disturbed by the concept of zombies, if not the execution as it were -- but hadn't seen the whole masterwork, it being too horrific for viewing on the public airwaves no doubt. But if it surpassed The Carpet Monster, as our desk references said it did, then we would surely be in high cotton. So we made great plans to make great mockery, and proceeded on our assumptions.

We teased the upcoming movie during the three or four weeks of February previews, usually through the Millie/Keith dialogs and supplementing with inappropriate crawls at inappropriate moments. We also began using George Thorogood's Bad to the Bone regularly as the music out, because power chords are always a Good Thing, one should always Leave Them Wanting More, and because we felt like it (Gosh!). I also had decided that we would open with the Fox Fanfare (with Cinemascope extension) because nothing announces a bombastic movie like the full Fox Fanfare with Cinemascope extension, complete with standup foamcore graphic and crew guys waving flashlights for the searchlights. Couldn't miss, I tell you.

Then we actually got the movie. And, as Jack Benny so aptly put it, "Well!"

It was not what I expected.

Remember the drill: the Millie MT show hijinks always sprung as riffs on the movie. And Plan 9 opened promisingly, with Criswell ranting, the paper plate flying saucers, and the two-chairs-plus-a-stick cockpit set. But then it veers into the Bela Lugosi footage, which is a fatal wrong turn at Albuquerque, and loses the audience. Historically, we have not yet arrived at full-blown Ed Woods revisionist scholarship yet -- we just have the work itself as Sola Scriptura to deconstruct, and no matter how many times we run and rerun the tape, none of us can get around the Time/Lifesuck of the Lugosi sequence.

I expect we were trapped by our expectations. Based on the rumors, we expected balls-out incoherent disregard for form and structure from start to finish. We had boxed ourselves into the Count Floyd box, building the movie up to an acme of awfulosity only to discover that the real thing just wasn't very bad, now, was it? Well, no matter because we still had to produce a show, and staring at the teevee wishin' and hopin' that inspiration would leap forth and smack us upside our pointy little heads wasn't going to work, and we had production deadlines to meet. So I started typing, and Barb started editing. We gave up trying to produce the show we wanted to make from Plan 9, and started work on the show that we could make from Plan 9.

There was one gag that we wanted to try, having talked about it conceptually several times with Keith. Much time was spent colorbalancing the cameras before we went on the air, so that there would be no visible change in quality from one camera to another (typically, the problem child was the minicam); the balancing was done with a white card placed in the three set areas. Film directors of photography often stacked several color-correction filters in their primary lens, and some were experimenting with filming through somewhat stronger color filters. Since gelling the studio lights for mood or effects was still off the table for the moment, we were toying with the idea of mounting theatrical lighting gel in front of one or more camera lenses as an effect; the idea was that after color and white balancing, we could keep the engineering department happy for the majority of the show while achieving a desired effect (whatever that would be) as a one-off gag. With a wide variety of colored gel available, we could quickly tweak the effect by swapping color. Keith liked the idea, and we had gotten sidetracked in testing by the recent office politics. The infamous day/night cemetary scene would be our test bed.

So we wrote a completely straight fanboy dissertation on the movie for Barb, pulling out all the academic buzzwords that we could remember. Barb would read sections of it for our friends n neighbors, and if anything induced a laff we took it out: we wanted one minute of terminal stultification. Then for the sequence, we taped a blue gel over one of the two cameras that would be used for the sequence: we wanted this to be textbook bad direction, with Point 1 assigned to Camera 1, Point 2 to Camera 2, Point 3 to Camera 1, et cetera. Except that Camera 1 would be "daylight", and Camera 2 "night". Keith's final tweak was to have Barb pivot from one camera to the other, holding the cut until she completed the pivot. It was metalicious.

The problem with making meta-comedy is that too often you're making comedy for an audience of one, two or three. You can rationalize this any way you want as a Tortured Creative Soul and feign cosmic indifference as to whether anybody gets the meta-point, but getting all wrapped up in your own cleverness is not a good place to be. That's what happened to the Plan 9 show; it was good enough, but too self-indulgent to be anything better. I was irked n offended that Ed Wood hadn't given me material to work with. Now that we had unequivocal creative freedom, it was time to get over my particular bad self and get to work -- especially since Barb had just landed auditions for several out-of-state graduate schools. The future was coming fast, and it was definitely the place where we were going to spend the rest of our lives.

In which the Ground Shifts Yet Again.

2009-06-28T04:55:00.001-07:00

So we did the next show as a sit-down, bad pun, nothingburger show. Our wonderings whether the guys had received the same talk were answered: the studio mood was glum, with lots of questions of "What are you going to do?" We did think about doing the show so snarkily bad as to Make a Point, but to who? Conceptual n artistic purity uber alles is a nice 19th century concept, along with the lack of room for commerce in art, and for that matter naivete trumping cynicism because it's naicer (well, that might be Rousseau, the creature); but we thought that indulging in a public display of temper tantrum would be neither productive nor entertaining. Best to disengage without regrets -- we got to play with a teevee station, test out whether our ideas of structuring an entertainment program would in fact be entertaining in the inhospitable environs of Central Kentucky, and got paid for it. Good enough, and time to start working on our personal future plans.

BTW, Bill loved that particular show. He left an ebullient message that he knew we had it in us, and looked forward to this week's show and more of the same. Definitely time to walk away. So along with the script, we prepared a letter that advised Bill that this would be our last MT, thanks for the use of the hall, etc.

The weekly script drop-off routine was to visit Keith and Doug in the master control room, talk with them about the overall plan, point out particular segments that would need attention, sometimes they'd have some reactions or ideas that we'd incorporate into the final polish, and visit a bit about this and that. They were more surprised that we'd be back for a last week than they were that we'd be gone after this week. Somebody was hollering down the hallway, which was unusual. I stuck my head out to see who was hollering, because it seemed to be esaclating.

It was JD. And he was hollering at me, trying to get my attention. Now what?

I knew JD from my college days in the early 70s. He was one of three noobs who were engaged by the Harvard of the Midwest as the managers charged with the daily management of student life n activities. JD's activities oversights included the campus filmmakers' group and the theatrical groups unaffiliated with the formal theatre program, which groups I passed the time and effort left over after the formal theatre program's demands. In this exalted position, JD got to be one of the boots-on-the-ground managers of the great university's response to the stoont activitists who took over the campus at the height of the antiwar protests. Not fun times, didn't do much for his sunny outlook on life, the university's crisis management was ineffective at best, no one was crowned with glory, and generally anyone part of all that probly leaves it off their curriculum vitae. So I was less than sanguine about engaging with JD on any level -- who knew how raw all that 70s foolishness still was?

Anyway, here's JD calling out "How ya doin got a minute come on in let's talk got some things to catch up on" in a good ol' Midwestern run-on sentence that was not a question. Ah well, not like there was anything else to do. So into JD's office we go.

"So what's up with your show. It stunk." Good old Midwestern directness, haven't heard that in years, but I am very weary of this particular trope from management. "John, we've been over this with Bill and we responded to the issues he raised, and yada yada yada managementbabblespeak and ..."

JD cut me off. "What show are you talking about? I'm talking about last week's show. It stunk. What happened?"

WTF? "John, we were led to believe that WLEX management hated the show we were doing. We were given a directive to do the show in the standard monster movie host format. We disagreed with the directive, we did it anyway. We were told to do this week's show the same way, that this was what WLEX wanted and if we didn't do it you would engage someone who would."

JD nodded. "Bill told you this." It was not a question.

The mental alarm bells start going off that this is not about our silly little show. "Bill is our official contact with WLEX. He speaks for management."

"I'm WLEX management. He doesn't speak for me." Ah. "So Bill changed your show and you didn't call Larry." Deeper and deeper WTF.

"John, I had a very nice chat with Larry a couple of months ago, but this is Kentucky. There was no reason to think that was anything deeper than the Boss being polite to the Help."

"That's what I told him you'd say." I don't like where this is going. "What's that?" pointing to the envelop I was carrying.

"This week's script. Bill wants to see the script before broadcast."

JD nodded. "You're quitting, right." That also was not a question.

"This will be our last week." JD nodded. Then --

"I don't think we've been entirely clear with you, so let me clear things up for you.

We like what you did with the show. Keep it up.

Don't talk to Bill anymore. Don't talk to anyone but me about the show. Don't talk to me unless you're doing something you think I need to know about. I'm not worried about you, never have been, I know your work." And he tore up the script and the letter.

Well, this puts a different light on things. "So what are we paying you?"

"Fifty a week for Barb, up to twenty-five a week in reimbursable hard costs."

"Seventy-five a week. You invoice us? Redo your invoice for last week and leave it for me. Is there anything that you want to do different?"

"Well, we'd like to get away from the live show and do it live-to-tape. "

"I thought live was your idea."

"Um, no. Bill thought it would keep us spontaneous ..."

"Forget that. What do you want?"

"I want to tape it."

"Done. Tell your guy Keith to set it up. No, I'll handle that. By the way, we're going to do a second run of movies. Here's a list of titles we're looking at -- pick out the ones you want to do. Anything else?"

Well, there were two things. Let's do the easier one first. "John, I don't think Bill told you that our intentions are to leave Lexington this year."

Pause. "No, he didn't. How soon?"

"Don't know. It depends on how things work out. Could be as early as August, could be later."

Pause. "Well, we'll deal with that when we need to. Doesn't change anything now. Anything else?"

Into the deep waters, folks. "John, you know we've been poking fun at a studio suit on the show that we call 'JD' ..."

JD laughed. "Yeah, that's pretty funny. My friends kid me about it. I think it's a hoot. What about it?"

"I hope you're okay with that."

"Why wouldn't I be? You going to do more like that?"

"Now we are."

With that, the interview ended. I poked my head in master control on my way out. Barb was visiting with Keith and Doug, wondering where I was. "I think we're going to punch that script up a lot." And told them what happened. Barb, Keith and Doug were very happy. I told Doug that I had one request for music that week, and I'd bring it with us. It was a Ry Cooder version of an old jass tune -- (Big Bad Bill) is Sweet Willie Now.

Now the real fun began.

In which the Hammer Strikes

2009-06-21T05:06:00.000-07:00

I may, and probly am, compressing time a little here. Just to set the history straight.

February was sweeps month, and we had big plans for building on the momentum of the Carpet Monster show. Although we didn't have a say in the selection of the first run of movies, we did have a say in assigning the air dates; so we had selected what we thought was a strong selection of the available cheese, building up to Plan 9 from Outer Space at the end of the month. We knew that we could pull off the kind of show that we wanted to do; the production fixes were relatively minor, and would be nailed if we could move to live-to-tape. And we were convinced that the Carpet Monster show would yield a shower of praise from the teeming masses, covering us in glory and convincing Bill to approve the minor production shift.

Well, wrong on one count and right on the other, but not the way we expected. Nary a peep from the Teeming Masses on the Carpet Monster show. A quite large peep from Bill on Monday, instructing Barb and me to come over to the station tout de suite about last weekend's show. We came in on Tuesday, to learn that Bill was Not Amused by the show.

Not Amused At All.

Appalled, outraged, dismayed, consternated, dumbfounded, aghast, stupefied, and enraged would be closer to the mark.

For him, the Carpet Monster show displayed everything that was wrong about our concept of the show. It moved too fast, it was too in-jokey, the characters were unappealing, it was impossible to follow, the production values were so sub-par as to be unacceptable for student work let alone the output of a professional major market teevee station. In case we hadn't noticed, this was a business and not a playground; and WLEX had made a sizable investment that he was not going to jeopardize during the all-important ratings sweeps month.

And while he was at it, where did we get off making public fun of station management? Didn't we realize that this undercut their position in the marketplace? It was embarassing for him and the rest of the senior management to constantly have to defend a foolish little show every time they showed their faces publicly. One thing was certain: nobody in the higher echelons of Lexington media had any clue what MT was about, and that reflected badly on WLEX management, of which he was one.

And so henceforth, not to be deviated from one jot or tittle, by order of the Supreme High Command of WLEX, and without mercy or hope of appeal:

No more crew interaction
No more snarky dialogue
No more Bobs, Nathans, studio visitors, pizza deliveries, phone calls fake or otherwise
No more puppets
No more references to anything outside of the movie
No more reading viewer letters on the air
No more run on graphics, crawls, or animation
No more roaming around the studio on air
No more sound FX, visual FX, or any other FX
No more nothing that wasn't funny jokes and puns about the actual movie
The show will be Millie in a chair talking about the movie. Period. And if we didn't care to offer that, somebody else was available and waiting for the opportunity.

Well, that was plain enough.

Out in the parking lot we noted that this was Tuesday, which was our crew's day off; so we figured they didn't know that the hammer was coming down. We talked about what we wanted to do about this; neither of us wanted to put any time into anything that wasn't fun, and staying up to 3AM Sunday to recite bad puns was not high on our list of fun things to do. Besides, Barb had out-of-town auditions coming up for grad schools; that would be our future life, far far away from Lexington. This foolishness was now a distraction that was jeopardizing our plans for our particular and immediate future.

OTOH, we did have a loyal audience of some unknown size; and we did have a studio crew that we had convinced to become part of what now appeared to be a fiasco of epic proportions, which would surely make their particular short-term careers hell. We would be gone anyway in a few months, we were going to write off our Lexington reputations as dust in the wind anyway. But we had some responsibility to them, to try to ensure that there was no lasting professional fallout poisoning their livelihoods.

So we decided: we'd give Bill the show he wanted. For two weeks. And then we'd leave. Obviously it was time to go. The Future Beckoned!

In which we Parse the Show, Part Deux

2009-06-17T18:29:00.000-07:00

But wait! There's more!

0:10 Here's Bob with a handful of Real Mail. Keith would hand me the week's mail when I checked in with him; we usually received between five and ten pieces of mail per week. I'd scan the letters and pick out the sections of each letter that we'd respond to on air; I'm pretty sure we acknowledged each piece of mail received each week, even if we didn't read the letter. Sometimes Barb would read the actual piece of mail with the on-air section hi-lit; usually we'd rewrite it with a Sharpie so that she could read it quickly. I'd bullet the response and she'd adlib around it. We'd stick the letters onto the set, so that everybody would see the letters every week.

0:42 I'm sure glad we didn't hear half of what Dougie was putting out for the soundscape, because I have no idea what he's doing with the FX.

0:56 This was a live show, so we didn't do the loop repeat gag. We must conclude that Mr. Mike created the loop for his buds at Morehead. We knew Morehead was a bastion of Milliedom, so this is not surprising. Recently, we learned that Asbury College was, too. Sakes! Who'da thunk?

1:38 This letter was not a setup; that was a real letter from a real fan. We used it as a Clever Device to integrate the plot into the show. If you listen carefully, you can hear the plot wheels creaking in the background.

2:14 The week's obligatory Punky Brewster running gag. Barb and I found this show vastly amusing for all the wrong reasons, including finding the words "punky" and "brewster" highly risible.

2:50 This is the week's single fake letter, which not only sets up the fake mailing address but is Secret Clue No. 2 to dating the broadcast.

3:07 This week's fake mailing address. The post office box is WLEX's main post office box. We put the joke header on in the first few weeks out of amusement at the conniptions it would give whoever sorted the mail. Imagine our surprise when people actually started sending letters to the fake address. Keith told me that it actually worked in our favor, because we got our own little mail cubby out of it. We'd occasionally use a cancelled envelope as the background to a bump shot, just to acknowledge that real people sent mail to the silly addresses and the Postal Service processed it through. I guess if they accept letters to Santa Claus, North Pole they'll accept anything. Of course, this was back in the day when mail was handled for the most part by humans. Our youngest son does not understand why you would write something on a piece of paper and send it when you can just email somebody.

3:08 Dougie has now shifted to his planned soundtrack, so we're back on the script -- the BG music is ripped from the movie.

3:09 Can't even read my own script, and give the wrong ZIP code. That's why we needed trained actors!

3:23 Get us out of this scene, Keith! We got nothing left!

3:51 Position 4 -- in the reception area -- note the on-air feed to the big honkin' console teevee. This was one of the early meta "watch ourselves watching ourselves" gags; but it's real function was to cue Bob; we didn't have enough cable to extend the headsets out for the two or three crew guys needed for the shot. So Little Jeff had the live headset, because as the cameraman he needed to hear the director. When Bob saw himself come up on the teevee, that was his cue to head for the conference room.

4:12 And here we are in the conference room. Shot just the way they left it at COB Friday. Usually we used the conference room for Barb's makeup and dressing room. Later on we discovered that the offices weren't usually locked at night, and we'd shoot "JD" in the real JD's office. Yes, folks, now it can be told -- we shot JD, not Kristin.

5:11 And speaking of the real JD, he had just given us a list of movies that they were looking at for "season 2" of MT. That was the first hint that we had that WLEX was committing to extending the show. So we selected and programmed the second wave of 26 movies that followed the "first season"; season 2 started with the Bela Lugosi Dracula.

5:27 Position 5. This sequence was written for Officer Elmer, but he decided that night that he didn't want to do it. This was an unpleasant surprise; we'd told him about it when we dropped the scripts off Thursday night, and gave him his pages, and he was up for it. Go figure. We needed to recruit somebody to stand in, in a hurry, so Terry did it. But Millie's posturing about a security breach makes no sense as played to Terry; Millie's on-air relationship with the production guys was amped-up Talent 'tude (go back to her manhandling Richie and Jeff in position 1). Well, we figured that anybody who stuck through the broadcast this long wasn't interested in strict internal logic n consistency.

6:09 Oh, look! More dead video air! That's because there was only one minicam, and it was set up at the film chain; Barb had to run over to it. We actually tried to get a pedestal camera out into the corridor for a cover shot; couldn't get it out the door.

6:25 The lens flare kills the payoff. The bookplate reads "Property of WKYT-TV". Guess we should have rehearsed that one.

6:54 Our first experiment in slipped synch. Doug had discovered that he could take an audio feed, loop it back through the audio rack, and throw the audio out of sync with the video. There was a noticeable degrade of the sound quality, but hey it was MT. We thought it might be interesting to have Millie's audio dubbed after going through the whole silent movie shtick; and we figured that people watching were half-asleep and if they noticed would think that their exhaustion was causing their eyes to play tricks on them. We played much more extensively with the slipped synch in later shows.

7:28 It's "je ne sais quoi", folks.

7:53 The Devil's Hand -- A Swedish anthology movie featuring Lon Chaney, Jr. as the devil, recovered from having his hand nailed to the set. He stays seated at a desk, wearing what looks like one of his personal shirts through his scenes, which were the wraparounds for the anthology stories. At the end of the movie he blows up the world.

8:06 The third Secret Clue to the air date. The show aired either the week before the Super Bowl, or the week of. We guys were vastly amused by Da Bears, not because we were football fans but because it was Ditka and Da Bears; we shared a brotherhood of punkdom. The out music is Da Bears doing the Super Bowl Shuffle.

8:32 Barb is adlibbing her way out.

So there you have it. We were pretty happy with it; this was, truth to tell, how the First Show would have played if we had had the chops to pull it off. We had the celebratory pizza afterwards, and everybody was feeling very good about this. We left the station sure in the certain knowledge that the cards n letters would pour in, congratulating us on our artistic accomplishment.

In which we Parse the Show -- Part 1

2009-06-14T05:13:00.000-07:00

Thanks to good ol' Mike the Carpet Monster show was saved for Posteriority:

So here's what was going on that fateful night.

0:08 SMPTE leader was a Clue that we were going to show a movie around the movie.

0:18 Dougie's soundscape was the first show-length soundtrack. For this show he ripped the music from the movie itself, and stacked his effects cassettes (regular old cassette tapes, not the carts that disc jockies used to use) in front of his decks. He had marked his script where he was going to play specific effects, and had others that he would drop in as fast as he could cue them up. Usually, he didn't send the soundscape out into the studio -- it would get picked up by the mics. So we never knew what the soundscape was until we played the show back. O that scamp Dougie!

That's Mike and Little Jeff fussing over Millie in the open. The blue cloth she was wearing was our Instant Blue Screen; if we wanted to matte in some thing, we'd put it on a little pedestal, drape the Instant Blue Screen over the pedestal, and put the whole thing in front of the permanent blue backing.

That's me doing my fake plummy FM radio announcer voice. I didn't have the pitch or resonance that a real plummy FM radio announcer had, but I knew what I wanted. I was trying to match the tempo of the movie's voiceover, hence the deliberate pacing of the VO; the normal MT show tempo would have been twice as fast.

0:23 If we repeated something, we wanted the audience to Get It. Repeating "zany" was that week's giveaway that we hated the word "zany" ICW MT. Ordinarily, we would have beat the repetition into the ground, but we had to get into the setup.

0:38 The Farrah Fawcett movie is one of two internal references that date the broadcast. If we had old teevee guides, we could pin it down for sure. The second internal reference puts the air date as either January 18 or 25. I'll tell you about it later.

0:45 "Horror Beyond Imagination." That's what the movie's original advertising promised. 1986 was also the year of Star Wars III (or VI), which to keep the fanboys away had the working title of "Blue Harvest" with the tagline "Horror Beyond Imagination". So there's our obligatory fanboy throwaway reference for the week.

0:51 That's the film library. All of the "on location" rooms were shot with available light; we had a little Lowellite on a stick to augment. So that's why the "on location" rooms are greenish; the lighting was moved from room to room, and we couldn't colorbalance the camera for each setup. A real DP would have pre-lit each room. Meh, we didn't have the lights, sue us.

Who knows why Doug put the woo woo into the soundscape here? Guess it was to show an alarm going off. We probly couldn't get a Star Trek Red Alert FX here, there was no Internets to pull down the file; if you wanted a sound effect, you had to go get the record.

I was way off to the side in the studio reading, as close to the mic as I could get, so that we had no background noise; I might have been up on the news set, can't remember. Barb could hear me live, but Bob was in another room; so Doug set up a monitor speaker for him to hear the VO.

Bob is tapping the bookplate on the film to set up the final joke. The bookplate reads "Property of WKYT-TV". The idea was to zoom in on the bookplate in the final segment; since this was a live show (we said so on teevee so it had to be true), unfortunately we had to remember to do so and cue the zoom -- and in that particular segment, things got rushed. Oh, well.

1:09 Yes kids, that is a Film Chain, and they actually still used it. When we showed the movie on the show, the movie was dubbed to videocassette, and the deck was cued automatically from the control room. But it arrived as a 16mm film, and Keith's first MT Job O The Week was to transfer the movie to videotape, using this very machine.

1:27 Another trope, this one from Michael Keaton in Night Shift: "Is this a great country or what?" We quoted a lot from not-quite-popular movies.

1:41 The standard show format by this point was an intro, five internal segments (mail is segment 3 or 4, depending on the film pacing), and outro including the preview. So this is Segment 1.

1:58 Doug has genuinely perplexed Barb with the "Secret woid" clip -- nobody knew that was coming, and he put that one out into the studio since there was no narration. So her look of puzzlement is not only in character, it's real.

2:06 That's Richie. He was floormanaging, so he went first. Since the cameras were generally locked down, the camera operator stood next to the camera during the shot.

2:23 That's Little Jeff. He was the minicam operator for the show. It was his tryout on the minicam.

2:45 Bill had grumbled about the writing being "glib and facile" at one point. So of course we had to call attention to the show's glibness and facility.

2:50 Barb was listening to Frankie Goes to Hollywood at this time, with the tee-shirt tag line "Frankie Say Relax". So we tried to work in "Millie say" at least once per show.

2:54 And speaking of live teevee and nobody knowing what someone might do, which as we all recall is what Bill hoped for back in the day, nobody knew that Barb would close out the segment by blowing a raspberry; we might have gone with live audio for that.

3:10 Here's Barb in the film room, and the lighting stinks. It didn't look so bad in the Bob sequence, because the blanket was green to begin with; but Barb's makeup and costume was in the reds, lavenders and blues. And since we all remember that teevee tubes broadcast light, and the primary colors of light are red, green and blue, and that under green light red and blue go black ... the perils of live teeveee with a half-hour setup taught us that we had to pre-light the next time we did this.

3:29 The "Clue" joke came from the Hard-Boiled Dick show (remember the Miami Vice montage?)

3:40 Self-referencing jokes in full mode here, folks.

3:50 Here's a geography lesson for the studio, showing how small the places really were: the Film Room was accessed through the Mail Room, which was right across the hall from the Control Room.

4:07 We are not above bad jokes. We were one of the few couples in our circle who thought Airplane was a great movie, and that quantity of jokes would work as well as quality of jokes.

4:20 The lighting in the Control Room stinks, and Terry has to fix it by dialing up something in the shot. After this show, Keith pronounces that we can do no more Control Room shots until we figure out how to fix the lighting.

4:28 In the writing, we saw that we were getting too off-track and that there was no way to get back to the so-called plot of the show; so we used the deus ex machina of the viewer call-in. We really wanted to get "real" viewers to call in, but that never happened. Probly for the best -- I don't know if we could have controlled the call. Bill Cosby was great at leading people into setting him up, when he felt like it.

I'm still reading in the studio; Barb is getting her cues from the room and booth monitors.

4:50 What in the world is Doug doing with the sound FX?

5:02 Finally, after all these years, I get the sound joke at the end of the bump.

5:19 Millie's crank calls were a staple of the show. We had the doo-dad where the call audio ran through the mixing board; when we did that live, she called the Control Room and one of the guys would answer (or call her in). That was a working extension she was dialing on, unplugged for this show.

She's calling for outside help because the previous movie segment had the Esteemed Scientist called in by the Sheriff. The Esteemed Scientist had explained the Secret of the Movie Monster to the stoic young Hero Guy. How did he know what the Secret of the Movie Monster was? Because he was an Esteemed Scientist from a University. I met one of those guys the other day.

5:32 The week before, Larry "Bud" had made a series of crank calls on Letterman using these exact jokes. Wonder if anybody remembered? He only made two calls; gags must always run in series of three. Running gags must always top each other, and run in odd-numbered series. Larry "Bud" made only two calls. Alert the media.

5:36 Now I'm in the ad-lib act; don't know why I thought the nyuk-nyuks would help the bit. I probly did it to irritate Barb, who to this day does not find the Stooges funny.

6:12 Here's the third joke. It's un homage to Willy Elder and one of his Mad chicken fat gags. A no-prize to the Merry Marvel Marcher who can identify which story this one was buried in.

6:32 Well, by this time he was established as a staple. I don't think that's my arm up the puppet's hinder, but it could have been.

6:43 Here's the Tape Room, which was behind the Control Room. This was the very room ripped up by the Real Engineers. Note that they're not quite finished yet -- they've still got masonite down on the floor where they were staging equipment to keep it clean.

7:09 Note the high-tech state o the art Sony decks.

7:12 Snappy-dressing Bob and his snappy dressing shoes. I would have sworn he was wearing Chucks.

In which we Can Has Cheezburgers

2009-06-12T17:04:00.001-07:00

Well, I was wrong. The Creeping Terror stunk.

Now I am willing to stipulate for the record that people are entitled to their dreams; and it's obvious that it was The Creeping Terror's director's dream to make a Real Movie. And I am willing to stipulate for the record that the director likely scored a used 16 mm camera and a used splicing block. And I am willing to stipulate for the record that the director likely knew a guy who knew a guy who was willing to write a Gripping Space Age Adventure for beer money; and that after he got the script, the director more n likely talked his friends n relations into coming up to the lake for a couple of weekends to act in his Dream Real Movie. And I am willing to stipulate for the record that the director very likely maxed out his credit cards on lab fees, and dubbing studio time, and wound up with one or two prints of his Dream Real Movie. And I am willing to stipulate for the record that the director highly likely spent a year or two pounding the pavement knock knock knocking on producers' doors until finally somebody wrote him a check for $.05 more than his out-of-pocket expenses, so he could live his life happy n secure in the knowledge that he made and sold his Dream Real Movie to a real Hollywood Producer Guy, and actually made money on the deal. While I'm at it, I'll stipulate that the director was a nice guy who loved children and puppies, and I'll throw in a veliciopede for good measure. I'm perfectly willing to stipulate all these things, because this is what makes our country great.

But I'm not willing to stipulate that Achieving Your Dream necessarily results in a Good Movie. In the case of The Creeping Terror, it didn't even result in a competent movie. O, it would be too easy to fisk the movie; besides the MSTies already did it years later. No no, sitting in our living room watching the thing play out ... well, fisking the movie would be like taking candy from a baby. Like taking feathers from a chicken. Like taking an honorary degree from Notre Dame. What's the fun in it?

Now I would not have said it this way 23 years ago, but this is what I thought about the Work, this is what I teach my kids about the Work, and this is what I still believe about the Work: you gotta get up and do the Work, every day. You set your daily Work time, and you show up for Work, and you do your Work during your Work time. If you write, you write during your Work time; if you draw or paint, you draw or paint during your Work time; if you play music, you practice your music during your Work time; if you design, you sit at your drawing board (we're still in the 80s, folks) and you design during your Work time; if you dance, you take class during your Work time; if you garden, you garden, etc. Whatever it is that you do creatively, you show up every day (6 out of 7 is good, 5 out of 7 is pushing it, 4 out of 7 is Right Off) during your Work time and you do your Work. You do not wait for the Muse to hit you in the eye with a big pizza pie, because that's not going to happen. You show up, you do your Work. Later you can take a break, drink a beer, hang with the gang, whatever. So it was pupu for me, Joe, that The Creeping Terror didn't inspire me with th' Muse o Wackiness -- but it was Work time and I had to write a teevee show to amuse n delight dozens, and it was due Thursday and we had the same three days we had had all season to do it. So I had to start writing on that yellow pad and not stop until I had broken the show.

It would be lovely to report that I saved the breakdown and the script; but they're long gone. But I sorta remember the thought process. And it went something like this:

We don't know what the ratings are, but we can count and we've been on the air more than 13 weeks and nobody's kicked us out yet. Matter of fact, the "real" WLEXers seem a tad friendlier. Maybe it's mere familiarity; the signs n portents suggest that The Powers That Be are happy with the numbers, which means that MT must be making itself felt in audience land.
If MT is gaining share, it's either because more people are continuing to watch teevee and turning to MT, or it's attracting viewers away from The Other Movie. Or both.
If The Other Movie on The Alpha Station is not growing, or is losing audience, they would not be happy about it. Especially if it was a result of no-count shabby upstarts like nous.
If the Millie-verse extended beyond the walls of WLEX, and The Alpha Station behaved like MT's "WLEX", they would react by making an inappropriate choice and following it all the way through.
If that were the case, the appropriate Inappropriate Choice would be to indulge in industrial sabotage.
If The Alpha Station were to indulge in Industrial Sabotage, it would do so publicly. Which means it would sabotage the program. And since no one on the program appears to be paying much attention to the movie, the weak link would be to sabotage the movie.
There's the show.

So I ran the idea past Barb, who was not all that interested because it sounded too High Concept, and High Concept doesn't play very well. Plus, there were rumblings that we were getting too far from Hosting a Movie, which is what we were supposed to do. So if we did this storyline ... but staged and played it mimicking the movie we were showing ... heh ...

The show pretty much wrote itself over the next two nights; we did very little in the polish beyond tightening here and there. We decided that since the movie seemed to be popularly known as The Carpet Monster, we'd use that as our Monstrous Device. Why the Alpha Station would employ a monster as its agent o mischief was irrelevant; this show took place in the Millieverse, so of course they'd use a cutout agent for plausible deniability. Duh.

When I dropped the script off at the station, Keith handed the audio copy to Doug, they both started reading, and started smiling before they finished the first page. Doug looked up first: "You need music for this, right." It wasn't a question. I agreed that a cheesy movie soundtrack would be a Very Good Thing. Keith looked up next: "You want to do this in black and white?"

Huh. Didn't know that was an option. It was very early for dropping the script off -- we usually dropped it off around 8:30 - 8:45, this was closer to 8, so the station had just gone to the network's feed for prime time programming, the guys had just taken over the studio for the night, and there weren't any local commercials to plug in until the half hour. So we pulled the bookcase flat out, turned on the light, and pointed a camera at it while Keith, Doug and Terry futzed with the electronics. I watched over their shoulder while they tried various things, and after a few minutes we all concluded that we probably couldn't make this work -- for this week. The set was lit wrong, and it looked like without some significant lighting adjustments we wouldn't be able to get enough sep between foreground (Barb) and background (set) to be able to clearly read Barb in the studio. It also looked like there would be real problems in the various building locations, which were all usually shot with available room light. One of the guys pointed out that if we did the whole show B&W, the only color would be the commercials; and after thinking about that one for a minute, we all decided that this interesting concept needed more work and we'd come back to it later.

Later, I thought this was a very good thing indeed -- the guys now own the show, they're taking ownership of production and working the problems. All we needed was to plunk a piece of carpet on Bob and do the show, and we just happened to be throwing out some old exhibit booth carpet from Ruckus Etcetera that very night. So I went dumpster diving, came up with a piece of carpet, and threw it right back in the dumpster -- the thing was so stiff it wouldn't drape worth a hoot toot, and was so heavy nobody could wear it. We decided we'd use a bedspread instead. (Still have that bedspread -- it's on The Michael's bed even as we speak.)

At this time, we're still doing the show live; so we show up at the studio very full of beans n mischief, Barb tells Bob he's going to have some fun tonight, we make our obligatory faces at Mike n Mindy as Mike sonorously advises the viewing audience to "stay tuned for SNL followed by MT, where tonight they're showing The Creeping Terror -- sounds like fun."

It was.

Next posts, we'll parse the YouTube clips.

In which we'll be Right Back after more Stuff

2009-06-11T17:57:00.000-07:00

Wait a minute -- oh! that music!

In which we Engineer Victory from Defeat

2009-06-11T10:47:00.000-07:00

We're going to take the dramatic license of compressing real time into story time. The incidents are mainly true, but not the implied timeline.

Keith is, dare I say it, actually twinkling one night. It seems that the Engineering Department has completed its due diligence, scheduling, solicitation of approved overtime, whatever fetlock-scratching was required and the rumored installation of the new electronic whizzbangery is scheduled for next week! With any luck, it will all be in by next week's show! Then we can do some Stuff! Hoot toot!

Well, all righty then; and although I can't swear to it I'm sure we rose to the occasion and wrote some bit that required some heinously complicated videographical nonsense for the punch line. So it was of course wholly to be expected that when we arrived for that night's Fun with Millie, he was about to kick Wags, the OBPP halfway from New Circle Road to East Kuala Lumpor. It seemed that the Engineering Department had encountered some Unforseen Issues in the installation of said new electronic whizzbangery.

And the installation was behind schedule.

And all of the old electronic whizzbangery was disconnected, with great gaping holes in the equipment racks where some devices formerly lived; and ripped-up wires hanging over the faces of the other devices.

So we were limited to the regular pedestal cameras tonight, and to regular old cuts -- we could have a fade to and from black, but nothing that involved going from one buss to another, because the X buss was also disconnected. So no Fun with Chromakey.

And he wasn't so sure that we could have supered titles or graphics, so no run-on crawls.

And no minicamera, either. It seems that the Engineering Department hadn't gotten around to hooking up the minicamera in the studio for us.

Because even as we spoke, the Engineering Department was in the dreaded Back Room, with all of the electronic whizzbangery spread out all over the place and the floor pulled, trying to figure out what the problems were and trying to get the system back up, online and functional for the Sunday public affairs show.

And he was under orders to "keep that show's rowdiness down and not disturb them" because they had to get the Back Room working in less than twelve hours, and frankly this little throwaway show wasn't worth jeopardizing the rest of the studio's operations over.

Well, all righty then. I note that the door is open, and I also note that -- hello! -- the A-Team studio crew is back, up to their pupkuses Laocoon-like in electronica and wiring. Now, I really am sympathetic to the problem -- deadlines is deadlines and not to be trifled with, and M's MT really is a throwaway show in the Grand Scheme of Things, and if you've been working away at installing many racksfull of electronic gear for any application it's not going to work the First Time, or the Second Time, and it is No Fun at any time, and you are going to wind up Starting All Over on Over Time, and it's just about certain that you're going to be pulling an All-Hands Allnighter at the end of the project, and you'll Get it Done (won't be pretty and will take some Junior Woodchuck the better part of two weeks at least to clean up whatever it is you did that finally got it Working, and you can bet your rosy hinder that the newest one of our guys will be the Junior Woodchuck anointed to take on that pleasant task In Addition To and at No Extra Pay). I am deeply and truly sympathetic to the problem, with a bushel and a peck of empathy thrown in for good measure. And I also know that M's MT is a real, regularly scheduled WLEX broadcast program that happens to making some kind of modest profit for the station thanks to a reliably watching audience that is going to be reliably watching in about an hour, and is therefore entitled to a show that has a certain minimum expected production support. So I hunker down with the Director o Engineering, who is in fact down in the floor and understandably not in the happiest of moods right about now.

Basically, the pitch is that we're known within the station as being a scripted program; the script was submitted properly, vetted and approved for certain camera n production gags; the Talent praise be unto her has rehearsed and prepared the show around the approved camera n production gags; the Talent n staff have regularly demonstrated collective team playery for good ol' WLEX; good ol' Larry would probly prefer not to refund paid advertising fees to the snazzy surplus store owing to a precipitous decline in viewership caused by the unfunny show we seem to be about to air; so what minimum electronica could we get back by air time, while otherwise not affecting the debugging and rebuilding?

D o E makes makes and once again for good measure makes the point that he really can't spare anybody or anything, is doing us a favor by even acknowledging our existence (of course I'm hunkered down right on the floor panel he wants to pull up next, and he knows it and I know it) -- and then relaxes a millimeter and says that he might spare one guy for five minutes. Because whether he likes the show or not, and don't think for a minute that I might like your show because I don't, it is a WLEX show and they shouldn't have made it impossible for us to do the kind of show that we do.

Well, if we can get the minicamera and maybe get the character generator to properly superimposed over the live image, we can fake the rest.

This, it seems, is possible -- possible, mind you, and he sends off -- heh -- our A-Team Director to accommodate us, remarking that ya know, the minicam doesn't really cut in properly with the studio pedestals and maybe while they're at it and as long as they've got everything torn up they might work on that next week, we might see some improvement, not promising anything now. Promises of buying a beer are exchanged and forgotten while the minicam is set up, Dougie looming over the operation just to make sure he understands how it's set up tonight so he knows what's different from usual -- Dougie's about twice the size of our A-Team guy normally, and is now trying to inflate like a puffer fish for maximum intimidation.

All this is fine n dandy, and an excellent manifestation of interpersonal skills I normally choose to not manifest at all, preferring to favor the Dangerous Angry Artiste persona -- but we have to rip up a segment now and come up with something new, and set up for the show which is going live in twenty minutes or so, and walk Barb n Keith through whatever this new segment is going to be. So Keith and I go through the script to see how we're going to do this. My habit is to paginate each segment separately, because Keith will hand out segments to certain of his team for a particular task -- usually the roving camera segments, or the chroma segments. Nobody gets a full script but Keith and audio, although Dougie has been known to pilfer Keith's script from time to time. So we're taking each segment and reordering the show sequence on the fly, because the fiendish chroma sequence of course was the open.

In a few minutes, we've got a new rundown that looks like it will hang flow together, with mail in its accustomed place. Don't know if it will make any sense for the movie we're showing that night, but that hasn't been a priority for a while. But we still have either Sequence Two or Sequence Three that basically doesn't exist any more, and we don't have any bright ideas about what to do to fill that dead air.

Barb has an idea. She tells Keith that she wants Dougie and the minicam, and a hand mic, and she'll do the rest. Trust her -- she's an actress. Mmm-kay; we got nothing else, and we're out of time -- once the show starts, we have learned that we have to go with it, we can't stop to fix or discuss anything. So we get through the open more or less intact; first position is a Millie sit-n-spiel; and that bump she tells Dougie to get ready with the minicam and Richie, who has graduated to floor manager, to just stay ahead of her and open doors.

And we're on the air. Barb announces that tonight we have a real treat: we get to go on a field trip to a Real Teevee Studio where we're going to see Real Teevee Guys doing Real Teevee Stuff. And off she charges for the studio door, Richie sprinting ahead of her. She marches into the control room, introduces Keith and berates him for hiding behind his Big Desk all these weeks, introduces our Audio Guy and Switcher Guy of the week, introduces Terry our Fake Engineer -- and then tells the camera that now we're going to meet the Real Engineers, and marches into the Back Room.

Of course, this is the time when the Real Engineers have chosen to take a coffee break, so bam! through the door comes Barb in full Millie flight, Dougie hot on her trail, and Barb triumphantly announcing "And here are Real Engineers doing Real Engineering Stuff, whatever it is that Real Engineers do. And you are?" she asks, thrusting her microphone into the phiz of the D o E, who is spluttering What what what what are you people doing? Since we get to see the On-Air feed in the studio, we note that Keith has helpfully put a graphic up: Real TV Engineers. Millie is continuing, "And how long have you been doing whatever it is that you do?" The D o E manages to get out "Don't you have a commercial to cut to, or something?" Millie takes the cue and gushes that she just noticed that Real TV Engineers shop at our title sponsor surplus store, where they get their -- and Keith punches in the commerical, that hot-starts with the immortal lede "Snazzy Duck-Head Jeans ..."

We're all pretty helpless with laughter by this point, while our pal the D o E is shaking his finger in Keith's face "Don't you -- ever -- do that again!" Except that his authority is a little undercut by his guys' breaking up; one of the A-Team takes the opportunity to remark that, well, we got them good; and besides, it was pretty funny. So the D o E thinks about it, resummons his dignity, and repeats: "Like I said -- don't you ever do that again -- tonight!" Then he grins marginally and throws us out of the Back Room.

After we wrap for the night, I ask Keith if I need to come in on Monday and smooth things over. He's not worried; and it was worth it to see their expressions on camera when Millie burst into the room. Then he hands me next week's cinematic masterpiece and says, "I don't know about this one -- it's pretty bad." I look at the tape on the back of the cassette -- The Creeping Terror, it sez -- and say, "I dunno. How bad could it be?"

In which we Start Shrieking a Lot.

2009-06-07T13:09:00.000-07:00

The bogus interview being a staple of teevee parody shows n skits, we threw in a bogus interview with a werewoof. Being tragically short of trained actors or werewoofs, it seemed logical to use a Cookie Monster puppet purchased from the same toy store as Wags the Obnoxious Etcetera Etcetera. It also seemed logical to put that puppet on my right hand, since I had run out of options for recruiting talent, Talent, or ta Lent.

Barb and I used to amuse ourselves on roadtrips with bogus puppet acts, which as they were performed in the privacy of our car for our own private entertainment (as the disclaimers on home entertainemtn require) were often at the expense of co-workers, other performers, academics, distinguished Lexington landed gentry, and anyone else who popped to mind. This was mindless riffing to while away the miles up n down I-75; so we had our own private rhythm, timing and general understanding of where the other one might go riffing. We amused each other with Monty Python pepperpot voices, abandoning fake British accents after attending a particularly unfortunate local production of something-or-other that featured the worst stage British in recorded history. So, the hell: it was a throwaway bit, it was within budget (most of which was being spent, when it was spent at all, on soundtrack), it was amusing in concept to co-opt a kid's puppet, badabing badaboom badabam. Done, moving on, next.

Except that when we watched the show playback, Barb said "That was pretty funny."

We had years of critiquing and noting each other's work; and I am not a performer, hate performing, and go out onto a stage only when I am dragged kicking and screaming. So I would have preferred to remain safely off camera, and was still deluding myself that the show would get to full improvisatory state in another two or three weeks; but the ten or twelve weeks of the show's broadcasts to date had pretty conclusively demonstrated that we'd gotten about as much performance out of our friends n crew as we were going to get -- and I for one wanted more than what we were getting.

It seemed to me that the show still wasn't crowded enough to overcome the audience's 1AM torpor. We were steadily increasing the additional production gags -- the crawls, the chroma, the music and sound gags -- and had pretty much found the Millie character, and some viable comic foils -- but the next step was obviously to pick up the pace of the show. And with only one trained performer, the pace was entirely dependent on Barb's timing. And with a live show/no audience, Barb's timing was driven by the pacing dictated by the script and by the cues from her foils. So if we wanted to speed things up, we had to give her a foil who could work fast with her, who she trusted and could play with, and who could take some of the heavy lifting performance load off Barb.

With no other alternatives, that would be me. We still kept up the good fight trying to recruit our Real Actor friends, who were grudgingly admitting that MT did appear to have some legs; but they were still unavailable for show. Lots of hair being washed at 1AM. Well, it was plausible, not worth wrecking friendships over, and we were still committed to pulling up stakes and moving Onward within a year so the friendship-wrecking would likely sort its own bad self out.

So ... the pieces are now all here.

Millie gets the show running. When she is setting something up, she starts at medium tempo and revs up to fourth gear or so -- when she is establishing the segment's concept, she starts normally and as it heads into ridiculosity her speed and pitch increase.

"Keith" slows the show down. "Keith" tries to get the show back on track. "Keith" is a foil for Millie, but does not interact with "Bob".

Millie occasionally incites "Keith's" crew against him, usually "Dougie", by playing the "studio crew" against the "control room crew". "Dougie" becomes Millie's partner-in-crime in the studio; when he moves into the control room and takes over audio, "Dougie" might side with either Millie or "Keith", depending on his mood. Millie can charm him, but "Keith" signs his time card. "Dougie" can interact with "Keith" and Millie, but not "Bob".

"Bob" works at a leisurely tempo. He doesn't change much; he's the straight man. "Bob" generally does not instigate; things happen to "Bob". Millie uses "Bob" to illustrate a ridiculous concept. "Bob" allows things to happen. Eventually "Bob" starts subverting this rule, as real-Bob starts working some of his innate snarkiness into his performance.

The puppet becomes the Clampett runamok. The puppet will run at full intensity, and will be used to wreak havok. The puppet should be used sparingly; no more than once a show, and not necessarily every show. That's 'cause the puppeteer has an irregular work schedule, and is having to work some late Saturday nights, although not as frequently now that he's shifted from theatre operations to convention operations. The puppet can fluster Millie, because the puppet is the only character that will not play by the rules. The puppet can do whatever it wants, but only once a show. Eventually, "Bob" and "Dougie" will also become anarchists when required.

There's some sense in this role for this particular puppet. The original Sesame Street was far more anarchic than the mid-80s version, and is unrecognizable compared to the current politically correct edition. And the Cookie Monster was the Id-beast loose: the only puppet with the googly eyes, constantly threatening to explode out of the scene and destroy not only the set but anybody else in the scene who wasn't Kermit. That puppet was designed to lunge and leave debris in its midst; so our borrowing would be un homage to its origins.

Yeah, right. Only problem is, I'm not a particularly good puppeteer -- and the shrieking voice is not picking up well on mic; can't make out what the thing is saying half the time. I want the puppet's closeups to be generally shot with the minicam, with the lens zoomed back as wide as possible and the camera pushed forward to get the shot. That would distort the perspective, so that when the thing is pushed into the camera it will balloon onto the screen, like the manic Daffy Duck of the late 30s and 40s. Keith reminds me that he's the director, and that maybe if I'm not happy with my performance I should go work on that instead of setting up shots. Then he takes charge on the set: "Okay, let's get Millie and the Blue Guy in place."

Well, that's as good a name for him as any.

In which Bob suffers Two Indignities

2009-06-05T17:09:00.000-07:00

Once in a while, we felt compelled to fool our friends, amaze our enemies, and insert some monster movie fanboyderie into the show.

There was this werewoof movie in the PRC list; the werewoof makeup, as I vaguely recall, was a poor piece of work indeed. But we did have a makeup artist who had signed on to be humiliated on demand on the air, and we had some useless trivia about Jack Pierce that cried out to be used, and we had Learned our Lesson: attacking or implying attacking small persons with tools or cooking implements was verboten, but attacking large persons was okey-dokey.

In those innocent pre-Internet days, if you wanted to clog your own personal bandwidth with useless trivia, you got it the old-fashioned way: from "printed materials". Most of these printed materials came in the form of "magazines", which could be either purchased through the odd "bookstore" or ordered through the "mail". Yes I know, hard to believe, you had to perform a certain amount of "physical effort" to track down these "magazines", you had to actually physically turn pieces of "paper" and "read" every word in order to find the trivial poop you sought, most of the time you would "read" the entire "magazine" "cover" to "cover" and not find the trivial poop you were looking for. Whew! thank gooness those days are gone gone gone never to return along with the drive-in movie theatre and the Polaroid Land camera! We can far more efficiently waste time waiting for the NIC card to find a network in range and the screen to load.

There were a couple of these odd little bookstores that I frequented: one on North Limestone near Transy, the other on South Limestone near UK, indulging my Cinefex/ Cinefantastique/ Film Fan Quarterly or whatever jones (and yes, as a beardless youth I read Famous Monsters and actually had a first print run of Dick Smith's Monster Makeup Handbook, but those are long since returned to midwestern humus). Some of the wunderkinder of 80s effects actually knew the heritage of their crafts, and would occasionally write appreciations of the master craftsmen of the 30s and 40s. In one of these mags Rick Baker wrote a two-page or so article on Jack Pierce, who created the makeups for the original Universal movie monsters. Baker was clearly a fan of Pierce's craftsmanship, from his character analysis to establish a motivation for the makeup design to the use of old-fashioned (by 1950s standards) materials to handcraft the makeup directly on the performer. I'm a big fan of hand tools and painstaking craftsmanship too; and notice that I'm not using a knife-sharpened quill and a piece of lamb's vellum to write this.

It seemed to me that underneath the admiration for the work ethic there were hints of a certain unbecoming misanthropy in Pierce's handling of the Talent, to wit: it seemed to me that Pierce didn't like the Talent very much. Really didn't like the Talent very much. Went out of his way to let the Talent know that he really really really didn't like the Talent very much. I knew a little bit about some of the materials and techniques that Pierce used for his monster makeups, and these were maximally uncomfortable to wear on your body -- as in potentially painfully uncomfortable. In watching one of Pierce's werewolf transitions, it was obvious that the film technique was a series of dissolves, with six or seven progressively more complete makeups dissolving on top of each other in sequence -- A to B, B to C, C to D, etc. -- with holds at each stage that showed the makeup. The first time this was done, the actor was not reset exactly into the same position between takes, so the overlap was not seamless -- probably ooky enough for 1941, but hardly ooky for 1985. And apparently not ooky enough for Pierce, who had a simple solution for the next movie: he nailed the actor's hand down.

I quote Dave Barry: "I am not making this up (copyright 1985, Dave Barry. All rights reserved.)" Pierce apparently used very fine brads and drove these brads through the skin webbing between the actor's fingers, so that the actor couldn't move his hand without ripping the nails through his skin. The actor in question was Lon Chaney Jr., who was big and ornery enough to throw Mr. Pierce through one or two of his makeup mirrors, which might have been a career-limiting move but I'd bet he did it anyway.

Well, such a factoid had to be used on M's MT; and with a werewoof movie on the schedule, that was the perfect opportunity to do so. We thought this was going to be The Bit Everyone Remembered from that week's show. Barb rattled Millie's more-or-less accurate description of Pierce's process while she drove 16d nails "through" Bob's fingers. Barb's a better carpenter than I am, so I had no worries about her accidentally smashing Bob; Bob was less sanguine about the prospect, but we plied him with beer and he was good to go. Bob splayed his fingers, Barb actually nailed next to his finger webbing, and we shot with the minicam so that we could drop it down to the table height and cheat the perspective; the big pedestal cameras would have tilted down onto the setup and given away the gag. I told Bob that he couldn't say anything or move; he had to gradually wilt into a cringe or grimace for each indignity, but it had to be s-l-o-w, the slower the better and funnier; the slowness would sell the gag while Millie yammered obliviously on.

Anyway, after Pierce nailed Chaney's hand down, he then glued the Special Custom Yak Hair on to Chaney's hand. He'd do a little; the cameras would roll; he'd do a little more; the cameras would roll; he'd do a little more; the cameras would roll; et cetera. Now, the thing with applying hair to a live actor -- not a wig or beard (which is called a "ventilated hair piece" in the trade because the hair is sewed on to a fine mesh net, hair by hair, and the net is then attached to the Talent), but applying crepe, human or Special Custom Yak -- is that you can't apply this in clumps: you apply it one hair at a time. Which meant that Herr Chaney sat with his hand nailed down for one whole day of shooting while Herr Pierce applied one -- Special -- Custom -- Yak -- Hair -- at -- a -- time. Gluing, pressing on, teasing out, trimming. I could imagine Chaney boiling, Pierce knowing Chaney was boiling -- and probably smoking a cigarette while he was working. And of course all this stuff -- the glue, the hair, the wardrobe, the finger extensions -- were highly flammable.

So I'm sure Millie was waving her cigarette holder around while she applied her "makeup" to Bob. To illustrate the process, we used a gallon of white glue and we globbed on handfuls of easter egg grass; probly equalled the discomfort of the spirit gum and Special Custom Yak Hair, but it sure took less time. By the time that particular bit was over and Richie had called us clear, nobody could hold the laughter in any more. We couldn't wait to get home and play that bit back; we were sure we had a winner.

Funny, though: when we played it back after we got home, it somehow didn't play as well as we thought it did. It was funny and all, but not the high point of the show. On the other hand, there was some possibilities in a throwaway bit we had tossed off, that involved Millie and a cookie monster puppet that was supposed to be a werewoof.

In which we Find, and Lose, Wags (the Obnoxious Battery-Powered Puppy)

2009-06-03T10:35:00.000-07:00

Shopping malls have service corridors that snake behind the stores. These corridors connect the back doors of the (usually not anchor tenant) stores to a corridor that leads to loading docks, trash dumpsters, restrooms and other common space necessities. There was such a corridor in the Mall at Ruckus Arenus, which connected to a Secret Passage that led down to the service areas of said Ruckus Arenus. This Secret Passage was very useful for engineers who might need to get into the stores, or "tenant spaces" as we quaintly referred to them, for the various mechanical adjustments occasionally called for during the busy shopping day. It was also very useful for most everybody else to get up to the Mall for coffee and lunch breaks and dashes over to Triangle Park and the Opera House.

The Secret Door to the service corridor was in the corner behind a store that for the longest time was a toy store. Outside of the toy store was a large drum table with a high lip surrounding the edge. The lip contained the toys on display, which were battery operated little squeaky dogs. These dogs did two things: They squeaked, they sat down, and they backflipped. Well, three things. The little squeaky dogs were set out at a height appropriate for small children to pick up a dog, bond with it hopefully and present it to the accompanying parent for immediate purchase n gratification. This seldom happened, because of the dogs' continous irritating squeaking. The squeaking was irritating, very irritating. And it was continuous -- from the time the store opened until the time it closed. Since most RA hourly and technical employees went in and out of that door several times daily, the little squeaky dogs were known to and loathed by all.

A few years earlier, Woody Allen released a gorgeously photographed and otherwise disturbing film, Manhattan. The disturbation came from the plotline that Allen's 42-year-old doppelganger was infatuated with a 17 year old high school girl, not that life imitates art or anything. The film also offers the equally amusing subplot of Allen's doppelganger putting the moves on his best male friend's new obnoxious girl friend, Diane Keaton. O the humorous n sophisticated hijinks among the New York literati of a certain age n time! Pip ho, wot? One humorous n sophisticated scene featured humorous n sophisticated witty repartee among Allen, Keaton and BMF Tony Roberts in the Keaton character's tiny Manhattan kitchen, with everyone continually interrupted by Keaton's tiny yapping dachshund, Waffles. Loathsome characters with a tiny little loathsome dog in a confined space ... loathsome little squeaky dogs ... hmm ...

Thus was born Wags, the Obnoxious Battery-Operated Puppy. The idea was to have Wags squeaking continously throughout random segments, with Millie completely oblivious to Wags while Wags drove everybody else crazy. We'd run this from time to time to establish that Wags was going to be allowed to run through the whole bit. After a few weeks of this, we'd then start the Overreacting Comic Retaliation. I envisioned crazed camera operators, maybe even a crazed Keith coming out of the control room, throwing Wags across the room, blowing Wags up real good, attacking Wags with hammers. In order to get the point across, every time we would use Wags we would throw up a helpful title: "Oh, No! It's WAGS -- The Obnoxious Battery-Powered Puppy!"

Didn't work. For one thing, Barb was driven to distraction by Wags. It's one thing to pitch a metajoke, but pitches have the luxury of ignoring certain realities like whether or not you can actually do it. Barb could not concentrate with Wags squeaking away, and after all there was no show without Barb holding it together.

For another thing, we also finally got called on going over the line of Public Decency. Around this time we discovered that Dougie's many talents included a pitch-perfect imitation of a crying baby. He had achieved a certain notoriety in certain social circles for performing this imitation in certain crowded, inappropriate, dark environments and setting off amusing scrambles by People who Weren't In on the Joke to find and shush the baby. Accordingly, we immediately worked up a segment featuring "Millie's Babysitting Tips for the Misanthropic". Dougie cried off-camera while Millie offered various inappropriate ways to calm a crying baby (a doll in a teeny dolly crib, fashioned from a beer carton conveniently donated by one of the guys), culminating with a deft whack upside the head with a 12" cast iron skillet. And of course we showed the skillet, slammed it down onto an off-camera metal counterweight (to produce a resounding clang), whereupon Dougie immediately cut off his piteous wails -- prompting a seraphic smile from Millie and a bridge into some other bogus tip. Being selfish childless boomers obliviously assuming that our entire audience consisted of selfish childless boomers, we failed to anticipate that there might be a) young parents watching, who b) did not find child abuse jokes funny and who c) had telephones and typewriters and d) knew how to use them.

Their use of telephones and typewriters brought an immediate appearance of the previously invisible Bill, who made it very clear that whacking defenseless off-camera suggested anythings was not what he had in mind when he contemplated Zaniness and Wackiness. Had we no decency, no sense of shame? Did we not realize that small children were watching? (Monster movies? At 2 in the morning? On a church day?) WLEX was not going to be party to an epidemic of random frying-pan attacks on the defenseless, apologies all around to the entire viewing community and the senior management of WLEX for putting them in such a parlous predicament, you know the drill. Bill stood over me as I called one particular lady on a speaker phone to abjectly apologize; she seemed very surprised that I would call, said she thought the segment was really pretty funny otherwise and loved the show, the frying pan just seemed a little over the top to her is what, asked for an autographed picture, at which point Bill decided that I probably didn't need to make any more calls on the station's behalf.

But no more cruelty to children or small animals. Real or imaginary.

On the other hand ... if we were to record these shows in advance ... then it would be possible for management to ... prescreen the show and catch any potentially ... unseemly ... content before it aired. So live-to-tape, at least, went back onto the table.

On the third hand ... Wags as an ongoing obnoxious comic foil was no longer an option. Back to the drawing board.

In which the Coming of Bob Comes

2009-05-17T04:10:00.000-07:00

Tell ya what. Reality does not respect one's writing schedule. Ah, well ...

Gumby's in. What else ya got?

Around this time we drop the kazoo theme and go straight to the cold open. Our sense is that the kazoos trigger an expectation that MT is going to be thus-and-such a kind of show, a zany or wacky show if you will ; it cues the viewer into expecting certain things, which we will have to deliver -- the catchphrase to catchphrase effect of SNL. We're not snobbish about it (well, probly we are) -- we like to think that we are far more pragmatic than theoretical -- but we want to do Something Else, which will keep the show interesting to create and presumably interesting to watch.

We also are weary of the adverbs "zany" and "wacky" turning up constantly in WLEX' publicity. To put things in 80s avatar context: Fozzie Bear is Zany. We aren't. Whenever I see those words used to describe MT, I immediately remember a little indica from an ancient Mad magazine parody of a TV Guide listing: "Funny Cannibal: Jerry Van Dyke." Henceforth, we shall use said adverbs only as on-air synonyms for "contemptuous".

Keith pushes back on dropping the kazoos. He thinks we're heading into too disorienting territory; at some point, the audience has to know what to expect. We're thinking that the overall tone will provide the necessary orientation. Keith points out that for copyright purposes we do have to identify each show somehow with a consistent brand -- that's the point of the consistent opening titles. Oh, yeah ... the law ... FCC stuff ... right ...

Say, btw, about that copyright bug -- what the heck is "Ghastly Things & Avatar Productions", anyway? Turns out "Ghastly Things" is Barb and me, "Avatar Productions" is Keith; and, according to Copyright Law 101 whatever entity is identified by the copyright bug is the legal owner of the work. So WLEX doesn't legally own MT. Which would probly be news to them if anybody was watching the end credits all the way through, and would certainly give the Legal Department a Righteous Conniption, but what's Done is Done. O that scamp Keith!

So we compromise: no kazoos, yes animated title (Keith worked hard on the title, so he's happy), yes cold open. The cold open forces us to put something interesting on immediately as the show opens; that's our rationale and we're sticking to it.

What else we got? By this point, we're barely acknowledging the movie other than as a springboard for the night's concept. Performance-wise, the show runs better as a barely-connected riff. Barb is concerned about this, because she likes a clearly defined throughline; so we spend more time on Writing Nights talking about how Position 1 connects not only to Position 2 but to Position 5 and 7. We read each night's drafts out loud to check pace and flow; that also quickly shows what's not hanging together, so we're doing more fixes on the fly.

Millie's voice starts to change to the definitive Millie as a result of this. If we're going to speed things up, we give Millie more words and less open vowels. Shifting to riffing puts Millie in control of the performance, because the show becomes whatever she shifts it to. Millie's lines become long run-ons where the rhythm and flow become dominant. Millie speeches become long jazz saxophone credenzas, rolling along, punctuated by ... well, there's the problem.

Barb's evolving Millie voice and Keith's voice are pitched sort-of harmoniously; but Keith's job is to direct the show, which is becoming a fairly complicated piece of work for a live-to-tape shoot except that we're still live-to-live. Teevee direction has to stop when he's reading lines; he's got to use one hand to push the talkback button, the other to flip script pages, and he's got to take his eyes off the monitors to read. We can't get into extended Millie/Keith exchanges; we learn that we've got to limit the call-and-response to no more than three volleys for any given segment, and we really need to limit the exchanges to the Open, Mail and Close segments: we're on adrenaline for the Open, Mail is a run-on/locked-down camera segment anyway, and the adrenaline comes back up for the Close. So meta takes a back seat to practicality, as it always must. And we're still stuck where we were all those weeks ago: Millie needs a straight man.

In classic funny man/straight man duos, the straight man is actually the harder working performer. The straight man sets up the funny man, controls the pace of the gags, and feeds the toppers. Interestingly, in vaudeville the straight man was the higher paid of the duo: in some circles it was considered a sign of the apocalypse when Lou Costello demanded a 50/50 cut with Bud Abbott. If, as many dying actors are alleged to have observed on their deathbeds, dying is easy but comedy is hard then finding a funny man is a piece of cake (especially if you're married to her) compared to finding a straight man when the Artistes are still Boycotting the Lowbrow. So thought I until I happened to listen to Bob n Barb after makeup and wardrobe one night.

Since we got our show rhythm going, I hadn't had much to do with Bob on show nights; my focus was in the studio. Paying a bit more attention now, I noticed that Bob was warming up Barb, feeding her snarky little zingers that she would top with a wave of the cigarette holder. He wasn't a linear thinker; he'd wander all over the board in talking about stuff. His voice was pitched about an octave higher than Barb's Millie voice; and it fit into the same harmonic triad that Barb and Keith were in. He had a kind of offbeat rhythm; in setting Barb up he could look innocent but. And he favored a sort-of Rat Pack/Fat Jack E. Leonard fashion that fit the found-object aesthetique we were ransacking (see Gumby above).

Plus, his name was Bob. In my particular Universal Theory of Funny, "Bob" is the funniest name in English. It's hard, flat (if delivered properly Midwesternly), punchy, and ridiculous if coupled with a pretentious professional, governmental or social title (e.g., "Count Bob, Vampire").

So one night I asked Bob if he wouldn't mind having lines on the show on a regular basis.

Well, obviously he didn't mind at all. But we soon discovered that Bob didn't read lines anywhere near as well as his impromptu warmups. Like anybody else, put a script in his hands and he wanted to Act. But I didn't want him to Act; I wanted him to Be Bob. So the early experiments with Bob the Straight Man did not go as I hoped -- which were my fault, because I had forgotten the lesson I had learned in writing for Keith. Keith's dialog was what Keith would have said in the situation, only amped up. I had to do more listening to Bob's riffs with Barb, so that I got a feel for Bob's own rhythms; then adapt his rhythms and words to the character "Bob".

About this time, I came across an interview with Letterman's writers talking about life with Letterman (a very demanding editor, who threw out 80 to 90% of the pitches right up to air time -- writing four or five MTs every day for years! Sakes, the mind boggles!) and the perils of writing for Calvert de Forest, a/k/a Larry "Bud" Melman. It seemed that the sight of de Forest would send Dave into near-hysterics, which is why they used him; but de Forest was so nearsighted that he couldn't read the cue cards. If they gave him the script ahead of time, he'd memorize his lines and push through them no matter what happened; but he apparently didn't understand many of the things he was given to say, and so he'd make up his own pronunciation for the words he didn't know. Since Letterman was a control freak of the first water, this would send him over the edge as often as it would amuse him to tears; the writers soon learned that de Forest's inherent unpredictability was more anxiety-producing for The Boss than was healthy for career maintenance. So the writers hit on the idea of walking de Forest generally through his sequences, and then springing his cue-card only script on him only for broadcast. This prevented de Forest from coming up with his own ideas for interpreting the script (usually looking for a place to throw in his guffawing laugh), and opened the door for an unending series of spoonerisms and idiosyncratic line-readings that reduced Letterman to wheezing laughter. Well, if it worked for Letterman's guys and won them a bushel basket of Emmys, it would work for us.

So Barb and I worked out Da Rules for Bob (comedy must always operate within its own rules of engagement). Bob would not get run-on sentences; Bob would become the sort-of Ed McMahon enabler of Millie (who could turn on her without warning); Bob's through line had to be straight-ahead, veering off only on occasion; and Bob would not get his script until just before the segment aired. We'd run through the segment with him as fast as possible so that he got the flow, and then go live almost as soon as we finished the runthrough. We hoped to get a little of that idiosyncratic unpredictability into the show at the expense of a polished delivery. Bob was quite fine with all this machiavellian stuff, as far as we knew; he only pushed back once, which happens to be one of the YouTube sequences (look for Bob in his Queen's Hat).

Things were coming together. Now we've got Keith, Dougie and Bob as semi-regular talent (not Talent); we've got a handle on production that seems to be working; we've got some recurring elements of the strange courtesy of Gumby; we've got some walk-ons from time to time.

But we don't have enough obnoxiosity. We need some obnoxious regulars, that grate on the ears, to make sure that people aren't going to fall asleep during these still-wretched movies.

In which we Get All Eisensteinian (or is it Pudovkinian) or Something

2009-05-15T17:30:00.000-07:00

It occurred to nous that nous haven't really experienced the MT experience in its entirety, as our audience did. Watching our sequences only and ffwding through the movie was alas an experience denied humanity in those dank bygone pre-Tivo days. As we explain to our beloved kinder, "when you wanted to watch a teevee program, you actually had to Make an Appointment With Your Teevee." "No way!" exclaim the Teenagers, jaws agape. "The horror! the horror!" "Yes, but we survived with our witz intact," we blushingly admit, all gawrshlike n such. But, since we were actually performing the show when it was on, and hadn't as yet mastered the art of bilocation, we had to rely on State of the Art 80s Technology to quality-check our little endeavours. So one night, we put on a tape that covered the entire SNL-to-MT timeslot, started it at 0dark00, and sat up to watch all night teevee all night.

First thing we noticed was that it was hard to stay awake through the entirety of SNL. There were high points, but unless you were a fan of the Band o the Week, there were far fewer highs than lows. We also noted that the show had descended into caricature performances that relied on catchphrases (this was the season of "You rook mahvelous!" and Tommy Flanagan the Pathological Liar), with the skits basically collections of setup lines that led to the catchphrases, which were wildly cheered by the Live Studio Audience. So, if you were listening to the show, there were basically only words that bridged catchphrase to catchphrase; if you were were watching the show, it was caricature to caricature; and if you were sitting there om-ing through the show, sooner or later you'd doze off. Plus, the structure of the show was to wind down the last half-hour; the tempo noticeably slackened, the Band o the Week played its downtempo offering, and finally the show closed with a slow blooze vamp -- in waltz time. Soporific wasn't in it; WLEX might as well have been handing out lettuces to the flopsy viewing bunnies.

Then came three or four Local Commercials, then us. And we were too tentative. Barb's neo-Tallulah delivery, which was amusing to us in the studio and called for lots of draaawn oouutt voooowellls just ground our attention to a halt. We needed to pick up the show's pace. We needed to ramp up the WTF factor; we needed to perform pieces that the viewer couldn't believe we just said, did or showed what we just said, did or showed. We needed every second of our broadcast to engage the viewer, just to keep them awake. We needed to have multiple show inputs going , as often as possible.

And we needed to fight the movie. The movie was Not Our Friend. It may be that no one intentionally gets up in the morning and says to his or her own self, "What a great day for baseball! Let's make mediocrity!" But these movies were Mediocre with a capital M; just not engaging in any way, shape or form. And at 2AM, they were killing the show.

We kicked around some ideas. The obvious solution was to engage Millie more interactively with the movie; but Keith, Barb and I had some serious reservations about our ability to pull that off. We were much better at doing whatever it was that we were doing; but it was taking almost all of the downtime between pieces to set up for the next piece. So we thought about another approach. It seemed to me that since there was so much Stuff stuffed into the odd nooks and crannies of that campus, it was likely that there was a box or two of source material for the old local kids' shows that WLEX surely ran, back in the day. And this source material would likely include those staples of independent teevee programming, 30s B&W cartoons and the Three Stooges. If we could find such a box, we could ... introduce clips into the movie proper. Randomly. If the audience didn't know what clip would come up next ... well, maybe they'd stay awake. And talk about this goofy show. Which would get people curious, because this kind of stuff just wasn't done on local Lexington teevee. That was the plan, and Keith set off to chat with his rabbi in the station about where such a box, if it existed, might be. If it existed. Hypothetically. Because we were ... interested in this kind of stuff.

The next week, Keith was all smiles. Turns out that such a box did exist. And he found it. And it was packed -- packed, I tell you! -- with many many three- to seven-minute reels.

Of old Gumby adventures.

Well, I had been hoping that we'd find -- you know -- old Looney Tunes, or some Max Fleischer pre-Popeye cartoons, or some bizarre Charles Mintz cartoons; toons from the days when the animators just cranked out straight-ahead tomfoolery with no regard for continuity or matching cuts or staying on model(or making sense, as far as that goes). Gumby didn't quite fit the profile. But, hey! we haven't come this far patching the show together with found objects to quibble now. So we come up with a new plan: Keith will inventory the Gumbies and give us a master list of possible inserts. I'll find sections of the movie where we might plug a Gumby into. When Keith is formatting the movie, he'll ... use his judgment and maybe make an interesting insert or two. And we'll see how it plays.

So we anxiously watch the next show, to see how the Great Experiment works. Keith hasn't told us where he may or may not have inserted a Gumby. He's chuckling away over in the control room, while we're getting a little testy about playing Where's Gumby when up he pops. It's certainly inappropriate, mucks completely with the flow of the alleged story ... well sir, not what we had in mind but it does seem to work. So, wotthehell, Gumby's a keeper.

But we need something else. Barb picks up the pace when she's got someone to act against. But Keith has to, you know, direct, so we can't use Keith more than once or twice a show, and never when we're doing something televisionary. Dougie's been willing, but he's now been promoted to audio and moved into the control room. We've got Little Jeff on camera now, and he's quite willing to go on air; and he's also quite willing to advise Keith on how best to direct the show. So we are not going to fuel that little fire; Keith will have to handle his crew.

Yessir, we need to find some new stooges for Ms. G. But where oh where will we find such and so forth?

"Ahem," said Bob.

In which we take Advantage of Technology

2009-05-10T04:59:00.000-07:00

A. Keith was grousing. All the new eagerly-awaited control room stuff was sitting in unopened boxes. The installation was proceeding fitfully at best. The only thing that had been installed, which was really pretty useless for a television station, was a piece of audio equipment that allowed incoming telephone calls to be assigned straight to a sound console input.

Huh. So you could call in from any old outside line and it could be patched straight to audio?

Even more useless, Keith pointed out, was that it was an extension off the station's PBX, so you could call from the house phone in the studio if you wanted to. What was the point of that?

B. We were comparing who was taping the broadcasts. Turns out that our studio guys might not be well paid, might not have upgraded from college kid apartments, but mostly had VCRs (Dougie had a Betamax, nanny nanny boo boo) and were mostly all taping the shows, too. Also turns out that house policy was that every broadcast was taped and archived. 'Twas ever Thus; who knew what happened to the archive tapes? probably eventually stored in a warehouse somewhere, hopefully not too close to the Lost Ark or the eldritch radiations thereof might degrade the video quality over time (that or melt the tapes into unusuable melmac goo, one). But yeah, every show occupied its own cassette of crisp Ampex goodness, marked and tagged in the film room.

C. Barb and I were wearing down a little. The family was Not Happy that we were going to excuse ourselves from attending the Required Thanksgiving Dinner -- again -- and this year's excuse was that we had to stay in Lex to do MT. Tell us again why exactly that's more important than enjoying your sister's cooking? While we weren't prepared to debate the relative merits of my sister's cooking v. exchanging witty patter with Keith, the reality was that every other spare minute since mid-August had been dedicated to MT. And while we still didn't know whether the show was Successful (whatever that meant) (although the well-informed interest of WLEX suits from Larry on down plus the attempted coup by Production should have been a pretty good indicator), we did know that we had this other personal agenda of Getting Out of Dodge, which had not yet been attended to -- and apparently we were now doing a pretty good job of rooting ourselves in Dodge for the forseeable future.

So we did the math: A+B+C = Time for a break. We need to take time for ourselves now.

In the snippy patois of the local thee-atyre folks at the time, one of the bigger hurled insults was to accuse an actor of phoning his or her role in. There were one or two known miscreants who signed on to a show, did nothing during the rehearsal process beyond getting lines down (usually a week or two after everybody else), and pulled out some Actor Tricks on opening night that fooled their friends and amazed their enemies enough to get by. Said miscreants were casually despised by the True Artistes, but were brand-name actors and directors who were good for some pre-show publicity in the Herald-Leader; and while whether such publicity actually translated to extra cash at the box office was debatable, it was vitally important enough to be a stumbling block for many people who apparently had too much time on their Hands.

So it seemed to me that we had the opportunity for another Meta-Joke: we could phone Millie in one night. It seemed to all of us that each individual show started strong but ran out of gas between Mail and the Close: we hadn't yet figured out how to sustain a show all the way through, and in truth all of us started running out of personal gas during the live shows -- the start/stop was wearing. If we built a show around the strongest bits, it might give us a clue to how to fix that particular problem. Besides, the Meta-Joke shows were proving to be the strong shows, so any opportunity for a Meta-Joke show would be eagerly seized.

Keith pointed out another true fact that had been staring everybody in the phiz all along: given the high resolution of US broadcast standard, there was no obvious visual dfference between a show on tape and a live show. Other than our occasional statements that we were live, a viewer could never tell just by watching the broadcast. So there was no technical reason why we couldn't record a show in advance. A taped show might actually be more cost-effective, because it wouldn't require keeping a full studio crew on till 3:30 Sunday morning; and more to the point, said full studio crew had to come right back in at 9 Sunday morning to do the live Public Interest show broadcasts. Which were starting to drag a little, because everybody was whacked from the MT broadcast. (And some intrepid post-show partying on their part that we poophead marrieds were not privy to nor supposed to know about. As if.) Plus the forced one-week layoff had revealed that the guys missed their Saturday nights a little, and Thanksgiving's imminence was fueling unnecessary new Grumbling in the Ranks.

A phoned-in show also wouldn't require makeup. Nothing against Bob, enjoyed his company and his contribution, but all in all there were many compelling reasons for Doing Something Different. Besides, what Keith said about not being able to tell the difference between live and live-to-tape was causing me to think very hard that this might solve a lot of problems. If I could sell it to Bill. Who was apparently basking in the glow of our putative success, uninterested in fixing what appeared to be unbroken as far as he was concerned, and not inclined to be sympathetic to the needs and desires of the male members of the contingent. But was interested in the care and feeding of His Star.

So after conspiring with Barb, we both came down one Monday to chat with Bill. By this point, I had learned to keep my mouth shut, so Barb did the talking: she reminded him that the deal was that she would be free to pursue her other interests, we had delivered what appeared to be successful n profitable for WLEX, an R&R break would be a Good Thing to take a step back and figure out the Next Steps for everybody, by Bill's own admission the Thanksgiving weekend would likely be a blow-off weekend for viewer numbers anyway -- what if we tried a live-to-tape show built around a highlight reel? If the numbers were building, then viewers might not have seen some of the stuff anyway.

Surprisingly, Bill was not opposed, much. He was concerned about Barb -- was she OK? Did she need a break? Was one week enough (but he didn't want to go too deep into December, he wanted to keep momentum for the February ratings period). We didn't play the crew card too much, other than to ask how the public interest shows were holding up given the late nights -- and Bill made it clear that broadcast quality of the public interest shows was a non-issue, these shows were wholly content-driven through the quality of the interviewer (hmmm). He was skeptical about the long-term implications: "I suppose if this works, you'll want to do the whole show live-to-tape." Didn't expect him to tumble to that right away, so I figured since that shot was directed at me I might as well respond: "I'd rather have that conversation later. I can't say that it hasn't occured to me, and I can't deny that we might want to do it that way, but we'd only want to do it that way if we got a better show out of it. And a better show would be a more popular show, which is what you want and WLEX wants, right? But that's a different conversation. Right now we're talking about one show."

Barb turns on both the charm and the Millie voice: "Please, Billy-willy? Daaaaarling?" Not even Bill can keep a straight face at that one, and okays the show. For a one-time shot, no segment retakes -- "Not even if the scenery falls down. It has to be just like the live show." That's fine by us, and we agree to tape the show Sunday night. Bill's figuring that if we're burning out this will really toast us; guess we forgot to tell him that we were going to be taping a telephone for thirty minutes.

So Keith, Barb and I pull our lists together of our favorite bits: we're pretty much in sync, negotiate one or two, but this was really a five-minute exercise at best. The hook for the framing sequences is that Millie is calling in sick; so Barb comes up with a new Millie voice, pouty and whiny, which definitely has some future possibilities. We kick around whether we could do the sequences right after the regular broadcast -- survey sez that camera guys are fading fast, so let's come back and do it fresh. We come back in Sunday night; we have the studio from 7:30 PM, must be clear by 9 PM (okay, 9:15) to do the Headline News cut-in at 9:30 PM. Keith has set up a corner of the set, put the phone on the trunk, and wants to do the open as a slow zoom in; someone has to pick up the ringing phone, that would be me. Big Jeff has by now moved on to Bigger and Better Things that don't include the Dreaded A-Shift, so Dougie has moved over to audio: he's finding all manner of sound effects that he delights in inappropriately inserting into the broadcast, so he handles the phone rings. Barb is sitting in the Sacred News Set, which has a phone built into it; we figure that the prohibition is that we can't see the Sacred News Set, not use it. We note for the record that the chair for the female anchor is labeled Big Butt on its backrest, and contemplate whether this is a term of endearment by the Crew for the Talent, or by the Distinguished Male Anchor for his Apparently Less Distinguished Cohort.

Keith explains Da Rules: we won't see the actual sequences we're introducing, we'll just do our intros and bumps. We'll have to hold at the ends of each sequence, including the bumps, while he rolls some black screen leader in and out of each sequence -- so no movee no talkee until the floor manager calls clear. We're only using the one camera tonight. They've taken extra pains to light the phone with beauty lighting, because he's going to use this as an in-house demo to show that our crew can do commercial shoots too (hithertofore the sole province of the Dreaded A-Shift, because commercials are shot in the afternoons after the Noon News at Noon breaks), so we all need to not cast shadows on the phone.

The shoot goes pretty fast, and we're mostly done by 8:30; we're sitting around for a few minutes after concluding that this went pretty well and would probably work for the regular show when Mike the Weekend News Guy comes in. He'd heard that we were doing the show now instead of Saturday night (apparently they were watching the in-house feed down in the news bullpen), and wanted to say hi. He thought it was pretty clever, and wanted to know where Barb was sitting when she used the phone. Barb doesn't want to admit that we had Trespassed onto the Sacred News Set, but Doug has no shame: "She's auditioning. She's the new Big Butt." Mike keeps it rolling, tells us he'll be sure to let Mindy know and that we can expect a call from her by the time we get home. Then he asks if we're planning to do all of the shows like this. I allow as to how we're thinking about it, it depends how this one comes off, we do have some internal obstacles to overcome ...

Mike snorts. "Bill?" Well, that tells us how the chickens are aligned in the barnyard this week. I never could take the hint and finish my thought, which is that we were trying to tie our argument to a falloff in production quality for the public interest shows; seems to us that these would be the shows that management would want to take care of, but the counterargument is that the shows stand on the quality of the interviewer. Which by a remarkable coincidence happens to be Mike. Who assures us that if we need him to make the case that a fresh wakeful crew is far far better than a half-asleep crew, we just need to say the word. I assure him that we'll take him up on that, we want to see how the next couple of weeks go, and that we might need his help around mid-December and he assures me any time, just catch him on the way off the set. And with that, the Phone-In Show is officially wrapped for the night.

We all set our VCRs as usual, and watch our tapes. Keith's right: I can't tell the difference between the taped show and the live shows.

In which we meet the A-Team. Twice.

2009-05-06T18:40:00.001-07:00

So here come Barb, Steve n Bob to do the show one Saturday night, pressing our phizzes against the studio door window to break up Mike Mindy n Keith, aaaand it's not Keith in the control room.

No Keiths. No Jeffs (big or little). No Dougies, Traceys, Howies, Richies, or any other familiar phiz. A noticeable lack of Keiths et alia. Instead, we have ... other persons. Who are not amused by our ritual hijinks.

The Alpha Male Director explains: It Has Been Decided that we shall be favored by the A-Team studio crew this week. To straighten out some of the shabbiness of the production. Which hasn't met WLEX's particular snuff of late. And since this so-called show does seem to be attracting some note out there in teevee land, we can't have product going out that's not, so to speak, up to WLEX Snuff.

Hmm. Well, we were kinda of the opinion that the so-called shabbiness of the production was not only part of its endearing n winsome charm, but was also kind of the point of the enterprise. But hey ho as Barb n Bob go off to makeup and wardrobe, we am nothing if not flexible. So I start running down the script with our alpha male putative director

Who will have none of it. We are dealing with a precision unit. They need no stinking scripts.

Au contraire, I point out, they will need stinking scripts because there is a particular bluescreen gag that has to coordinate with Barb's speech in Position 1 --

AMD cuts me off right there, because there isn't going to be a bluescreen shot tonight. The raggedy mattes are not acceptable; the costume was not designed for bluescreen, and we are not going to put shabby bluescreen on the air.

All righty, then. Well, they will still need the stinking script, and the AMD's name, because the Millie/Keith exchange in Position 2 --

AMD cuts me off right there again, because there isn't going to be any of this Acting foolishness done by the crew. It will affect their concentration in doing their real job. Which is producing the show. Which is one of the reasons why the show's production needs help. This talking to the crew stuff is Out. It distracts the Crew. Crew is not Talent.

This is the point in the discussion where you could swing a 2x4 across the back of my neck and shatter said 2x4 into toothpicks. This is the point in the discussion where I should go nuclear and have a good ol' cathartic Rant. Which would accomplish less than nothing, not even purge the gorge rising in my throat, and would result most likely in dead air where the Insert Mille Here sequences should be. Instead, I turn and stride forth purposely down the corridor to have a conversation with the Real Talent.

Barb does not have a diva bone in her body (still doesn't); but an actor's makeup time is the actor's private time and is not to be interrupted. It is the Time Honored Tradition of the Service. So for me to interrupt is a signal that something much like the apocalypse is upon us. And while the gutting of a live teevee show with less than an hour to air is not on a par with, say, Nicolas Cage's utter failure to prevent a solar flare from destroying all life on the planet even unto incinerating a CGI moose, it does introduce unnecessary stress that is not included in the $50/week show fee.

We're not going to pull the Not Coming Out of My Trailer stunt. The Show Must Go On, we guess. We figure out a couple of ways to work around, but hearts are not in it. We kick around putting me in the control room and using the talkback, figure that will get shot down anyway (I have no desire to spend one minute in what is now clearly hostile territory) and reassign the Keith dialogue to me on an off-camera VOG mic; it won't be the same, but it's the best we can come up with. I hate it a lot, I do not have a reverberant VOG voice, but we got nothing else -- it's me or Bob, and ... We pare some other dialogue down; it will be OK, we guess. We go into the studio -- a cold, dead room -- and do a cold, dead show.

Aaaand of course there's no tape for next week. I can come in Monday and pick it up.

We thank everyone for their effort (it's called acting), and get home as fast as possible. Don't even look at the playback; still haven't, to this day.

When I come in Monday to pick up the tape, who should want to see me but the formerly invisible Bill. Who wastes no pleasantries in telling me how Disappointed he was in Saturday's show; it wasn't up to the standards we have set, and he hopes this isn't the direction that we planned to take such a Promising Show. It was especially disappointing because of all the liberties we had taken with the Approved Script. What was the point of submitting a script for approval if we weren't going to do it? especially when we were the ones so adamant about a scripted show in the first place?

This is too much. I point out to Bill that this was His New Crew's decision, not ours; and that he didn't have the courtesy of telling us in advance that we were getting a New Crew, or that we were going to have to conform the show to the New Crew's standards. I told him that it seemed rather shabby treatment, and that if it was his intent to 86 us off the show then he could at least have had us turned away at the door Saturday night instead of putting us through foolishness that would be unacceptable for a high school production.

Bill stops me right there. What New Crew?

I told him that our regular crew had been replaced by the day shift, and the show had to be repurposed to suit the day shift's production requirements -- and that we had thirty minutes before air to do that repurposing -- which he would have known if he had been there with us, as our producer. As far as we knew or assumed, this was done either at his direction or with his blessing; what else were we to assume?

Bill's face changes. We are not shouting at each other, but we haven't minced words, either; even so, this is New Information and it's not computing. He tells me that he needs to check something, and asks -- ! -- if I wouldn't mind waiting for a few minutes. Then he heads, if my understanding of the internal geography is correct, towards the Production offices. Voices are soon raised, and I figure that there's very likely a pot of coffee and an unused coffee cup at the other end of the corridor.

Heading down that way, I meet a short, courtly man in a natty suit, who introduces himself as Larry. He seems familiar with me, Barb and MT. I ask if we've met before, and he chuckles no; he doesn't come down to the station when we do, and he's a little surprised to see me during office hours. He asks how things are going with the show, I make pleasant enough noises, and ask what his interest is.

"Oh, I own the station. I just want to know if we're treating you folks all right."

All righty, then. "Well, gee, thanks for asking. Things have been going pretty well the last couple of months. Had a couple of glitches this weekend, I think they're being taken care of ..."

Larry stops me there. He's a Southern Gentleman, and he knows a stinking fetid pile of polite crap when he hears it. "You had some troubles with your show Saturday night. Anything you want to tell me about?"

All righty, then. "I've just spoken with Bill about it. I think he's handling it. That's why I'm down on this end of the hall."

Larry nods. "Good. If that doesn't work out" he writes something on a card and hands it to me "this is my private number. You call me."

All righty, then. "Well ... thanks."

Larry looks me in the eye. "You call me about anything you think I might need to know about."

All righty, then. And as long as we're on the subject, "You know, sir ..."

"Larry."

" ... Larry, I know that the show is not exactly what people here thought it would be, and I'm sure that some of the stuff we're doing on the show probably upsets some folks a little ..."

Larry smiles. "You don't see every letter about that show. I do."

All righty, then. "Well, if we're doing anything that upsets you, please tell me. It's just a show. Sometimes we get a little too wrapped up in our selves, and we don't see how we're coming across ..."

Larry continues to smile. "You've got people talking about us. Some people will complain no matter what you do. I'm not bothered by that. If you ever do anything that I think is a little too far, I'll let you know. But I know you won't do that."

Well, I might not be the most perceptive pickle in the barrel, but I know when I have been given a Clear Directive. So I thank Larry for his advice and his help, and he smiles a little broader and tells me I must bring my charming wife around, and reminds me that I am to call if I need anything, and then disappears into one of the offices.

Bill calls from down the hall. It would appear that there was a little ... confusion ... in the Production Department's scheduling last weekend. Which will not be repeated again. Ever. And he gives me a piece of paper with his home number on it and tells me that if I ever run into a studio problem like that again, which would be highly unlikely, I should not hesitate to call him at home and he will straighten them out. Immediately. I note to self the use of the pronoun "them," not "it". Bill by the ways why did I come down today anyway? I had forgotten; it was to pick up the tape of the movie; we had already lost a day in planning out this week's show, and I didn't want to lose any more.

Bill disappears into the Mail Room, comes out with a cassette that has a Post-It note with my name on it stuck on the label. "Is this it?" The label sez that it is in fact this week's movie, so I thank him for it and head for home before things get any weirder.

When I walk through the door, Barb observes that this took longer than she thought, and asks "Did anything interesting happen?"

"You would not believe ..."

In which we're Back after an exciting Commercial Break

2009-05-03T15:02:00.000-07:00

Now then, where was I before life so rudely interrupted me? Oh, yes ... the Pirate Show.

So here we are waiting for the Watings Word, or Ratings Rood, or whatever, elaborately pretending that we don't care a fig for such mundane things but really hoping for some external validation here folks, because playing to the camera is fun n all and it's amusing to try to get the guys to break up but otherwise there's not much indication that anybody's watching beyond the fan mail from the flounders. Production has settled into a routine, which is:

Get dub of next week's movie from Keith as we finish the debrief of the current show
Watch home tape of the show Sunday afternoon (speed through movie, on account of it probably stunk); watch dub of next week's movie, talk back at it a lot; watch dub a second time, talk back at it a lot, time and take notes of movie and back-sassing
Walk around Ruckus Arenus and the so-called Hermitage Hall during Monday lunch, look at the movie notes and cull them into Promising Leads and Dead-End Bores; take the long way home and try to break a theme for the week's show
Try the theme out on Barb during Monday dinner -- if she laughs it's a go and we talk the overall show through, if not it's Plan B which is lots of "Darlings" and sassing Keith
Break the consensual theme and related notes into the Intro, Outro, and assigned commercial breaks
Write the first half of the show (through Mail) Tuesday night;
Write the second half of the show (through close) Wednesday night;
Read through with Barb, polish script, and deliver the script to Keith Thursday night;
Get a life Friday night
Prop and music shop Saturday afternoon; final readthrough and polish Saturday evening; pick up Bob at Joe B's
Arrive at station Saturday around 11:30; make faces at Mike n Mindy through the door, try to get them to break up on camera
Makeup and wardrobe for Barb; set goes in and crew goes to lunch; review final script with Keith before he goes to lunch; Keith sets up graphics and whatever bluescreen we're doing
Make cue cards, pace, wait for people to come in; ignore the No Smoking signs and stink up the joint with the vile cigars I was smoking at the time; SNL network feed is playing in the studio and I'm trying to decide which will be less funny -- tonight's SNL or tonight's MT (usually giving the prize to SNL, although this was the first year of the Church Lady, the Pathological Liar, Master Thespian and Fernando)
Barb, Bob, Keith, Doug, Jeff are usually the first back, around 12:30 or so; Barb gets plugged in, Bob gets his sides, Doug and Jeff get cameras lined up; Keith runs down the show with his crew, crew runs down Keith for whatever mischievous reason they have that week; elaborately ignore the children's quarrels as well as the "Who's been smoking in here?" questions -- "I didn't see anybody come in here smoking," which was true enough as far as it went
About the time the Musical Guests play their second set, rehearse the open once or twice; suggestions and comments are proffered, considered, accepted or rejected; Keith starts the countdown clock when the SNL house band starts vamping the waltz outro theme, everybody gets into position
Do show
Repeat until cancelled.

This routine works well until the dreaded week in November when Keith allows as to how there's a problem with next week's movie.

See, the movies were 16mm films that arrived from the distributor usually on Wednesday or Thursday. Keith's Friday afternoon task was to take the reels of film, screen them to make sure that a) we had the right movie b) we had all of the right movie iii) remove any black leader that had been spliced into the movie by the previous renter and 4) retime and recut the movie into MT's commercial segments, cleverly inserting black leader as necessary. He would then dub the movie onto VHS cassettes, one each for himself, us and audio (first Jeff1, then Doug). During broadcast, the actual movie its own bad self was still in 16mm format and run through a film chain. Yes, children, and all the audio cues were reel-to-reel or cassettes, many of which were made by Jeff1, Doug or me on our home tape decks. Amazing, but true. The highest of high tech was that the final show was written on a C64 (is that a real C64 or a Sears C64? the latter I fear, bought on sale at Fayette Mall).

So a problem with the movie usually was either a remarkably crummy color print that needed hellacious electronic tweaking to try to rebalance the color, or a remarkably crummy black n white print with all of the pristine clarity of a third carbon copy, occasionally a remarkably crummy print that had been run through a projector that had a 6d nail inexplicably stuck in the film gate.

Not this week. The problem with the movie was that it hadn't arrived from the distributor yet.

Normally, this would not be a big deal, because we had The List of Movies. This was a typed list prepared by Bill Back in the Day, that listed (wait for it) the air date and the movie title. That's it -- no other information available. Now a quick scan of IMDB (or, back then, our by-now well-thumbed copies of The Golden Turkey Awards, Maltin's Movie Directory and the Psychotronic Encyclopedia) tells us that there aren't a lot of movies out there with titles like Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things or The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave; but the movie in question was Bluebeard, and there are rather a few movies out there with Bluebeard in the title, and three of them could have been the one we were programmed to show: a Richard Burton paycheck vehicle featuring Raquel Welch, a French pirate movie, or an Edgar Ulmer PRC oddity featuring John Carradine and singing puppets.

Keith and I summoned our vaunted powers of deduction (we had, after all, recently put up a Hard Boiled Dick show so we were experts at this sort of stuff) and reasoned:

A color Richard Burton movie with Raquel Welch in it was too expensive for the drek package we were slogging through
A PRC oddity would fit in with the other PRC classics we were slogging through, but not even Bill would stick us with singing puppets
Therefore it must be the French pirate movie.

So we decided to program around the French pirate movie for starters. Although Monday was Keith's day off, he would check in with the station: undoubtedly the package was delayed in the mail, would have been delivered Saturday except that the station picked its mail up from a post office box and the post office box pickup guy (who had the only key to the post office box) didn't work Saturdays, so of course it would come in on Monday. Keith would get his counterpart to check the first few feet of movie to identify the studio and star, we'd know what movie we really were showing, and Monday was early enough to shift writing gears if necessary.

A sound plan, worthy of praise. Except that when Keith called us Monday night, the movie still wasn't in.

Didn't come in Tuesday, either.

So now we've got Wednesday to write, no matter what. And of course the movie didn't come in on Wednesday. Barb and I decide to cast our lot with the pirates. This is in the innocent days before National Talk Like a Pirate Day; occasionally the Opry House and Ruckus Arenus riggers would decide to Talk Like Pirates, because it was Amusing. Typically, pirate-speak was employed either because the Opry House show was full of teeny tiny dance school kids (we particularly favored talking like pirates during Miss Jane's School o Dance, because it highly amused Miss Jane, who quivered approvingly when she laughed) or during the wretched hives of scum n villainy that traveled with such arena rock dinosaurs as AC/DC or Mr. Osbourne (this year was the Year of Alleged Bat-Biting).

So up we stay half the night, making pirate jokes and scattering them across the various positions. The deliverable script is all over the place, with Arrrs instead of Darlings, and the Line That Shall Live On Forever: "Shiver me timbers. That means 'My Lumber is Cold'." We read it through Thursday night, punchy as can be, and roister off to WLEX. Keith is chewing away on his moustache when we arrive, because we're two days to air and the thing still hasn't come in, and neither has next week's movie. We opine that maybe we should leave a note for Bill to call the distributor and see what's up; it might be nice if Bill actually did some Producing for a change. So we scribble an Oh By the Way on our Invoice for Services Rendered, slip it under his door, and motor off into the night trailing titters n sniggers all the way.

I guess Bill made the call, because both movies were rush-shipped and delivered (!) to WLEX on Saturday. It made Elmer's day; he had to sign for a delivery. We arrive, make the requisite faces at Mike n Mindy, and Keith comes out of the control room.

To tell us that it's the singing puppet movie.

Well, all righty then. Barb pales, I'm speechless; we decide that no matter what she's still got to get into makeup and wardrobe, so off go Barb n Bob while Keith and I put our heads back together to figure out this Fine Mess.

Didn't take long; it's not like we had a lot of options. We decide we're going with the pirate show as planned, and whatever happened would happen. As would be said in the future, It Was what It Was. I go tell Barb that we'll go with what we planned. She's dubious, and if that's the case then she'd really rather not have the movie program run in the studio while we're on the air; she's afraid that the disconnect will throw her performance off. Seems reasonable to me, Keith's fine with it (because all that's involved is to turn the floor monitors off), and we're off. The only change we decide to make is to give Keith a line correcting Millie about the movie, which Millie immediately blows off and continues with her spiel as written.

During the second position, we hear hoots from the control room while we're running the scene. Turns out they're watching the movie in the control room, and the movie (ridiculous enough to start with) is so out of sync with our show that it's a continuous WTF experience. We turn the floor monitors on, and they're right: this is a Dada night if ever there was one. By now everybody is laughing so hard we're having a hard time getting back in place for the next sequence. Barb compensates by slowing her delivery down, and it comes out as Millie is Never Wrong, Even When She's Wrong. This gives everybody ideas for the rest of the show, and we start writing in more Keith/Millie banter to heighten the disconnect. It's getting harder and harder to keep from laughing in the studio during the on-air sequences; the disconnect is too silly for words.

By the time we're done, if somebody hadn't been Bwah-ha-ha-ha'ing they should have been. We were pretty dizzy from the performance. Even Keith is laughing, and he never laughs. Keith apologizes, hasn't had time to dub next week's movie but he'll get to it later today (it is Sunday, after all). We'll stop by around dinner and pick it up.

When we get home, we can't wait: we rewind our tape of the broadcast and watch the first half hour or so. It is ridiculous; we can't believe we actually went ahead and did this. It's just so -- so -- oh, Bwah-ha-ha-ha!

Arr.

In which we apply the Tex Avery Principle

2009-04-04T09:57:00.000-07:00

The Hard-Boiled Dick show was Breakthrough 2 of 4, showing us that the show stood up better by breaking away from the movie we were hosting. We still weren't ready to cut the umbilical to the movie entirely; we had to assume that people were tuning in for the movie first, and that our efforts were wholly directed to keep their little dials glued to 18 at least through the first hour (so it would count as an Official View) so as to be motivated to run out and buy some snazzy Duck Head Jeans at the earliest opportunity, October being the all-important ratings sweeps month and all. In two weeks it would be Halloween, and also Fall Back Night. Halloween had not yet become the anti-Christmas bacchanalia and shopping holiday we are now so fortunate to enjoy, but it was starting down that road at the time with some pretty notorious underground costume parties. It seemed to us that we could go off script, or at least full script, if we could take advantage of some of the planned masked revelry that was already in the works: we would convince one or more of the annual acting community Halloween parties to relocate after midnight to the WLEX studios, and get some trained improvisers to riff along with Barb. Then, at 2AM, we'd -- run the first hour all over again, through the close. In a perfect world, we'd even restart the movie.

My key style influences were Villy Elder, Ernie Kovacs, Buster Keaton and Tex Avery; and while all of these used the same approach, Tex refined it into two key concepts:

Start with a logical but ridiculous premise.
Pursue it way past its logical conclusion.
Pursue it with absolute conviction and complete sincerity.

The perfect expression of this, to me at the time, was Tex's Northwest Hounded Police, a staple on the Turner cable stations of the time. Look it up sometime. There's no directorial winking: in order for the premise to work, Droopy must be omnipresent and the last shot shows that this is indeed so. Doubtful that Aristotle had this in mind when he proposed his theory of the unities, but I'd argue that these seven minutes of handmade determinism serve as a perfectly valid proof test (although I would not get an A on my paper from my former colleague the Professor of Philosophy at Transylvania University, but instead a V for Vulgarity).

Given that, it seemed that the best way to show on a live teevee show what Falling Back really meant would be to do a complete rewind-n-replay of the first hour of the show. Keith was up for it; by this point Bill had retreated to whatever his next triumph of programming or WLEX turf war was, and was allegedly only reviewing show tapes; advance script approval had been abandoned. After a day or so of thinking about it, Keith called to say he didn't think it advisable legally to restart the movie; he thought that there might be some FCC issues if somebody complained, but as long as we ran the sold commercials in their proper slots and did nothing illegal immoral or fattening during the host segments, we should be fine.

So I started calling our friends The Actors, inviting them to come over to WLEX for the next show in costume for our On-Air Costume Party. We'd supply the party fud, and the centerpiece would be a Costume Fashion Show with hushed commentary by good ol' Missy (I hadn't sprung this on good ol' Missy yet, but I figured she'd be all over it). We'd want them to adlib humorously for probly four bits, and it would all be over by 2:15 AM or so. Since we had known all these folks for years, we pitched ideas that we were sure they'd glom onto, resulting in a killer show that would go down in th' annals of teevee history ferever.

Well, we were wrong. Nobody wanted anything at all to do with this.

It seems that the world of Lexington theatre at the time was aligning itself along two lines -- the followers of Director W and the followers of Director S. Of the two, Director S was considered far the more Artiste, living the total Boho Artiste life along with the dedicated troupe of followers. Entry into this secret society implied a full commitment to the total gestalt, which mean shunning the likes of all other influences, including Director W. And Barb was considered to be wholly in the camp of Director W. So if you wanted to be doing Real Thee-Aytre Art with Fellow Traveler Artistes in that place at that time, you got yourself hence to Director S, and you had naught to do with the irrelevancies of Director W and his boozhwa minions. And you especially wouldn't be caught dead intimating that you a) might own a teevee b) might watch some programs on this teevee and c) might watch that wretched Monsterpiece Theatre, just about a perfect example of All That Thee-Aytre Art Wasn't or Would Never Be.

Barb took all this a little personally: she felt, with some justification, that she was being personally redlined. I thought it was silly at best -- but I had also invested time normally spent in writing to try to recruit a largish group of good comic improvisers, and I had no Plan B.

Plus Missy returned my call: she didn't want to be on the air either, although this had nothing to do with the extracurricular foolishness -- she and John had plans. Our friend Maggie the Costumer had already committed to coming in costume, so I called her and asked if she was interested in doing the color commentary. Maggie has a very dry wit, and when I described what was left of Plan A, she almost audibly licked her chops at the thought of giving back to actors some of the grief that actors had given her over the years.

We tried a few other options. Seems that our friend Jack the soon-to-be-Famous Author was quite willing to come down as an Inebriated Genteel Sot, and passed the word to his various circles, which somehow included Bob. Bob recruited several of his more eccentric friends, who actually showed up. Good Old Reliable Nathan and his girlfriend also signed on. I made sure that Elmer knew the night before that we had these people coming over, and after giving us the Do Your Parents Know You're Having These Kids Over for a Wild Party look, he agreed so long as I escorted them in and out.

A small but quite motley crew showed up for the Halloween Party show, and I had some serious second thoughts: we didn't know most of these people, so we didn't know how this was going to play at all. This was not Pushing the Creative Envelope; this was Public Stupidity. Well, the first rule of leadership is Don't Show Second Thoughts, so I huddled with Barb and Keith. We would go with the cold open as planned, following the Pizza Guy into the studio and giving the setup; we'd do viewer mail third, at about 1:25 AM; we'd do the Fashion Show fourth, about 1:40 AM and stretch for six minutes or so; we'd do the rewind at 1:58 AM. We needed a scripted bits for the second and fifth slots, fake our way through the close, and hope for the best. And we'd confiscate the beer that somebody snuck in.

I ran the show down for our guests, and did the 86 the Beer speech to the predictable hoots. I turned the set lights off and said I'd be willing to go with dead air for the open if we didn't lose the beer now, crossing my fingers as well as the Rubicon; the beer was surrendered, once again proving the Power of Teevee to Change Minds and Influence Behavior. The Pizza Guy showed up with the delivery -- a new pizza guy, who looked quite puzzled at the request to "just hang around a minute, walk through that door when we tell you and ask who gets the Blubber Pizza. If you do this, we'll tip you $20." The $20 tip carried the day; when we played the show back we could hear Keith hollering "Cue the pizza guy" just as the show started. We got through the open more or less intact, and decided that Position 2 would be talking smack about the movie to date (that could be controllable). We got through Mail, the Fashion Show and the Fall Back. Barb felt comfortable with more trash talk for our last open segment, and we ran through the close as fast as we could. Thanked everyone for coming, thanked our guardian angels for getting us through a call too close for comfort, and concluded:

High Concept alone wasn't enough to carry the day.
We aren't putting anybody on camera who we don't know or aren't sure about.
We aren't going into the studio without knowing what we're going to do that night.

Well, at least we were leaving the studio more or less intact, and our merry prankster studio crew thought the whole affair quite funny. So, let's get next week's reviewing tape and we'll call it a night.

Keith hems a bit. Then he explains that, well, next week's movie hasn't come in yet.

In which we hit our Marks, our Stride, and the Lottery

2009-03-28T15:41:00.000-07:00

This week's movie is an exciting noir classic from Producers Releasing Corporation. Actually, it was neither exciting nor classic, but it was from Producers Releasing Corporation. In fact, the next couple of months will feature a slogfest through the catalog of Producers Releasing Corporation, which according to Wikipedia is "one of the humbler studios along Poverty Row." In a way, it's kinda cruel to make mock of PRC; no doubt the employees were doing the best they could do with what they had to work with, and no doubt were pleased as proverbial punch that they had jobs n all in cruel times, and no doubt none of said worthies so gainfully employed thought for one minute that their work would survive down through the generations to be displayed with a heaping plate of 80s 'tude on local KY teevee; but honestly, if we weren't paid to sit through the thing we would have been out washing the car or chunking rocks at our neighbor's rooster or some other activity that would have been a far more profitable use of our time than trying to figure out how to wrap some alleged entertainment around an exciting noir classic from Producers Releasing Corporation.

In fact, watching the tape resulting in a remarkably pristine note pad as I recall ... no grist for the mill, nada, nil, naught, nix, ni. One or the other of us basically said, "Oh let's just trash the damn thing and be done with it." This seemed to yield enough grist to produce something that could be show-like, and at least get us out of the rut; if we didn't get out of the rut soon, we'd be phoning in the bad puns and saying buh-bye to teevee land after a few more weeks. So ... a show of Millie as a Hard Boiled Dick seemed promising enough, and the premise started to write itself sorta -- always helpful when you're writing in your spare time and to deadline.

We still didn't really have Millie's voice, but it was starting to emerge. Dick Cavett opined once that one can't write comedy without writing for a particular comic and that particular comic's delivery, and went on to demonstrate how a basic joke would morph for Bob Hope, Groucho Marx and somebody else. We found this to be true in practice: until we found Millie's unique voice, the rhythm of her words, the particular sounds and words that were hers, writing and performing the show was a wrestling match with the paper right up to the show close. For this show, I was "hearing" Millie channeling Phillip Marlowe, Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe; and it was coming out in a faster-paced torrent of words than normal. Rococo words, too; Millie was channeling S.J. Perelman channeling Messrs. Marlowe, Goodwin and Wolfe. The script was getting a little more interesting than the post-opening scripts.

The open called for Millie investigating a murder, with a stage heaped with victims: Millie would rattle on, we'd roll Keith's new opening sequence, we'd come back in with more victims heaped around, and then roll the first segment of the movie. When we dropped the scripts off Thursday, I talked Keith through this sequence because if we were going to heap the stage with victims we'd probably need a few camera guys as set dressing. Keith was fine with this, and pointed out that if this was going to be a noir bit then we probably needed noirish lighting. This was fine with me, you want some suggestions? let's try some stuff when we place the set. O-kay. Oh by the way, Keith added, do you have anything in mind for the opening sequence? Nope, that's yours, do what you think it needs. Keith had something in mind.

When we came in Saturday night, the studio energy level was definitely up. The guys hustled the set in before they broke for lunch, and there seemed to be a bit more clutter to it than usual -- not a bad thing, somebody's been set-dressing. Everybody, including Barb n Bob, came back in at 12:30, and looky here a ladder has appeared! there's somebody up on it! and he's -- moving a light! After looking at the monitor, Keith and I wonder what it would look like if we -- turned off a couple of lights? So we start turning off lights, Keith checking back with the engineer to make sure we aren't breaking any station rules, and after a few minutes we end up with something that's definitely ... different.

Keith has decided that this will be a locked down one-camera shot, so he lines the shot up and we start decoratively arranging camera guys as helpless victims around the set. The guys are quite insistent that Floor Manager Tracy be the most prominent victim, and that she be decoratively arranged so as to be visibly ... protruberant would be a good word. They compete to be decoratively arranged near Tracy, so that they can try to break her up during the shot; it would seem that Tracy is easily amused and has a distinctive giggle. We haven't seen this much interest n life yet for this show, so Barb ices the cake by telling Tracy that whatever she does, she must-not-giggle. This has the desired effect of Tracy manfully trying to hold it in through the camera rehearsal, but not quite making it. The whole thing looks very silly -- not at all what we had imagined, but very silly and very playable. The whole show is going to go in a different direction tonight than what we thought -- and then Barb gives Keith the cue for the New Open.

Oh, that scamp Keith! He has been very busy in the edit booth, and has swiped the opening titles for Miami Vice, editing in Millie shots culled from the fateful first camera runthrough and the first couple of shows and matting the titles for this week's show over the Miami Vice graphics. Apparently none of the floor guys were in on this; we're all seeing it for the first time and howling with laughter. Keith is beaming, until one of the poopheads in the control room points out that he really needs to start the countdown clock because we've got less than two minutes to air. So we hurriedly get everybody back into some semblance of the victim positions, remind Tracy most severely that under no circumstances can she giggle, Keith suddenly remembers that with everybody laying dead on camera he's got no floor manager to count into the show so I put on Tracy's headset and do the hand jive for everyone and we're doing it for real, Tracy merrily mph mph mphing through Barb's monolog.

It occurs to me that if we went from Keith's open back to the studio and then back to the movie, we're taking something away from Keith's open; so I mention to Keith that it would be OK with us if we just went straight from his open to the movie. He's locked and loaded with tape and film cued up, so he's fine with that; and so it goes. Barb asks why we didn't come back to her, I tell her, she's fine with that as well, and we're madly dashing for the next setup.

The rest of the show chugs along just fine. Everybody's having a good time, we're getting good suggestions for the bumps, everybody's contributing. Any semblance between the show we're broadcasting and the show we dropped off on Thursday is purely accidental. This calls for post-show pizza, and while we're celebrating it occurs to me that Halloween is coming in a couple of weeks, as is Fall Back Night. It also occurs to me that we'll be live at the time that humanity supposedly Falls Back. So while we're congratulating each other and thanking Keith for his open, I wonder how hard it would be to tape the open of the show and then play the tape back live later on in the show. Keith say this is fairly easy, and did I have something in mind?

As a matter of fact, I did.

In which we Reboot a Bit

2009-03-23T17:41:00.001-07:00

I'm not remembering anything showstopping from Show 3 itself; but the thing from Show 3 or thereabouts was what we have come to know as a Fair, Frank n Open Discussion of the Issues.

Keith wanted to talk while Barb got out of makeup, and shared a little about the guys, WLEX, and his feelings about the enterprise.

Our studio guys were basically the newest production hires, fresh out of EKU's Radio and TV Production curriculum. As the newest production hires, they occupied the sub-basement of the production pecking order; and the only way out of the sub-basement was if one of the day-shift production folks moved on. Generally, this never happened: the only other places to go to in central KY at the time were WKYT and KET; and since those were the plum jobs, nobody ever left there. Unless they left central KY. Which was unthinkable.

So our guys were condemned to the Midnight Shift for the forseeable forever, with no hope of doing anything interesting in the next decade or two; the News was all robocameras, fergoodnesssakes, and the formats for the Sunday AM Public Interest shows were frozen in aspic. Then we came along, with our merry disregard for everything that anybody Knew about the Right Way to Produce a Show -- and it looked even more hopeless than before, except that a) we seemed to listen to them, b) we seemed to respect their work and c) we seemed to have fun and wanted them to have fun, too. This from Show 1.

So everybody gets all excited and starts psyching themselves up for the show -- and here we are, doing basically illustrated radio. All Millie is doing is sitting up there, cracking jokes and making faces. Where's the television? What happened to all that talk of a month ago?

For my part, my $.02 is that we were hitting nothing but "Can't do that," for reasons ranging from the legitimate n plausible to the oh, please. And for all our brave talk, the reality is that the tape from Show 1 showed that (hate to say it) Bill was more right than not: as a teevee show, it might have been a brave experiment and fun in the studio, but what went out over the air kinda stunk. So we've been kinda busy working on what we could control, which is the character.

We talk about the character: Millie is stuck in a Grande Dame Diva rut that nobody is particularly excited about, with the possible exception of Bill. And as long as she's tied to the chair, not moving around and not reacting to anybody, we can't do much more with her than write jokes that nobody understands. We've got to pick up the pace and get more Stuff going in the show. Which means, Mr. Writer, that you have to put more Stuff into the script that we can work with.

Up to this point, the scripts are just Millie's monologues. And I point out that our understanding was that Keith & Co. would take care of the teevee part, we'd take care of the talent part. So if it's boring teevee, we need Keith & Co. to step up as well: it serves none of us for any of us to get all Artiste-y with the Show. Right or wrong, the guys' attitude towards The Talent reflected their legitimate reaction to how The Talent treated them in the past; and we have had our little experiences with divas as well. We don't play that game.

So we leave each other with a challenge: Given the basic lines of responsibility -- we don't tell them how to stage the broadcast unless the scene is written to be staged a particular way, they don't tell us what to say or do -- what can we do next week to get out of the rut?

Keith is not in for Week 4; Audio Jeff is directing, and Doug shifts from camera to audio. But obviously our conversation has been shared, because we walk in to the studio to say our howdys upon arrival, and the mood is most def upbeat. Barb n Bob go off, pumped. Jeff, who has been very quiet for the past month, is willing to read the Director lines. The guys want to see Barb enter -- they want to move the cameras! Doug is playing with sound -- there are sound effects being dropped in here and there, more or less in logical holes in the script. There is talkback that isn't scripted, and Millie responds appropriately. Everybody's energy is up without the franticity of Week 1. This show is working the way that it's supposed to work. And it's coming together in Week 4, just like we thought. And Week 4 begins the ratings month. Oh, we love it when a plan comes together.

We're moving into a series of PRC trash movies at this point -- the next one up is some detective epic, with snappy patter n guys in fedoras that don't come off when the hard-boiled dick socks 'em. The writing is now falling into a pattern -- too bad we won't be writing after a few more weeks, we should be off scripts by the end of the month at this rate -- and I call Keith Tuesday night and ask: How do you feel about doing a hard-boiled dick show this week? If the show's full of detective movie cliches running around the movie? Could you come up with a special open for the show?

Keith say he's got an idea.

In which we play a Kazoo Interlude

2009-03-19T17:46:00.001-07:00

Projects, deadlines, too much workly stuff at this time. Plus I need to go up to the attic and try to find the Box O Tapes to start refreshing my memory. Tune in for next week's exciting classic, whatever it is.

O, yeah ... the Kazoos.

This being in the prehistoric, pre-internet times, and also being Lexington, we couldn't just you know google "Masterpiece Theatre theme" and get th' wisdom o' the ages delivered to our Sears Commodore 64 monitor in nanoseconds. If we strolled into the mall record store and asked, "Hey, you guys got the theme to Masterpiece Theatre?", we'd get the Thousand Yard Stare, which is what we did and what we got. This also being in the prehistoric, pre-home theatre times, we had kludged up an audio output from our teevee and ran it through the Other inputs of our fine fine Barney Miller's Marantz amplifier so's we could enjoy teevee audio in high fidelity n such. So the easier solution was to just rip the theme right off the air and dub it to a cassette. And then it was time for Midnight Audio.

Barb called our friend Doroth and asked if Doroth'd like to go out and do something different tonight. Doroth was always up for something different, so Barb told Doroth to meet her at the northwestest door of Ruckus Arenus on High Street in an hour. Since we lived a few blocks from the Big Gym, we walked over with our cassette and kazoos in hand. Barb went up to the aforementioned corner while I signed in at the famous Guard Condo. People in our shop were always signing in and out at all hours, so this was not unusual at all. I told the guard that I needed to pick up some gear out of the arenus sound booth for a show, and he nodded; whatever was on the guard condo teevee that Sunday night was pretty fascinating. Mental note: logical audience for MT includes guards on midnight shift. I stopped off in the shop, picked up a reel of tape and a couple of RE 20 microphones, and went up to the northwestest door on High Street, one of the thousands of doors that wasn't alarmed, and let Barb and Doroth in. Then, with mics tapes n kazoos we went to the Ruckus Arenus sound booth to record the Theme to Monsterpiece Theatre.

The Ruckus Arenus sound booth was set up as a recording studio for LCC and Opera Housus projects; so it had state-of-the-80s art Neve consoles, a couple of Tascam studio reel-to-reel decks, and a big ol' processor rack; way overengineered for the Ruckus Arenus PA system, but hey. Once in, if you didn't fire up the main amp racks to the cluster you had a very nice little recording studio; so I didn't fire up the main amp racks to the cluster, cued up the Masterpiece cassette, and set mics up for Barb n Doroth to tootle their little kazoos, just like 'at Slothrop the Singing Nincompoop kazooing his way across The Zone. We did a couple of dead takes trying to solve the problem of picking up leakage from the booth monitor, then decided it didn't matter anyway and added it as a sweetener into the dub; then Barb n Doroth kazootled their way through the entire cut in one take, interrupting themselves every so often with giggles. Figured that since it was in the bridge that too didn't matter, and besides it wasn't entirely unknown that the guard made rounds. So one take and we're done.

Audio editing at the time of course is razor blade n splicing block, with grease pencil and rocking the tape back n forth across the playback head looking for the right blurp. And of course it's a prime opportunity to space out and forget whether the playback head is head 1 or head 3. Which I did, as I cut off the head and spliced on the leader. So when we played the tape back, we lost the first note-and-a-half, which the kazoos had't come in on anyway because they couldn't hear the cue. Oh, well.

So we hand the tape to Keith, who plays it and asks, "Did you know that you have a false start to the music cue?" Well, yeah ... but ... does it matter? Keith gives me The Look: thought you Ruckus Arenus guys were, like, practically perfect in every way and you hand in this shabby thing? The kazoos are playing in the WLEX control room, and one of the regular newsies pokes his or her head in: What's that? We're thinking of this for the Monsterpiece theme. "Hey, that's pretty funny, what is it, kazoos?" Keith seizes the moment and runs the tape back to the beginning: Hey, what do you think about this open? and plays the blown edit. The newsie listens, shrugs, asks "Does it matter?" I'm thinking about it, wincing at the edit and about to say "Let's do it over," when Keith decides, "It's good enough for now. You guys will probably be making some noise or something during the opens anyway."

Yeah, probly.

In which we do a Turkey that we Know Should Fold

2009-03-12T10:06:00.000-07:00

Oh my, do we dislike this here movie The Sentinel. It's a dreary boomer-angsty haunted house movie in which a lovely but troubled (or is it troubled but lovely) boomette modelle has to give up her entire life career n everything on account of the mean old Catholic Church is making her babysit the entrance to hell. Which is through a brownstone in Brooklyn. Because if she doesn't, it'll be armageddon n stuff, which would ruin our whole day. Mom n Dad are so mean, making us be responsible.

We don't know yet how to channel our responses into a Show, and the clock is running, so Week 2 becomes pretty much by-the-numbers as I recall. Probly a Good Thing; we threw a lot of spaghetti at the wall in Week 1. Keith is right -- we need to give him and his group time to get with this program. Bill's right, which we'd prefer not to admit -- for all the high concept blather, what people saw on the air bounced around like a thousand crazed superballs. And we're right -- the outlines of what the Show ought to be are clear and soon-to-be very doable.

But we can't break this particular movie into a cohesive Show, not just yet. So as I recall we don't have much choice but to do a lot of Millicent Talking. And neither of us have found her Voice yet. Barb has a sound, but it's not refined; I haven't found the rhythm or the vocabulary yet. So we push through the required positions, but nothing's really happening. Oh well, time's up and we hand in the script on Thursday as promised.

Bill calls Barb on Friday. He thinks we're on the right track. That makes one of us.

Same drill Saturday night, except the set's up and facing the News Team, who seem to find it somewhat distracting, tee hee and too bad. Audio Jeff hands Barb the beltpack and mic as he comes out of the control room. The clock officially starts for MT at 12:30, and Barb is quickly connected and checked, since all Audio Jeff has to do is plug the cable in. Keith runs the open he's put together -- titles drift in from top and bottom, that's kind of interesting, the weekly movie will float in as well, he's thinking of assembling a montage of movie shots and Millie shots under it, okey dokey whatever. We run through the Approved Opening, mostly talk setting up the movie -- we are not going to do any Crypt Keeper groaner puns, no no no. Everything's good, we've got a little less than twenty minutes to go, so Keith Doug n Audio Jeff decide to work on the Bluescreen Issue.

The problem is that it's kind of a jury-rigged setup to start with. There are two or three lights that light up the blue wall, and three or four lights that light up the Talent; and electronically the deal is to balance the light between the foreground/Talent and the background/blue wall so that the electronics can blank out the blue and insert the image of choice. There will always be a hard black outline, given the state of the art electronics available at WLEX (but there's good stuff on order, will be here soon). If the light and the color are balanced electronically, then the insert will work without either dropping out sections of the Talent, or fringing the hard black outline around the Talent. Thanks to the zany costume, which breaks all the rules of the blue wall, the Talent both has image bleedthrough randomly throughout the costume and fringes the hard black outline. And while the guys take the point that a cheesy bluescreen might be conceptually just th' ticket for the cheesy show we seem to be hellbent on producing, they have also been informed in No Uncertain Terms by Oz the Great n Terrible Head Engineer that there will be No Cheesy Bluescreen Shots on His Watch -- and just to be sure, he'll be watching to make sure that they don't let Those People talk them into a cheesy bluescreen shot.

Let me state for the record that I have yet to see Management by Bullying work as a valid motivational tool, and I have worked for some world-class bullies in Our Nation's Capital.

Keith Doug n Jeff have been mulling this problem over as a thought problem during the week, and have concluded that the ideal solution would be to either boost the lighting on the blue backing or boost the lighting on the Talent, one. In essence, this would give just enough of a fudge factor that the video switcher could be tweaked just a little off the Approved Settings and generate a barely-tolerable shot. The problem is that they can't move the lights, they don't have any spare lights on sticks that could be set up as a temporary solution, and the studio lights are not on dimmers they're on on/off wall switches so they can't do a light level tweak. But if they gel the lights with color media, this would be definition change the red-green-blue balance and intensity of one or more lights; which might get the same result as the light boost textbook solution.

I'm impressed. They've apparently been quite serious in thinking this through. I have my odd bits o scavenged gel from the Opry House, and remark that we sometimes have the same problem on stage with trying to get a visual separation between foreground actors and background scenery, particularly lit cycloramas; and our classic solution is to use either a top light or better still a backlight, more or less 15 degrees off vertical, to rim the foreground actors and put a little edge of light around the 3-D stuff. Hmm, sez Jeff or Doug, and rummages around in the back to come up with a little garage clip light with a dinky little PAR 38 in it. While one guy's up on the ladder swapping gels, the other waves the light around Barb. Keith and the show's video engineer (who never comes out of the control room), keep up cryptic chatter that seems to suggest that the experiment is promising, but not yet good enough. The countdown clock and the SNL network feed both warn us that we're running out of time, so we get in position for the open.

The show feels more under control this week, but it also feels lethargic. Barb has pitched her voice down, and is using lots of elongated vowels; she's an actress and she's been given a note to pull the character back, and so she does; and in the studio the show feels slow. Nothing you can put your finger on, but the energy level is a little below acceptable. Nothing is memorable about this week. There are a couple more letters that came in. Hope they're still watching next week.

We're coming up on a sequence where the Basement Door to Hell opens and horrible fiendish persons intent on Grievous Naughtiness start piling out. We've watched the movie at home three or four times trying to break the show, and this sequence induces groans and Oh Puh-leezes every time. Say there, Keith -- could we just cut in a shot of Barb sticking her tongue out? She's not going to say or do anything -- it'd just appear in the middle of the scene. Let the movie soundtrack roll, it would be just for a couple of seconds. Keith is Skeptical -- why would we want to do that? I could tell you that it's because we think it would be funny -- but it's really because anybody who's still up watching this thing is half-asleep, and it'll wake 'em up. Somebody on the floor thinks that's funny, so what the hell. We line up the shot; Keith says he supposes I know exactly when I want to break in, and I allow that as a matter of fact I do, and I'll point at him when it comes. Which I do, which he does, which Barb does, which the movie rolls merrily on. Snickers all around; it seems I'm not the only one who thinks this week is a letdown.

Thankfully the movie ends. We know we have to do the promo for next week's movie, so I scribble a promo script and channel some of the collective frustration into the promo. We thank everybody for the night -- Mr. Metz told me as a young pup that no matter how bad the rehearsal or the show was, one always thanks people for their work that night. Somebody remarks it wasn't bad; somebody else remarks it'll be better next week. Nobody's leaving feeling bad about the night besides Barb and me.

In restrospect, this week was the Buy-In Week. Now it's no longer The Talent's Show; it's Our Show.

In which we are Constructively Criticized

2009-03-11T18:05:00.000-07:00

Oh, that rascal Bill, the scamp. He didn't like it.

Too busy, too fast, Millicent is too big, too harsh, too ugly, too unlikable ...

All the guys are sitting around the table with us. The happy folks who sure looked like they were into it just a couple of days ago are sinking back into themselves. They were sporting what I have since learned to recognize as the BOHICA sulk (Bend Over, Here It Comes for you wee ones who should be reading Treasure Island). And while our own review of the show, watched Sunday night instead of loyally watching Amazing Stories or whatever the fine first-run NBC product was that particular Sunday night, told us that we weren't anywhere near the right balance of chaos and organization that we wanted to be, on the whole the show was entertaining enough ... there were some parts that were laugh-out-loud funny ... and the bits that fell flat fell flat because they were poorly thought-out.

The nice thing about being tagged as the Uncooperative Outsider is that once in a while you can live up to the tag. And this was as good a time as any, so Bad Intense Steve asked a few questions: Wasn't the brief to produce ... an improvised show? An unrehearsed show? An anything goes show? That was pitched to a cult audience who would discover the show, not a mass audience that needed to be unchallenged? Haven't we just finished up a month of being told that WLEX did not want a polished show? Or a structured show? And didn't we have your approval to produce a show that pretty much played the way it was scripted? Did we not just deliver the show that you asked for, nay insisted on?

And by the way, did we get any mail?

Turns out we did get a couple of letters. Which were, in fact, two more than anybody thought we would get, including ourselves.

And we looked at the letters -- fan mail, from some flounders. Postmarked Sunday.

So ... these folks dropped letters in the mail the day after the show aired. And sent it to the fake address. And they appear to be, not to put too fine a point on it, complimentary.

Well, pardon th' rant n all, and truth to tell when we look at the tape as a standalone record of the performance there is a fair amount of work to be done to polish this show, so we are inclined to agree with th' gist of your comments. But if polish is what's required, then we're going to have to have the kind of structure that a polished show requires.

Which means a script. And rehearsals. And an overall vision. And a crew who's willing to push things a little. And we have all that, at least in embryonic form. What we need is time for the pieces to come together. We made a quantum leap in a week. Now that we have one show down, and we know what we have to work on, whatever needs fixing is easy to fix.

Besides, the unspoken thought hangs in the air, what else ya got?

One thing we learned at good ol' Ruckus Arenus was arrogance and in-your-face-itude. We had a Master teaching us, our cranky old Head Rat. It was not the normal language of business or the arts in good ol' Lexington KY circa 1985, and it likely was not the normal discourse in that little boardroom. It was also not the way to win executive friends and influence people; it was the big fat pride talking, the noise of a young arrogant snot.

But it won the point. Bill backed down.

Keith fills the void. We asked for way too much teevee stuff on such short notice; we really needed to pull back on the video stuff. Let's do one thing a week and solve the production problems; then we can work in the actor stuff for the floor guys. We wanted crawls, animations, quick cut-ins, blue screen, sound effects, moving cameras, location shots -- all at once. Let's just do one or two of those a week for a few weeks.

Good point. No problem. What do you think we should work on this week? We decide that we'll only do crawls and cut-ins this week, we'll use some of the set stuff during the bits so there won't be any camera whippeteria, we'll camera rehearse everything before we air it, we'll only have one (well, maybe two) brief exchanges between Millie and Keith, and if we have downtime we'll try out an idea or two for solving the bluescreen.

Bill doesn't understand this bluescreen fixation. Why can't we just stand up there and tell jokes? Because as long as we do unexpected stuff, we'll have an audience. As soon as the audience can predict what we're going to do, they'll stop watching. Because why would they need to watch? if they can make up just as good a show in their minds, they don't need us. We don't want to do bluescreen for the sake of bluescreen, we'll always have a reason: we want to do a teevee show, so why shouldn't we take advantage of teevee technology?

Well, OK ... but no coming in early, or cutting meals short, to solve production problems. How long do you think it will take for this ... show ... to come together.

Four weeks, I say. Don't know where that comes from, but I know it's right.

What are you thinking about for this week's show? Turns out we watched the movie the night before -- an unfortunate and shabby piece of 70s faux deviltry called The Sentinel, which we hated hated hated -- and Barb and I do a quick rundown of our impressions. "So you're basically going to trash the movie," Bill says. We think about that for a second, and Barb says, "Yeah, pretty much."

Bill likes that. Go figure; it's closer to a classic monster movie host act, maybe it's closer to what he really wanted.

Keith still wants a theme song and a fixed opening. How about the theme from Masterpiece Theatre, played on kazoos? Bill thinks that's pretty funny. Where are we going to get the theme from Masterpiece Theatre played on kazoos? I has an idea, but it won't be ready this week. Keith will come up with something.

Well, all righty then. If things are slowed down a little, Millicent is pulled back a little, it's more jokey a little, then let's try that and see how it looks. Script for Thursday, see you Saturday night. Executive decisions executed decisively.

Barb and I hang back with Keith a second: thanks for the support and the constructive comments, much appreciated. Keith thanks us for the pizza -- nobody ever bought them pizza after a shoot before. Huh.

So ... honestly, now ... did you like the show?

"Now that we're past it ... yeah. Parts of it were pretty good. Others ..."

Same for us. We've got to do what we've got to do this week, but ... do you want to do a sitdown joke show, or do you want to do more like Saturday?

No hesitation. "More like Saturday, only better."

Okey-dokey.

In which the Show Goes On

2009-03-10T10:17:00.000-07:00

It's showtime, folks.

Here comes Barb, Bob, Nathan n Steve piling out of the car shortly after 11PM on a lovely Saturday night, there's that Elmer smilin' at us n wavin' us in, Steve signs everybody in while Barb n Bob go off looking for a place to change and make up. The News is on air, the control room door is open -- seems it's rather stuffy in there, so that's how they vent the joint out -- and Keith and a couple of others we recognize are pushin' them buttons, slidin' them sliders, and otherwise producing The News At 11. Mike n Mindy are reciting the day's woes, national n local, and as they wrap up the newscast I hear over the control room monitor, "... stay tuned for Saturday Night Live, and right after that a new show -- Monsterpiece Theatre. Sounds like fun. Later tonight." Then the cold open for SNL comes on, headsets come off followed shortly by studio crew guys, followed shortly by Mike n Mindy their own selves. They're taller than I irrelevantly thought, and they're wearing jeans n sneaks! -- well, we never see them other than waist-up, they're behind the News Desk in the News Set, of course. Keith introduces me as one of the Monsterpiece guys, and Mike n Mindy allow as to how they're looking forward to the show, heard a lot of good things, gracious chitchat yadayada. I mumble something hopefully gracious in reply but probly not because I'm counting down to show and to this day it's nothing but adrenaline and tension until the first minute of show when it's well and truly Out of Our Hands and Owned by the Audience. They go down the hall to the News Department, and behind me I hear a hoot, that's so funny -- guess we know where Barb n Bob are set up ...

Keith wants to go over the script, but not now: everybody's on lunch break. Another Little Surprise. Later, counting their shift hours on fingers n toes, of course it makes sense, it's after the fourth hour of the shift -- but damn, guys, how many more of these Little Surprises are out there anyway? Nothing to do but pace in the studio, which seems to be my place for now. At least the set is stacked along the wall, behind the cameras -- and it's stacked in sequence, first piece by the door is on top; The Chair, The Teevee and the Loose Stuff bring up the rear of the train.

There's a downshooter camera on a table, with some script pages. Some are ours, with notes -- good to see. Some are for a commercial -- typed on a bulletin typewriter. There's the minicam, standing on a tripod; the minicam is good news, the tripod -- must resist WTF impulse. There's a flipchart in the corner, with a fairly dry marker on the easel ledge.

Keith's back. Not many notes -- there are some crawls, he wants to know if these should be against a black field or across the bottom of the screen, I have no opinion that's his call; the blue backing gag might not work tonight, the Head Engineer came in to test something, can we do it as a cut-in if we have to? rather not, but if we have to and only as a last resort; he's okay with lines that he has to read, but he doesn't want anybody else on the crew to have lines -- he wants them to focus on their jobs, not act ... little late for this Little Surprise, but we shall zip our lip and ask instead what if we put a headset on Nathan and give the lines to him? that'll work .... about this fake address for the fan mail -- do you really want to use this? is anybody really goint to write in? well, if they do they the mail guy sure won't mix it in with the bills ... want that as a title? can we have it as a title? sure, why not ... that's about it. Keith goes off to fix the crawl, Barb Bob n Nathan come in, the studio guys come in, and the countdown clocks start on the cameras.

Head Engineer Guy and Doug white-balance the floor cameras (quick) and the minicam (not so quick ... takes about five or ten minutes). Head Engineer Guy and Doug want The Talent over at the blue backing wall, they want to fuss with lights n electronics. Audio Guy attaches a power pack to the small of Barb's back, threads a lapel mic through the layers of costume -- Barb asks if he wants, he could just give her the stuff when she comes in and she'll put it on when she dresses -- Audio Guy has to think about this one, apparently nobody's offered to do this before -- Head Engineer Guy concludes nope, can't get good separation, no blue backing stuff tonight, too much damn blue in the costume and hair, The Great Oz Has Spoken. Bob's got some red spray hair dye, starts frosting the wig and shpritzing bits of costume where the blue is poking through, I ask if I brought some gel with a lot of red in it and they backlit or toplit her would that help? Head Engineer Guy does the bobblehead Nope nope nope, Doug says aside bring it in, can't hurt, countdown clock is down to 5 minutes, Keith wants The Talent out in the hall to set up the opening. I tell Nathan he's going to be a techie, hand him his side, ask the rest of the guys if they know what to do ... nope, nobody tells them nothin' Oh please so I break the No Speaking to Crew Rule, tell them what's coming, and tell them feel free to crack as many Talent cracks as they want, but they have to do it on the air, and the countdown clock is counting seconds down from 120.

Out in the corridor, the shot is set up; Barb wants to know when to come in -- the floor manager is out on the landing with her, she'll cue her when they're live. Elmer wants Doug to get his good side, Barb walks down the corridor with Doug so that he knows where she's going, Keith wants everybody in place because it's ten seconds to air. Mad scrambling, Barb just gets back outside (no floor manager with; she jumps into the film room counting three ... two ... one ... and) ...

BAM! The door flies open, it's not Barb but Millie, in full rant and everybody who's left in the corridor gets out of the way in a hurry. Millie rants down the corridor, someone ducks down in front of her to get the door, she kicks the studio door open and rips into the floor guys. They're surprised, somebody remembers to say "huzzabuzza huzzabuzza Talent", Nathan reads His Line for posterity, the movie gets introduced, the floor manager makes the universal signal for Hold It and announces "We're clear."

Lots of exhaling, a couple of "yeah!"s n "OK"s, tension clear, and we've got seven minutes to set up the next shot. Barb apologizes to the crew for yelling at them, oh that's all right, ma'am, Keith reminds us that the clock is running and we've got to set the next scene up. He calls for the Designer -- guess that's me, folks.

I ask for the entry piece, half of the bookcase, want to see the other half creep in behind her during the shot; we set the chair in the light, throw some dressing around -- Barb wants an extra copy of the script just in case, we leave it on the teevee, floor manager announces we're live in thirty seconds, everybody jumps back behind cameras except for me who will do the flat move, we come back up and do the first in-show bit, which is to be punctuated by the flat falling down. It does not fall with a satisfactory thud: it's vacuformed, dummy -- it's got no weight or mass, it just kind of ... wafts down. Millicent explodes that she can't even get a decent noise out of her set -- where'd that come from? oh well, better than the close we had -- and we're out. Exhaling again here, boss except that the floor manager annouces that we need to set up the bump.

Is this another one of tonight's Little Surprises? Sure is, we need a bumper -- five to ten second shot of Something that the show title gets superimposed over. Doesn't matter what, but we're live in thirty seconds. We grab Barb n some stuff, do something, say "Do this!" just as the floor manager counts us back on the air ... and the Monsterpiece Theatre bumpers are born. Every bumper during the run of the show will be made up on the fly, and whoever's got the best idea sets up the bump.

We're counting down to the next bit, which will be the aborted blue backing insert -- just going to be a quickie, then on to whatever is next -- when I hear from the on-air monitor the cue for the cut-in. That ain't right -- it's supposed to be at least three minutes from now. Turns out there was an internal edit to the film -- guess somebody thought something was a Naughty Bit -- well, too bad, we missed it and we're moving to the next setup.

Barb asks me if I can cue her; I grab the flip chart, start writing her dialog bullets, and position myself with flip chartsnext to the center camera. That's where I will live for the run of the show: I'm now Cue Card Guy.

And so it goes. Millie reads her Fan Mail, gives out the first bogus address, Camera Guy next to me snickers at the address. Millie does Ketchup Theatre. Millie does Other Stuff. Bumps get improvised. Everybody's much looser than we were at 12:30. Some stuff is working, some stuff isn't; but for the most part most of the show will do. We aren't anywhere near where we want to be with this show, but the progress from last Thursday is clear, the breakneck studio pace doesn't let us worry about what just happened, and if we aren't amusing anybody else in teevee land we're amusing our collective selves.

We're setting up the outro, and Doug annouces that it's a full moon tonight. Keith wants to get a shot of the full moon for the close; well, good on you, Keith, that will most certainly work. Doug dashes down the corridor to set up the minicam in the parking lot, Millie introduces the next week's classic (whatever it is), the credits roll, and the floor manager tells us we're clear. It's something like 3:15AM, and there's applause from the guys. "We did good," Doug announces.

I have my Little Surprise for the night: a Domino's guy shows up with pizzas n pop. If we tanked, at least we leave on a full stomach; if we win, victory smells like pepperoni. Before we dig in, Keith reminds us that we have to do the Promo, and he promises that's the last of tonight's Little Surprises. We got nothing at this point, so we just reprise whatever Millie said in the outro over the clip. Now it's Domino's time. But before you go, pizza guy ... is this your shift? Do you do this every week? Ever deliver over here? Got a problem with ... oh ... delivering pizza on the air?

Keith's all smiles coming out of the control room. On the whole, it went pretty well. He hands me a cassette: it's next week's movie. Bill wants to do notes late Tuesday afternoon, they're all coming in a little early; did he talk to us about it. My turn: nobody tells us nothin'. Keith laughs: that is this place, all right.

We leave about 4. Some of the studio guys have to be back to do the Sunday AM public interest shows. Nathan left his car at our place, we drop Bob off at his place: Just think, Bob -- we get to do this again next week!

Bob say "Oh boy!"

In Which a Star is Borned

2009-03-08T18:17:00.001-07:00

Well, all righty. Counting down to show here, boss.

If we're going to submit a completed script to Bill in seven days, we need to write it in no more than six; and since we both have full-time jobs, we need to get busy tonight. We get home, pop the tape into the VCR -- note that this first work o art is some epic titled The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, which just happens to be referenced in our handy dandy Psychotronic Encyclopedia -- and commence to watch.

About ninety or so minutes later, the truth is clear: this is incomprehensible dreck. I'm about to radically revise my long-held belief that nobody wakes up one morning and decides that he or she will spend the next twenty-four hours doing the worst job possible in his/her appointed duty for the day. As best as we can tell, this is some sort of revenge tale about assorted eurotrash cads of various sexes; but the movie itself is at least fifteen minutes shorter than its alleged run time, if the tape is any kind of faithful to the film image then the film stock has aged to the point that the colors are leaching out to a bluish muck, and I am damned if I can keep track of which unlikable pouf is doing what unspeakable deed to whoever irredemiable scoundrel, where said unspeakable deed is being done, or whether what we're watching is flash forward, flash back, flash sideways, or Flash the Wonder Cat. There is no way any half-awake person in his or her right mind would sit through the first reel of this nonsense. At least as far as this particular movie is concerned, it's of no help or use to us: we're on our own.

We watch it again Friday, with a notepad and stopwatch, scribbling notes and run times on whatever catches our attention positive or negative. We're holding on to the unready for sub-prime time framing story, and some movie-related stuff is sticking to this framework. On a whim, we decide that we'll throw in a viewer mail segment and lard it with fake letters: who knows, maybe someone will take the bait, and anyway it's knocked out quickly. Barb and I are basically talking trash back at the movie as it unspools, in the time-honored tradition of talking trash back at the movie as it unspools. I make no claim for anticipating MST3K, my high-skool buds and I did the same thing at the Rio Show in the late 60s, culminating in Uncle Rich Ungar growing so irritated at a Godzilla and the Teensy Princesses epic that he shot the screen and was promptly barred from the Rio Show for life plus the unfortunate incident being Duly Noted on his Permanent Record, the bullet hole allegedly prominently unpatched until the Rio Show fell to the demo crew in the early 80s and my brother-in-law rescuing the glow-in-the-dark clock over the exit, which it can still be seen in his kitchen. But I digress.

Saturday morning I fire up my trusty Commodore 64 and head the page: Monsterpiece Theatre/Show 1/The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave.

Fade in on Elmer at the guard entrance; shade the shot so that the outside door can clearly be seen. The door bangs open and MILLIE barges in.

Where does Millie come from? Not in any character backstory sense -- how'd this character suddenly become Millie? We've been calling her Millicent for the last three or four weeks. No matter -- once I start writing, I write straight ahead in two to three hour stretches, pausing to check the breakdown or refill my coffee. So Millie barges past Elmer, barges into the empty studio, starts barking into the empty air ...

And suddenly here are some words on the paper for Director Keith. And the camera has followed Millie into the studio to show some camera guys lolling about, and here are some words for them as well. And here's how this show is going to work, and the words start writing themselves bit after bit, and Barb looks over my shoulder at the draft and starts reading the written words out loud and adding more words and what-ifs, and this show is going to work because now we know what this show is about:

Millie is Teevee Talent. There is no backstory -- she exists only as a Teevee Image. Her frame of reference is a) her teevee show and b) herself. She blows into the real world of the real teevee studio, surrounded by real people, who have to deal with real things. Millie does not deal with any reality, nothing that refers to the real world except as it is revealed on television, she is not real, she is a teevee character who only knows teevee things. The teevee studio guys, and in particular Director Keith, are the audience's avatar: they don't have the luxury of Millie's self-contained and self-referential foolishness. Their goal is to get through the show without having to deal with Millie, the movie, or the show falling down.

And the show takes shape: Millie does this, Millie does that, Millie gives out misinformation, trashes movie, station, crew; misrepresents the scene in progress -- we time out a bit where we'll matte her into a scene to argue with a character, never mind that the guys say it can't be done, if it's in the script then we'll have to find some way to do it; blows off the movie entirely in Ketchup Theatre; the set falls down; Millie garbles the outro, which will be a Preview of Coming Attractions; Millie proclaims the entire evening a success, to the dismay of the studio guys. By midnight Sunday we've got a draft script; Monday night we read it back to each other, marking rewrites that range from tightening and tweaking to tossing pages out and putting in something new; Tuesday night we rewrite front-to-back, print out two copies, and insert them into two envelopes -- one for Bill, the other for Keith. I drop the envelopes off at WLEX during lunch Wednesday, and when we get home Wednesday night there's a message on the answering machine from Bill: he likes it, has a couple of notes that would simplify production, and approves it for broadcast with the revisions. He suggests that we arrive at the studio a little after 11 Saturday. No writer's credit, of course; but as long as it's kept loose it will look ad-libbed, and that's what the audience wants.

We are not going to argue: it's showtime, folks.

In which we get the Final Pieces, and make a Trial Fitting

2009-03-05T16:22:00.000-08:00

All in all, as we motor over to WLEX, we're feeling pretty good about the upcoming studio session. Costume works, makeup works, set folks are feeling good, there's a character starting to emerge, got a couple of fixed bits to build the rest of the show around, Bob n Nathan are in the car and everyboy's laffin n jivin n having a Good Time as we pull into the parking lot, troop up the steps to the night entrance

And we can't come in.

Seems that no one let Elmer the night guard (okay, I don't remember his name after all this time, but I always thought of him as an Elmer) know that we were expected. Therefore we aren't on his list. And if you're not on the night list, You Shall Not Pass.

We are not going to get all diva about this. Well, some of us are thinking about getting all diva about this, but others of us who have some experience with rent-a-guards know that about all a rent-a-guard is going to get for a post order is "show up here at 1800 hours, go home at 0600 hours, don't fall asleep". So if we aren't on the night list, one certain n universal truth is it's not Elmer's fault.

So after a huddle, we decide that the Cute One is the best positioned to smile, bat eyelashes and ask if perhaps he might check with Mr. Bill and see if we are expected? Nathan proposes a quick round of Rock Paper Scissors to determine who the Cute One is, but Barb's beat him to it and is charming Elmer. I don't know how she does this, and honor her for it; I can spend a week in Baltimore without any Charm City lint rubbing off on me. It doesn't take long for Barb to convince Elmer to check his sign-out sheet and by gum Mr. Bill still is on property but he's not answering his phone there. One of us manages to wonder if perhaps he could be paged? and by gum he can be and by gum if Bill doesn't bust out all over from the studio profusely apologizing for the mixup, secretary was supposed to leave word, this isn't the way he hoped to get started tonight, well no harm done, glad to see that Security's doing their job (Elmer very proud with this last one), and if I'm not very much mistaken that there studio door is only about fifteen or twenty feet behind that there Elmer. Anyway, after establishing that Bob is here to apply makeup only at no additional charge to Bill, Barb Bob n Bill are off to find some privacy for changing and makeup and Nathan and I step into El Casa de Monstrepiece.

It's cold. And it's not just the AC, which is cranked down to meatlocker mode ("It's the lights, you know. They're very hot," Bill explains. "Ah," I respond). The studio guys are on the floor, watching us, and I would not characterize this first meeting as friendly.

We came to find out later why, when we were all happy family. This evening, we are squarely in the category of Them, which is not the place to be on this fine September eve. I attempt to engage folk in What We're Going to Try Tonight; I would probably have had more luck talking to the weather map, except that we're not supposed to acknowledge The News Set, remember? So, let's look around and see what's what: there's the chair and it looks pretty good; there are a couple of the bookcase flats behind and doctored a little, good enough; there's the console teevee and it's a nasty piece of work, excellent; there's some interesting junque I didn't expect, very nice. There are the three pedestal cameras and hello! here's a minicam, didn't expect that. Got a triax cable dork hanging out the back of it that approximates a garden hose. Nathan's a photographer, he wants to try some lighting on the set; no chance, monkey boy, it is what it is. This seems, well, incomprehensible to Nathan: lights are meant to be moved around, but no one will have any of that. I mutter that we need to pick our moment, lost that one already, and then remark that the set looks pretty good.

One of the guys allows that they really didn't know where any of this stuff went, so they just put it together as best they could. I'm surprised: I left plans, elevations and a painting with Katie n Jerry that showed where everything goes. Katie n Jerry, oh well, that explains everything. Stepping in doodoo here, boss. Well, I just happen to have another set of the drawings here if you'd like a production copy -- but really, this looks better than what I thought and we're certainly happy to work with this. It's just a working rehearsal, right?

A little easing of tension. Oh, you're the Designer. I'm the Director. My name's Keith. Having a label is better than Not Having a lable. The rules are that it's Keith's studio, we don't touch anything, if we need anything we talk to Keith and he talks to the crew. Fair enough, we play by the house rules. The Designer thinks everything looks Fine so far, let's see what it looks like once Barbara gets on the set --

Who?

Barbara. My wife. She's the host.

Oh. You mean the Talent. I get the distinct impression that "Talent" is not a Nice Word in this Environment. And on cue, Barb sweeps in, Bob in tow, with cigarette in cigarette holder that has appeared from somewhere (Bob thought it would add a Certain Something, so he scored it on his own personal wherewithal during the week). Sudden paleness, and it's not because the guys are overwhelmed by star power: the Studio is a No Smoking Zone and if Bill sees her smoking there will be Hell to Pay. "Oh, he's a poophead," pronounces Millicent. Bob snickers, and so does one of the studio guys -- the biggest guy, and sure enough on cue Bill sweeps in, zeroes in on the cigarette and announces in the tone of voice that is normally used for very small children and very smiling foreigners that we probably didn't Know that the Studio is a No Smoking Zone and we might Hurt the Cameras if we Smoked. It's Nathan's turn to snicker, Millicent waves the holder and announces that of course it's not lit, darlings, so no cameras will be hurt in the taping of this show. I point out that if she's only going to use it as a prop, well then the Actor might need the Prop to Improvise, and we don't need to actually have a cigarette in the cigarette holder. Bill's not so sure; Whatever the Talent Wants comes from one of the guys, but I don't think there's the same edge that was there earlier; I for one am starting to get a little tired of whatever game we're in the middle of, but I remember the house rules and ask Keith: So, when do you think we can get started?

Studio Guys leap into action. The big guy, whose name is Doug, picks up the minicamera; seems the thing weighs around forty pounds, and he's the only one strong enough to carry it. One guy is eyeing Barb critically; seems he's audio and he can't figure out where to put the little lapel lavaliere mic, finally decides it looks like one of the necklace geegaws and puts it there. Two others plus Keith are also eyeing Barbara critically: huzza buzza huzza buzza bluescreen. I'm interested, come over and mention to Keith that I had some ideas for using the blue backing in bits ... Keith cuts me off: No way, there's too much fringe from the costume. Huh; seems to me a remarkably fringeless costume. Keith explains: the black lace trim plus the particular blues used in the foundation make it impossible to get a clean separation from the blue wall, either there will be a hard black line around the image, like a bad Japanese monster movie, or parts of the inserted image will bleed into the costume, or both. In any case, very bad and not gonna happen. Well, there goes about half of what we could have done. Nathan's turn to sidle over and murmur Pick your battles; I'm sussing out the battlefield when big Doug says, "Oh, I don't know, Keith; I've got a couple of ideas. Let's try it." They go off to consult.

Fussing ends; Bill, Keith, and a couple of others retreat to the control room, the rest disport themselves behind cameras except for a young woman who announces Clear the set, Talent on set. And counts down, Three -- two -- one -- and -- Action.

Barb/Millicent sits there. Nothing.

There's an audible snap from the little speaker, and then Keith's voice: We called action! Barb: So? What, no warmup, no warning, no preparation for me? Just -- act? It doesn't work like that, I need a couple of minutes. Keith explains: Basically his production clock is governed by his needs for prepping the broadcast; they assume that the Talent is doing whatever he/she needs to do while they're doing whatever they need to do. As far as they're concerned, if a light doesn't blow up, a microphone buzz, or a camera fall down they're good. If the set or the Talent falls down, that's not their problem. The exchange is professional, no diva tude, just tell us what the rules are and we'll cope; I'm thinking simultaneously This is not going to go well and Hmm. That little exchange is interesting. We could use that. And If the set falls down, that's not their problem. Well, it wouldn't take much to knock the set down ...

We're rolling tape for about an hour. In the first few minutes, what we were trying to tell Bill all along became obvious: Barb, and very likely no trained actorperson, cannot be spontaneously zany on her own without interacting with someone or something. The little toys and greebly set things help; Nathan and I start handing things to her, and Bob gets into the act as well, and gradually the character starts to emerge. At one point Millicent gets up and starts to move around, and Doug follows her; his camera goes up on the floor monitor, and he's got a pretty good eye, he's finding some interesting compositions. Millicent heads for the News Set, Bill comes on over the talkback system Remember -- don't go on the News Set, Millicent heads to the control room window and makes a face at everyone. The floor guys laugh audibly. Keith calls a wrap, asks how long it will take Barb to clean up, and Bill calls a meeting in the conference room. Off go Barb n Bob to clean up, off goes the set to the rear storage area, off go we all to said conference room.

Bill is not happy with the evening. It wasn't zany enough. Before we can speak, Keith says he thought after we got going he got some good stuff. Camera guy Doug and audio guy Jeff both opine that they thought whatever problems were not insurmountable, and they had some fixes. Allies. This is a Good Thing. Barb said that she's not entirely comfortable with being completely on her own, she felt better when she could talk to people and interact with people. Bill allows as to how that was, well he wouldn't exactly say Good but ...

Pick your battles. I'm in. I allow, and probably descend into Intense Steve mode, that this was a Rehearsal, and Rehearsals are supposed to disclose what works and what doesn't. It seemed to me watching the monitor that we got more good out of the interaction between Barb and the crew; maybe we could play this. Maybe we can hit the spontaneity that WLEX has seen all along (looking at Bill) by playing off of Millicent's ill fit with the teevee professionals. Maybe what we have for the first show or two is a Bad Teevee Show, where everything goes wrong because the Talent doesn't cooperate. Maybe the Crew tries to direct her and she won't take direction.

Keith jumps in. That's all well and good, but he's going to be too busy directing and his crew are going to be too busy crewing to have time to Act. And they wouldn't know what to say or do, anyway.

Doug and Jeff: But it's not like there's anywhere she can go. If it's limited, and we knew what's coming ...

Time to break through the defensive line: If there's a rundown, or a script, at least for the first few weeks, that breaks down what's going to happen in the scene -- and we run through it a couple of times -- and we keep it simple, so that nobody who's got a "part" would have to "do" anything beyond what they would already do -- nobody has to memorize lines or learn blocking, just do what they would be doing, the only difference is that we'd see them doing it.

Bill: No script! No script!

Keith: You know, a script would make it a lot easier for us.

Steve: It's not for the run of the show. It's just for the first few weeks, to settle everything down and establish the direction. We all have real jobs with real commitments, I don't have time to do this beyond October anyway. (To Bill) We all want this show to succeed, right? At least for thirteen weeks. Tonight was good, we all know what we need to do now. And we all know we've got a Show, we've just got to work some kinks out. That's what we do, we're all professionals here.

Bill allows that he was seeing some Showlike stuff after everything started to sync, sorta kinda. So he sets some rules: He wants advance script approval; we'll go with script for four weeks only, but no credit; we'll have a debriefing after every show where he'll give us notes; and if it doesn't shape up after four weeks, we'll go to the Old School format.

We can do this.

Let's wrap up; let's talk about the opening. Keith wants to do a real opening sequence, I like the idea of a cold opening. Keith really wants to do a title sequence, I like the idea for the first few weeks of viewers being supremely puzzled by what they're watching. We go back and forth, and realize that we don't have enough material for an opening sequence anyway, so we'll table this for a few weeks while Keith thinks through what he would put together; fair enough. Bob doesn't like the way the makeup looked on camera, it looked too much like street makeup; he's going to push it a little. Bill doesn't want anything too weird, somebody chimes in with How can you be too weird with a monster movie show? Keith wants to know what our theme music will be. Theme music? We'll get back to you. A couple of other housekeeping things, and we're done.

Keith comes up after the meeting, hands me a videocassette: it's our first movie, he thought we might need it. Well, thank you Keith, this will be very helpful indeed. He tells me there are seven positions in it; say what? The crack sales team has sold seven commercial breaks, and he hasn't figured out exactly where they're going to go. I ask if I can indicate where they could go in the script; he'll take it under advisement; I say the only reason is that we might want to tie certain script bits to certain scenes in the movie; Keith say oh, I see, okay, if you do that we could work with it but I have to know by Wednesday -- we're going to format the movie on Thursday.

I tell him I hope that we didn't offend him or get off to a bad start tonight; he and his people are professionals and we're not about to tell him their jobs. Keith say he had heard from "some people" that we were Difficult to work with, but after we got going that didn't seem to be the case so he wasn't worried. I ask if the minicam would be part of the regular camera complement; Keith not too sure about that, it was assigned to the news truck usually, had to put in a reservation for it, can't really say if it would be available ... I say I have an idea for the opening: what if we recap what actually happened tonight? what if Millicent is locked out of the building because no one knows she's coming? And she starts in a blank studio, rags on people, starts the movie in a huff, and pieces of set come in through the whole show and they're not right, upside down, doesn't work, fall over, whatever? Doug is with us, he likes it: they could light the hallway, do some location shooting, it would be fun. Keith doesn't know, I press on: we could have the same interaction with Elmer, it would be fun. Keith say: Elmer would never do it. Doug say: He would, it'd be fun. I say: If Elmer agrees to do it, would you try to get the camera? Keith make up his mind: If Elmer agrees to do it, he'll do it.

We collect Barb Bob n Nathan, and all of us head for the parking lot: the guys have to get ready for the 9:30 "Details at Eleven" news cut-in into the network programming. Elmer's all smiles, Well didja do your little show? Sorry about th' mixup there when ya came in. We're all smiles, Yeah it went pretty well, don't ya think Keith? Oh, by the way, we were wondering ... ya know, it really was pretty funny that we couldn't get in. We were thinking ... would you mind ... if we did that for the actual show? Barb would come up to the door in costume, she'd try to get it, you'd say she's not on the list, she'd just push right past and go into the studio? It'd just be a real quick thing, and if you're not comfortable with it that's okay ...

Elmer thinks it over, and allows as to how if it was just the one time, and he didn't have to get all make up n such, he'd probly do it.

I look at Keith. Keith smiles. Doug say, Told ya. This could be fun.

In which it starts to Come Together

2009-02-27T17:48:00.000-08:00

Today is Saturday, and if it's Saturday then Missy must be coming over to the house for a trial costume fitting. And along with Missy is her friend, Bob. Bob is a painter who also does makeup and hair, and Bob is here to design the Millicent Makeup. Bob has the requisite makeup kit, wig block and wig, and is busily working on the wig while Missy and Barb fuss with the costume. Turns out that the first fitup is really pretty close -- doesn't need much alteration, and Missy decides she'll just finish it off here in the living room.

Saturday also probably brings Nathan over. Nathan comes into town every weekend, and often swings by to see if we're doing anything Interesting. Parading around in Ghastly garb certainly qualifies as Interesting in Nathan's book, so we spill the project beans, at least the ones that have directly to do with the putative show itself. This is the mostInteresting thing Nathan has heard all day, and Barb starts warming up some walks and voices in various pieces of costume. Bob has made some big ol' hair and is trying out some makeup ideas. Nathan and I proffer useless suggestions, Barb dismisses most out of hand in an Interesting voice. Something's coming together here.

Saturday also brings the mail, which today includes a letter from WLEX that does not include a contract but does include the list of movies. I pride myself on knowing more than a little pottytinkle about monster movies good bad and insipid; but I haven't heard of half of the movies on the list. More to the point, neither apparently has the compiler of the Psychotronic Encyclopedia. Fortunately, he has heard of at least the first one, an Italian opus titled The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave. I read the synopsis to assorted giggles, switching back and forth from Wally Balloo through Leonard Plinth-Garnell voices to Val-speak, and I remember a bit that David Copperfield pulled at the Opera House in the spring. On the first night of the run, some fashionable Lexingtoons came in about ten minutes late to their very-near front row seats. Said Copperfield (a nice guy offstage) had already done his big opening and was doing some card tricks; he stopped, sat down on the edge of the stage and conversationally said, "Well, we played some music and then I came out and there was applause and I did this disappearing trick and it was pretty cool and then I came in from the back and everybody clapped and then we changed the lights and brought this out and I did a couple of card tricks and then you guys came in and that's where we are. Are we good? we're all caught up? Okay, let's get back to the show." Huh, sez I. That could be a running bit: Barb does a recap of the movie to date, and the movie is so ridiculous that if she just describes what you've seen you can't help but make people laugh. So every week she catches people up and we call it ... Ketchup Theatre.

And you can build a little stage with a curtain and everything just for Ketchup Theatre, sez either Nathan or Bob. I'm not too happy about this You stuff, because that's what it's going to be -- no more building from WLEX ... but this could be something real simple, like a Punch and Judy set, just some plywood and a couple of flippers to stand it up, and a paint job; we could knock this out tomorrow and be done with it.

Okey dokie, Barb -- think we could do this as a running bit? Plug it in after the first hour of movie or so, for the people changing channels?

"Daaaahling, that would be maaaaaahvlus!" This with the first fitting of the wig. Where'd that voice come from? "Dunno, but it feels right." It does, at that.

Missy is Done. Bob steps back to admire his handiwork. Barb is definitely obscured, and the makeup is definitely not going to be easy for her to put on by herself; eventually, yes but not right away. So, Bob ... doing anything Thursday night? Wanna come over to the teevee station and do the makeup? We'll probably have to make some changes anyway once we see it on teevee. Bob's up for it, especially after we throw in dinner. Nathan wants to come, too -- this looks like it could be fun. Sure, why not? We could use some moral support.

In which a Bridge is Built, and JD begins Hoovering in the Background

2009-02-26T10:38:00.000-08:00

Predictably enough, Jerry and Katie the WLEX Designers, are politely unimpressed. The general response seems to be why would anybody spend so much time elegantly drafting crap?

Some design and shop chitchat starts to uncover a mystery wrapped within a riddle, and no doubt if we dig a little deeper we'll unearth an enigma: Seems the word is out around WLEX that We are Troublesome Artists; but there is also counterword that We're OK, Just a Little Weird. Huh: so far as we know, we've only had dealings with two people from WLEX -- Bill, and long before Bill the remote video guys recording The Nutcracker at the Opera House. I thought the tapings went pretty well -- they were pros, had to deal with a show that was staged and lit for people in the audience and not teevee cameras and did not order up tons of additional light for broadcast but fixed things electronically -- and I dropped the names I remembered. No longer with, oh well, then where are these Outed Words coming from, anyway?

Well, it would seem that Bill's nose is out of joint (oh, well), but our hidden champion is JD.

Excuse me? JD? About 40, about my height, from St. Louis?

Yeah. You know him?

Um, yeah. JD was one of three Vice President of Keeping the Students in Line during my college years, who accepted the position the year that said students decided to host their own college revolution, as seen on teevee. JD, along with Julius Hunter and Ed Rollins, were tasked to, um, manage the revolution somehow. Double-plus unfun times. JD was also the official advisor to the campus filmmaking club, where he rode herd on our assorted zany artsy-fartsy hi-jinx; and while the lot of us had vey different tastes, he never overrode anybody's proposal as long as the proposal showed a semblance of structure and budget. He saved his fire for the screenings, where he would rip the product, but only if you went off the approved plan. His critique was in essence What you put up on the screen is your business; your production values are my business. I expect to be able to see what you photographed, hear what you recorded, and follow what you edited. Beyond that, you're on your own.

A while ago. So he's here now, huh?

Katie n Jerry allow that he is indeed, as a recently hired Vice President in Charge of Just About Everything, including Bill; and that while the company jury was still out on him he seemed to know his stuff, and he thinks you probably know what you're doing so we should humor you.

Interesting. So ... you gonna humor me with this set?

Oh, sure. We see what you want. It's ... interesting. Could be fun. Don't see how we can get it done for your taping. And you know, we don't have a teevee or a chair you can use.

I just happen to have a solution for those items that won't cost you anything except some time. Interested? Do you have a truck, or can you get a truck? Why don't you drive around the neighborhood south of Loudon Avenue late Sunday afternoon. People are going to be putting their trash out for Monday morning. Just drive around, and pick up the nastiest, rattiest looking chair and console teevee you find on the curb. Pick up anything else that looks interesting, while you're at it. We only need the chair and the teevee for Thursday night. Anything else you can give me is gravy.

Katie n Jerry look at me, and I see the beginnings of smiles at the corners of their mouths. Katie speaks for Jerry: "That ... would be fun. We can do that."

Hump cleared here, boss. We establish that the sketch should be used as a concept drawing, not a final plan. They suggest some adjusts -- some are minor, some aren't; and I tell them to do whatever they think is right. I tell them again that I'd rather have a piece finished for show than rushed for rehearsal. They say they think they can get the center part completely ready for Thursday, tweaks n all; if they think of anything else, they'll call me. I say if you think of anything else, just do it and surprise us.

In which Lemons are Squeezed

2009-02-24T10:52:00.000-08:00

Let's put some marks on the paper and zero in on this environment:

We'll need an entrance/exit, someplace that can serve for standup bits, a landing place for solo spots, and something that can serve for twosomes. And that blue backing is part of the mix, so we need access to it as well.

A comfortable path of travel is audience left to audience right. So we'll reverse that. That would put the entrance in the extreme right location, which sites it near the real door to the studio. Maybe we can use that at some point.

There are three lighting hotspots, so we'll have to cheat either the standup bit space or the duo space. Don't know how we might use the duo space, so we should put something there as a placeholder -- but let's not do full design development just yet; park a couple of the nondescript backings there and leave it for now. Let's focus on what we know we'll need.

Might as well play off the Masterpiece Theatre/Alaistair Cooke association, so the host solo spot/landing place will be in the vacuformed library. And we could use a chair; but not a comfy library chair; we want the nastiest, rattiest chair we can find, and I know how we'll get that for free. And we're not "reading great books", but "watching dumb movies", so we could use a teevee. Might be cool if the teevee was fed program that we can control; should just need a piece of coax and an adaptor, but this is a building full of teevee engineers -- they can figure that part out.

If we go with the Wee Concept, everything talks or potentially talks. But we don't have puppeteers to work these things. But we can cut portholes into the flats, and we can hand stuff through the flats -- thank you, Thing. We can also hang sleeves with gloves, and various limbs, from parts of the set -- doesn't make any sense, but we can reach in from the back and manipulate them live. It would be funny to have these things hanging there doing nothing in establishing shots, and then they suddenly start moving during a bit.

We've got a fake entry piece, so we'll put that near the real door; it might be interesting to show Barb coming through the real door, then coming through the set entry.

It all needs layers upon layers of detachable Stuff, but most of the detachable Stuff needs to be semi-permanently affixed; according to Da Rules, we don't have time to attach anything on site, the whole thing needs to be plopped in place in fifteen minutes or less. So maybe we start with one layer stapled on, and add Stuff throughout the run. That will buy time to solve the detachable problem. It would be cool to have the set like a Louise Nevelson piece, just a bunch of shadowboxes full of "toys"; but we don't have time or money for that. Yet.

That's it. Layers of junk. Some loose, some fixed. Slash some color across it that offsets the costume colors -- maybe find some kids and turn them loose with spray paint. Let's just draw this up to scale, color it, and we'll take it in to WLEX's scene designers tomorrow. It will be interesting to see what they think.

In which we see the Future Site of Our New Home

2009-02-23T10:19:00.000-08:00

We pick up messages While We Were Out: Missy's ready to come over and show a costume design. We're pumped, our minds awhirl with th' cosmic possibilities of it all, come on down! Missy shows us a sketch that's a riot of big hair, neon blues and greens, layered with blacks and topped off with a pink wifebeater emblazoned with the word Arrgh! What's that about, Missy? "I don't know, it just looks cool." Doesn't look like anything we imagined, even during the thousands of miles of brainstorming; doesn't look like anything we would imagine; doesn't look like anything we could imagine.

We love it. Alls we gots to do is run it past WLEX, just to make sure they don't have heartburn with it.

Bill hates it. It's one thing to hear someone talking about a monster movie teevee show that isn't going to look or be like the monster movie teevee show you imagined and sold to your Higher Authority; it's quite another thing to hold in your hands incontrovertible evidence that said teevee show will never, cannot possibly ever look or be like the show you imagined and sold to your Higher Authority. We say all the words -- new, spontaneous, ad-lib, freewheeling, unique -- the response is, "Well, if this is what you want/if you think you can make your show work/I hope you know what you're doing." Lotta second person impersonal pronouns there, few to none first person plural pronouns; this somehow isn't sounding much like a Notice to Proceed, much less a Ringing Endorsement of Creativity, but we press on: so, can we get some advance money released for costume materials? The crickets return in full chorus, then Bill agrees to get a check cut. While we wait, he takes me to WLEX's scene dock, which is in WLEX's studio.

WLEX at this time is a smallish cluster of connected buildings off Russell Cave Road, on the fringe of an industrial park. There's a main front entrance that's open during business hours; the reception area is a circa-70s living room, with a big console teevee that shows the broadcast feed as well as studio feeds. There's a long central hall that runs lengthwise through the main building; going down the hall one way takes you past the management offices and conference room to the news operation, going down the hall the other way takes you past the production offices and carrells to the studios and support areas, and then past the guard post out to the parking lot. There's one studio; it's about twenty-five feet wide by sixty-ish feet deep, maybe a twelve foot ceiling. The News Set takes up most of the rear of the studio: a big desk with three or four seating pods, monitors and blue panels behind the main desk; a map of the US on the wall to camera left, with magnetic letters and little weather symbols, a large-scale map of Kentucky to the left of the US map. A plate glass window: the control room. There's a wall-mounted speaker box above the window, with a standard 8" speaker in it; what's that? Three pedestal cameras, some pointed at the news set, others pointed at the not-news set: a shower-curtain cyc that covers the short wall, stopping short of about twelve feet of drywall painted blue. Ah, this must be the famous Chroma-Key backing I heard so much about. But I thought that a proper Chroma-Key Backing consisted of a trade-secret fabric of a certain Pantone blue. You can see the drywall seams on this bad boy; what's up with that? There's a cluster of lights over the News Set, and maybe a dozen or so lights pointed toward the Not-News Set.

Bill turns the lights on for the Not-News Set: "This is where you'll do your show." He explains the studio rules: your set can't be set up during news, because it would distract the news anchors; you can't move or touch the lights, which have to be left as is for the Sunday morning public affairs show; you get the three studio cameras, that's it, and oh by the way they don't move during show; your set has to be carried out, set up and lit in fifteen minutes, because the crew doesn't get off lunch break until 12:30, and you're live on the air at 1 so you'll probably need a few minutes to go over the opening of the show with the crew, but you can't talk to them while they're doing the news or eating lunch. And you can't use the blue wall, because it'll take too much time to set up a shot and you won't have the time.

I'm not sensing that there's a lot of support for this here show, logistical or otherwise. But I can ignore warning signals with the best of 'em, so I pace off the available space, identify where the lights are focused -- three hot areas, including the Blue Wall, roughly equidistant from each other and the shower curtain; and ask to see the scene dock.

The scene dock is behind the News Set; it's about eight feet square, at best. It's really a sound lock between the news set and a kitchen that appears disused: seems this was the breakroom until fairly recently, and nobody's formally claimed this area yet. There is a very small, very random collection of odds and ends, a trunk, and a dozen or so flats of some kind or other, including some badly painted vacuformed panels that purport to be a library. Take some measurements, take some notes; Bill observes that there's not much to work with.

"We can make this work." Damned if I know how, but we can.

"Today is Wednesday; can I have a scene design for the staff designers by, oh, Friday afternoon? We've budgeted the weekend to build your set."

Forget about ordering anything; forget about buying anything, for that matter. And I'm not hearing tools, or smelling sawdust or paint, or detecting anything that might suggest that there's a carpenter or painter, or for that matter another live human being lurking about. When in doubt, give the benefit of the doubt:

"We can make this work."

In which Szygny is Attained

2009-02-22T06:14:00.000-08:00

On the road o discovery, many conversations led to:

Millicent. A Millicent is formidable. A Millicent is always right. A Millicent knows the world is divided into Our Kind and Not Our Kind, Dear. A Millicent's Kind is limited to a small circle of perhaps one. Not Our Kind persons' rightful job is to serve Our Kind, and be quick about it.

Millicent explains things to people who are too dull to grasp the true meaning of it all, with patrician grace and marginally clenched teeth.

Millicent is not Zany. Don't know how we're going to resolve this, but Millicents are not Zany. Marthas are Zany. Maybe the Zany stuff goes on around Millicent, and she doesn't acknowledge it.

Millicent is above it all. Millicent is not connected to the movie. Millicent is not connected to the show. There's tension between Millicent and everything around her, which Millicent controls by explaining away.

This seems to be leading us to lots of words, but not much action: how is Millicent going to become an Actor (in the sense of doing things that shape and direct things, as opposed to passing judgment on what happens)?

We puzzle on this through two short stops prior to a few days in Boston. Rambles in Boylston take us into various funky stores that are completely self-contained and disconnected: a bookstore blaring Little Richard, where we pick up a Psychotronic Encyclopedia, a joke shop where we pick up a bagful of Cheap Laffs, a toy shop where we pick up another bagful of windup toys and noisy clattering things. Somehow, stuff is going to have to run amok throughout this show and Millicent is going to approve of it. Control it? Mmmmmmaybe -- a cool n collected Presence Overseeing It All, and the Complicated Plans Themselves provide the heat for the show.

We have tickets for Forbidden Broadway; it's the only live show in town, and while it's not what we would prefer (zany actors making fun of serious thee-ayter), it's the only live show in town. We're seated at a table with Cindy and the other Steve, from Minneapolis. They want to know everything about everything, as well as passing opinions on everything about everything. For our part, we're tired of working The Millicent Problem and let go of it for the night. And it would seem that zany actors making fun of serious thee-ayter by going for the soft pompous underbellies that only insiders know about ... that's interesting. It's easy to make fun of Les Miz. It's smart to make fun of Les Miz by singing about how easy it is to manipulate an audience into cheering by taking a bunch of Noble College Stoonts singing this particular progression of notes, putting this particular group of types here and that particular group of types there, moving impossibly heavy scenic stuff this way n that, and then waving a flag -- a red flag, mind you -- to top it all. And here's a table full of people who get the joke upon joke upon joke.

Post show, we're talking about this n that, what they do, what we do, where we're all going in life, comfortable conversation, and Barb talks about acting. The other Steve n Cindy are fascinated by this -- she's an attorney, he's an engineer -- and it leads naturally to what are you doing next? They think it's the best that she's doing a teevee monster movie show next, and they have all kinds of ideas about things that they wished monster movie shows did. We're listening, letting it wash over us mostly because they're on a roll and we couldn't get a word in edgewise anyway, and the conversation turns to Count Floyd, Joe Flaherty's SCTV monster movie host. Count Floyd's shtick is that he's trying to sell scary movies that he knows aren't scary, and he grows more and more desparate in trying to drum up enthusiasm from a cold audience. So we're watching a character who knows that his show is collapsing around him and can't do anything to stop it because the movie is a fixed commodity; and our Algonquin Table begins deconstructing the character. It doesn't work as an ongoing bit because panic is not inherently empathic: we're laughing at the character, and after the third go-round or so who cares? But then why does Wile E. Coyote work and Count Floyd doesn't? Aren't they the same thing? No, because Wile E. Coyote is a Genius who is bound and determined to outsmart calamity and won't accept that calamity is a Super-Genius.

And then somebody says, What if the host knows how bad the movies are and spends the whole program working against the movie? What if the host knows how the whole thing is supposed to work -- the movie, teevee, everything -- and goes through the whole program undercutting everything so that it doesn't work?

In which we arrange for Haute Couture

2009-02-21T10:23:00.000-08:00

Barb, are you okay with all of this?

As long as we don't get sidetracked, it could be fun. As long as this little adventure doesn't become fulltime, doesn't replace her real acting, doesn't take time away from the ubergoal of Getting Out, as long as it's fun -- yes, let's do it.

Okay, first things first: ultimately, it's all going to fall on you to carry it off; what do you need?

Barb sees improv acting as an exercise best kept in a closed (classroom, rehearsal) environment, not as public performance in and of itself. Improv is a tool to unblock what the person would be inclined to do; as performance, she thinks it's about as interesting as watching a concert pianist play scales. She is not happy with the emphasis on improv as the entirety of the show, but sees some possibility of changing Bill's mind if we can show him something that looks like what he thinks improv is, but is better. Meanwhile, we have to at least try to deliver an apparently improvised show. Since her improv exercises consist of reacting to changing stimuli, she needs a lot of changable stimuli: lots of color, lots of things to handle and play with, lots of stuff all over the place, lots of cues where you wouldn't normally find cues.

Clutter; color; objects everywhere. Things that make noise when they're handled. Doesn't sound like a black costume in a gray set to me. We start talking about improvised teevee: my frame of reference is Ernie Kovacs and Jonathan Winters, she doesn't go back that far, let's talk about now and not twenty years ago. So who's doing improv teevee now?

Well, the big three in summer 1985 is SNL (meh), SCTV and Pee Wee Herman. SNL really doesn't count; it started out as a roughly equal partnership between the Second City actors and the National Lampoon writers, but success has gone to everybody's heads: the current crop of writers is content with cheap shots and laff lines, and the current crop of actors is content with funny voices and mugging. SCTV is a lot cleverer, almost too clever: it maintains its internal consistency at the expense of pulling off a complete show, so individual pieces of any given show are always funnier than the whole show. What's Pee Wee doing in there?

The Pee Wee Herman Show started life as an improvisatory goof on 50s local kids teevee shows by the LA comedy troupe The Groundlings, one of whom eventually finds fame n fortune as (wait for it) Elvira. It found its audience among the LA hipsters (big surprise there), morphed into a running midnight show that was eventually taped by HBO and offered up as part of its occasional comedy specials. This yielded Mr. Wee a national audience of some size, which rationalized a movie or two, which somehow convinced CBS to offer Mr. Wee a series deal -- as a real kid's teevee show.

I am convinced that when future historians t-t-t-talk about my g-g-g-g-generation, their entire commentary will be reduced to four words: What Were They Thinking? And in retrospect, what was a no doubt hip n moustacio'd CBS programming exec thinking in slotting Mr. Wee into Saturday morning kidland? But there he was, offering the strangest looking n sounding half hour broadcast outside of the Soviet Union. And from a visual standpoint, everything about Mr. Wee's environment and cast was the answer to an improviser's fervent prayers: everything moved, talked, and appeared strangely enough to steer any actor straight to terra incognita.

If we wanted to do something like with the tools available in the-then world o Lexington visual n performing arts, bon chance amigos. Everybody knew everybody else, and had known everybody else forever; it was very difficult for anybody to do anything new, because everybody knew how the other person would react. Generally speaking, nobody was coming in to Lexington with new ideas: not into a comfortable middle class marketplace where conflict was defined as the Sacred Knights of Wildcat Basketball predictably whaling the poop out of their hapless opponents (or else). This was why we were seeking escape, not settling in and accepting a vaguely comfortable fate.

But in the previous year, the ballet company had imported a modern dance troupe from Seattle for a year's residency, no doubt to bring in someone doing something different to recharge its own work. As far as said troupe's impact on the ballet's wprk went, the experiment failed miserably: whatever the merits of the troupe were, discipline and respectful cooperation weren't part of the package, so the performances flamed out publicly and spectacularly. But the troupe brought Missy n John with them as their production staff, and they were another story entirely.

Missy n John knew their craft, delivered what they promised (on time and on budget), and their stuff worked mechanically and visually. Missy was the costumer, John the all-other-production-stufferer. Being Left Coasties, they lived and breathed the Left Coasty art world, specifically the stuff coalescing as Grunge -- their stuff could never have been mistaken for Kentucky stuff. It was authentic, and from the stagecraft perspective it was well-made: it held up to the stresses of dancing in, around and on it. We could find people who could imitate this kind of stuff (we could do that ourselves if we had to), but the result would be a forgery: as long as you didn't look too close it would do. But we were going to depend on set n costume for thirteen weeks of inspiration. So if we needed something outre, then it stood to reason that we needed to go to the best people for outre we knew. Who, fortunately, had elected to pitch their tents in Lexington for another year -- maybe something having to do with the lack of year-round rain -- and see what happens. We do these things when we are Young.

So I called Missy, and after swearing her to secrecy described the project in general: late night teevee, improv, thirteen weeks, monster movies, hostess carries show, yada yada needs costume and set, modest to indifferent money at best but big honkin' credit at the end of each show (playing two ends against the middle here, boss), interested?

Missy was polite, they had lined up work with UK's theatre department that started up with the fall semester, felt that they had to impress the new bosses first n foremost, maybe someone else might be interested?

Well, someone else might be interested but you all are uniquely qualified to pull this off because you're ... well, you. Everybody else is ... not you. We really think that you're the only people with the vision we need to make the project work.

Flattery, even sincere and heartfelt, gets us somewhere. But this is a monster movie show. Anybody can put Barb in a black gown with a hoodie and call her Elvira.

Yabbut, we weren't exactly thinking Elvira. We were thinking more Pee Wee Herman.

A pause. A good costumer has to have a good sense of humor. I knew Missy was good. Her reply, as best as I remember it, went something like this:

"A Pee Wee Herman monster movie show? Bwah-ha-ha-ha!" And she's in for the costume.

It's a blank piece of paper, Missy: give us something Barb can work with and key off of. Our needs are: she's got to be mostly unrecognizable in the outfit, she's got to be able to get into it without a dresser, wardrobe and makeup can't take any more than an hour, she's got to be able to move in it, she's got to be able to play the costume, it's got to be machine washablem, it's got to hold up for at least thirteen weeks without maintenance. Other than that, go for it. Think John is interested in the set?

Well, that's John's business; and as it turned out John wasn't that interested in the set. His first assignment for UK was producing shop drawings and getting its shop ready for the year's construction; this being before CAD, shop drawings were still handmade, which takes hours; and the shop ... needed a lot of work: seems "maintenance" wasn't a high priority for his predecssor. He's not comfortable taking time away from a new paying job to take on any outside work; and he's not sure that the publicity would be career-enhancing vis-a-vis UK. But maybe he could touch up whatever we came up with.

I'll take .5 of the loaf. Besides, we've got to pull the set from stock units anyway; it will be easier to do that once we have the costume locked.

So we load the car and head east, secure in the knowledge that when we get back we'll know what Millicent looks like. Meanwhile, we've got hundreds of miles ahead of us and a lot to talk about. We've got three weeks to figure out who Millicent is.

In which the Deed is Done, Dirt Cheap

2009-02-18T09:55:00.000-08:00

Okay, so let's just all review what the expectations are; and pretend that we the putative Talent don't know nothin' about th' normal n customary expecations of teevee shows and teevee show folks, being but poor simple-minded theatre types:

The form of the show will be: an introduction to the movie, a certain number of internal bits or activities determined by the number of commercials sold each week, and a close. That mysterious internal number is going to probably be five, but it could be more; "less" would not be a Good Thing. We will all be in a Happy Place if each segment times out to two minutes, more or less; some could run to three minutes, but that should be the exception rather than the rule. Therefore, we are expected to deliver roughly twenty to twenty-five minutes of wacky improvised host antics weekly. The movies are ninety to a hundred minutes each; so if theyre chopped up into six equal pieces, there will be at least fifteen minutes to come up with the next wacky antic sequence. Plenty of time for a talented improviser to come up with something. We'll take that last under advisement, but we shall as the lawyers say so stipulate.

The show will be live. Audiences love live teevee; it's like watching Evel Knievel go over Niagra Falls in a barrel. The fun is knowing that he might not make it over to the other side. Not so sure we relish the thought of sleeping with the fishes in real time, as long as we're churning that metaphor, but we'll take that one under advisement, too.

WLEX is in for thirteen weeks, beginnning September 13. That will take the show through the all-important fall ratings sweep period. A show's market share is established by the ratings sweeps; the ratings share drives the prices that can be charged for commercial time on the show. The goal is to do better than the period is currently doing; any improvement is good. Improvement means we get to stay and play the next round; status quo or dare we say it decline means going home. Fair enough.

WLEX will pay for a costume, and will provide a set. We will arrange for the costume and will provide for reasonable maintenance of the costume. If we have suggestions or ideas for the set, WLEX will be glad to entertain them. The set will have to be produced from materials on hand, there is no budget for construction. This works.

The show will be broadcast from WLEX's studio facilities, using the available facilities and the existing studio crew. There will be no live remotes or field trips, no bringing in of preferred personnel. The standing news set is not to be touched, shown, hinted at or alluded to; this is entertainment, but news is News. We hear you. Wonder why this is being emphasized? Let's remember this for later.

WLEX will reimburse Barbara for her services as a performer. This will be on a contractor basis, with a single fee-for-service of fifty dollars per show as sole compensation. The engagement can be terminated at WLEX's sole discretion at any time. Okay, "contractor" implies that there will be a contract between Barbara and WLEX. Say, hoss, we'd like to review that there contract before we formally agree to anything. If we learned nothing else from adventures in Ruckus Arenus and the esteemed Headus Rattus therein, it's that a) the contract always favors the issuer and b) everything's theoretically negotiable, but only before you sign.

What about expenses? What is this word you use, "expenses"? We know nothing of such things. Well, there will be certain consumables such as makeup; and there will also be props and other consumable items from time to time. What is this new word you use, "props?" We know nothing of such things, also and additionally. Since the show is supposed to be improvised, that means that Barbara will need constant stimuli -- new things to use, react to, play with, all in the name of keeping the show fresh, interesting and how you say zany. We understand budgets; there is surely some money set aside for contingencies, so this can be a not-to-exceed figure and we're responsible for any overage. We'll have to run the numbers, but we can probably work something out. Score!

We'll all have a camera run-through in the studio Thursday evening, September 4. You will arrive with costume and makeup; the set may not be ready, that's on us and our input to the design process. Agreed. We'll try this approach you suggest. Based on the camera run through, you'll make whatever adjustments necessary to be show-ready September 13. And the crowd goes wild.

We'll send you the list of movies once confirmed. Are the dates confirmed for the movies? Only the first thirteen. Can we suggest some sequences of movies, or some air dates, for movies that don't have confirmed air dates? We'll be glad to consider your suggestions. Getting control of the content here, boss.

So, when can we expect to see the form of contract? Have a good vacation, come back with lots of good ideas, and we'll see you in a couple of weeks.

In retrospect, it would seem that our Chump Detectors probably should have been taken in for some serious alignment after this meeting. But that's only if you look at this as a business deal. As far as we were concerned, we won the most important point: this can be a monster movie show, a teevee show unlike anything else seen on sleepy ol' Lexington teevee. And it won't cost WLEX any more than what they were already willing to spend. We'll just de-onerous that there contract a little, flesh this thing out a little, and we're good to go.

But first, I have a couple of phone calls to make.

In which the Plot Thickens

2009-02-17T10:01:00.000-08:00

Okay, full disclosure. I wanted to do this more than Barb did; but she's the actor, the personable one, the fearless one, the friendly one who puts people at ease. I'm the intense scary guy who doesn't talk to people he doesn't know, who's compelled to be the smartest guy in the room. People watch Barb, she carries her plays. If she doesn't want to do this, it's not going to happen: there's no host and they can just run the movies. Somewhere around now I begin to see what this project could be -- dimly, dimly, but there's a Show somewhere in this. And right now, Bill's the only one with skin in this game -- whatever is going on in his hierarchy, he's the one who sold his management on going way beyond their Usual Suspect Comfort Zone to entrust a big-deal project to a complete unknown with no teevee track record. He's pushing back for a reason that makes sense to him, and it is his project. Let's think kindly of him in the Now, because if he hadn't taken the risk there'd be no You-Know-Who's You-Know-What, and let's pull back on the self-aggrandizement a point or two.

And this isn't exactly what happened. But something like this did, sort of.

We start trying to find some common ground. We agree that beyond the title, the character's name, and a slate of bad movies there's not much more to this thing. Bill's got the movie list; apparently movies are sold in packages, and he's deliberately set out to get the worst movies available. So the movies will be known to be, and will be sold as, the worst movies available. That's something we can work with. But a misspent lifetime watching bad movies teaches one that the irreducible truth about any given bad movie is that at some point the Guilty Pleasure of watching a Bad Movie wears off, and the moviegoer is stuck with said irreducible truth: this movie stinks, and my time is better spent watching paint dry. Most sensible people know this and deftly avoid the Bad Movie with the same grace used to avoid a person mumbling to himself while shuffling down a sidewalk. Very few people will intentionally seek out the Bad Movie; and those that do might hang around in a movie theatre to protect their investment of actual cash, but given a free movie on teevee with no upfront cash investment and the option of surfing away or going to bed (we are still talking about 1AM Sunday, right? About the time people start ... crashing?), you can't hold the audience for very long. So this show really is going to have to be held together by what the host says or does. The audience will come in for the opening of the movie, but will only stay around so long as they're interested in the host.

We're all good with this; so let's take it another step.

So you're at home, SNL has just blessedly gone off the air (sorry, we know there's nothing you can do about it, you've got what NBC gives you, but we used to watch it; it's just a collection of unfunny catch phrases that the audience laughs at reflexively, it loses momentum after Weekend Update, it closes with self-congratulatory weepiness and a slow blues, and the only reason people aren't turning the teevee off is because they're too tired to get up or they've lost the remote, one) -- aaaaaaaaaand then what? What if the next thing you see is like nothing you can watch on any other available channel? What if what you see and hear is so off the wall that you can't believe it? What if you're watching somebody or something so outrageous that you stick around to see if they dare to do it again?

Yeah, yeah, that's it. That's what we want.

See, the people who are going to tune in for the movie already know that the movie stinks. Once they confirm that it stinks, they can cross it off their Bucket List and move on. So we can't just give them EC Vault o Cheese puns, or dissert on the movie itself, or whatever -- that can be part of the mix, but not the whole thing. If the point is to nibble away at Channel 27, why not tive them something that they'll never see on Channel 27?

You're losing me, here.

The show stands alone from the movie it supports. Maybe it interacts with the movie, maybe it doesn't. But we know what the audience's expectations are, and we mess with those expectations. They're expecting Vampira, Elvira, Palmyra, whatever; they're expecting bats and cobwebs and crypts and dry ice. And that's what we're not going to do.

Okay, I get that. You're not going to do the show we want you to do. And I can see your thinking, and it's ... different. I'm not saying I agree with you, I'm not saying I disagree. So I know what you're not going to do. What are you going to do?

The storyteller wants desperately to have Barb break in with "Daaaaaahling!" But that didn't happen. Neither Millie, nor the show, burst forth fully formed.

We did come around to this, generally:

Let's try something different.
We can always go back to Bye-bye-ra.
We'll have something workable fleshed out when we get back from vacation.

Bill was good with that. Because he had scheduled studio time for a run-through the week after we got back. We could try this idea, see what happened, and if it didn't work well we'd have a week to put together a ... more traditional show.

In which we learn the significance of the B

2009-02-16T18:02:00.000-08:00

As expected, the phone did not ring; the mail did not arrive; and life did go on. Of course, we may have neglected to provide Bill with an address that he could mail to; but the whole proposition seemed so far-fetched, while the life stuff was a bit more pressing.

We were more and more becoming convicted that wherever Home was, it wasn't Lexington. But we had been in Lexington long enough to have run out of excuses for putting down roots: we were either going to live there or somewhere else. Barbara rightly insisted that we choose instead of drift. One thing was clear: there was no possibility of professional advancement for either of us, if that was important (and it was) -- the glass ceiling was a good six foot thick, and we could look forward to Windexing it at best. Barbara felt called to conservatory acting training, and so we made a deal: we'd both spend the next year working on getting out, whoever landed the better opportunity the other one would follow. Barb set about looking for graduate acting conservatories, I set about looking for buildings with management opportunities, and we planned a vacation road trip to scout out some possible areas. Itineraries were planned, Trip-Tiks assembled, reservations made.

Occasionally we'd tiptoe around That Bizarre Meeting: Did it really happen? Were they really serious? If we were to do this, what would we do? Would our credibility, such as it was, be forever shredded if we were known to be affiliated with (dare we say it) commercial entertainment (bwah ha ha ha)? Could this be the end of Rico -- shilling for hemmorhoid unguents? After a few weeks we decided that the ancient and noble theatre tradition of the "We'll call" blowoff had been invoked, and so we pronounced closure and prepared for a road trip o discovery.

A few days before we left, Barb said "You might want to listen to this message we got today." She punched up the answering machine, and lo it was Bill, just wondering if we had picked our character's name yet, since the station was about to issue a press release describing the show, the character, and the first episode's air date.

In the immortal words of a then-favorite Ruckus Arenus radio transmission: WTF? Over.

Which was the gist of my return of Bill's call the next day, during which we confirmed that neither we nor Bill were doing a particularly good job of saying what we meant, or listening to what the other person was saying. Both Barb and I had drawerfuls of proposed theatrework that went nowhere after the initial feelers; Bill assumed that since we didn't definitively say we were Out, and had in fact expressed some vague interest, then we must be In. In our experience, the producer or director (or directing producer) assembled the package and the team, championed the project, and kept the project moving forward; in Bill's experience, if you caught the pitch you ran with it. In any event, WLEX was committed to a September 13 air date; counting on his fingers and toes that was a little more than a month off, so we probably ought to have a character's name by now. So ... what was it? And why wasn't Barb returning the call, since they were really only interested in her?

Deep breath. Time to channel some Ruckus Arenus High Moral Tone: Barb was not aware that vague polite interest constituted binding legal commitment. Barb makes her career choices, as do I, and we support each other's choices. Barb's long-term career choices do not include Lexington at this time. Now that we understand that you are serious about this project, I will be glad to discuss this with her tonight, and We will get back to you with Our joint decision tomorrow. If We decide to go forward with this project, We will commit tomorrow; if not, at that time We will provide you with the names of performers who We think could pull this off. It is not Our intent to leave you in any kind of lurch, and We apologize for any misunderstanding, but in any event, We are going on vacation and will not be back for ten days.

Quick soul mate soulsearch: Do we want to do this? Not really, but it is a paying gig. It's thirteen weeks; probably won't go anywhere; wouldn't hurt to have a teevee gig on the resume for later. It's one night a week, after everything closes; you could continue with real theatre and blow in and do this; they want it adlibbed, anyway. I can't adlib an entire show. I'll help; I can structure it for you, it'll be like comedia; you've done comedia. I don't want anyone to know it's me; we could handle that with costume and makeup, and you never take a credit. Just because this is monster movies doesn't mean that we have to do what they expect -- if we did something else, they can't second-guess us. Will this hurt us professionally here? If we're leaving, who cares? and we can't pretend that we might stay. Can we do this? We can do this together if we want to, and we can walk away from it when we want to. If nothing else, it's not Serious Art, and we're tired of competing with the Serious Artistes; we could have some fun doing this. We're in it together; we talk to Bill together; and when we're done, we leave together.

Okay, so ... let's make a mark on the blank piece of paper: what is this character's name, anyway?

We started writing down names. No internet, no search engines -- this is ancient times, using human memory only; bots n spyders are part of the marvelous future yet to be revealed. Two columns, first and last names, pulling names out of memory; pull out the bio of W.C. Fields, pull out the S.J. Perelman books, pull out the Edward Gorey books, list everything that looks -- different. No puns, no Cryptkeeper stuff. Break that down to ten combinations we like, and let Bill make a decision: if he's going to produce, he gets to make producerly decisions.

Bill doesn't like the package deal: he's only interested in Barbara, if I'm around that's her business. Barbara stands her ground: both of us, or neither of us. Bill's only paying for one: we don't care about that, pay Barb, but deal with Steve on the business side. Barb's the talent, but Barb wants Steve to handle the visuals and shape the overall show: we have our people, he gets no credit. Steve's not interested in putting your people out of work, if you've got people who are supposed to do this then they're the experts and let 'em do it. We just haven't seen any evidence of that, so -- when do we meet the designers? Um ... we don't have designers. So who's doing the costume? The makeup? The set? Um ... we thought you'd handle that. We'll provide the studio and the studio crew. Do you have a budget for costumes, for makeup, for sets? Do you have an inventory? Anything you can pull? We have some stuff, but not really costume stuff ... We know people. We can handle that. We can give your people sketches, pull set pieces from your inventory, bring in some dressing. No credit! None of those union people! We already agreed to that is this about union? and the union doesn't design. Whoever you've got, we use; if you don't have someone, we'll take care of it. We'll make our arrangements; you cover hard costs only. Such as? We'll get the costumer, you pay for the fabric; we'll handle makeup design and application, you pay for the makeup; set a not-to-exceed if that helps, and we'll cover the overage.

Bill doesn't like it; but he can live with it. Done. Handshake. Now, about the name ...

We just happen to have a list; we thought since it's your project you should pick the name.

"How about ... Millicent B. Ghastly?" B? Well, if it means he's buying into it ... what's the diff?
Barb is gracious, pours oil on the troubled waters: "I liked that one, too."

In which the Enterprise is Christened

2009-02-15T06:21:00.000-08:00

Bill was on a roll now. Sensing that the fishy was hooked, he dropped that the putative show had a working title which was (wait for it) Monsterpiece Theatre. Like Masterpiece Theatre, only not on PBS and not with great works of British literature but with ... monster movies!

I heard the sound of crickets in my mind. This is usually about the part where Barb shoots me the "Get me out of here" look. One of us tactfully remarks on the witty pun, because that would have been the polite thing to do, given the free lunch and all. But, still, monster movies -- the hundreds, nay thousands of hours I spent watching monster movies in my misspent youth, from the classic Universal horror package endlessly rerun on the St. Louis indy station through the AIP cheapos run after school on the ABC affiliate competing with the Three Stooges, to Saturday afternoons at the no-longer Fabulous Fox and the Rio Show gorging on the Godzilla canon; monster movies are a certain cultural touchstone for certain kinds of folks and truth be told, it would be kind of cool to be part of that.

During my purgatory in Bloomington, with its two or so teevee options, I came across one Sammy Terry, broadcast out of Indianapolis (Indynoplace, Naptown ... and these were terms of endearment used by Hoosiers, what were we sophisticates from the Gateway to the West supposed to think? Sakes!) Sammy's show was about as cheap as it got -- badly painted sets (badly painted, I later learned, by slumming IU scene painters), spooky organ music under wretched puns oversold by a citizen made up in black and white housepaint who kinda looked like the screaming guy in the Munch painting -- teevee to set your teeth on edge; it had the sole beneficial effect of reminding one that time was a-wasting and making one's pile o schoolwork strangely attractive. "Ever hear of an Indiana show ... Sammy Terry or something?" I asked.

Turns out Bill did; shouldn't have been surprised. He was a hotshot teevee executive, he should know about this kind of stuff.

"We wouldn't have any interest in something like that ..." Barb shot me another look. We? Signals getting crossed here, folks ... we have an interest in getting out of here, forgetting about this and getting on with our lives.

Bill also picked up on the pronoun. "Well, we're really only interested in your wife. It's not a big deal; we just want someone to come in, do the show and leave. It'll all be ad-libbed, anyway. We aren't going to make a big deal out of this."

Then why do it? "Well, something like this doesn't need a lot of stuff. But if you don't want to make a big deal out of this ... why do it?" Barb unlaxes; discussion back on script. Wrap this up. "See, if you want improv get an improv person. Improv guys work off of scripts; they might not be written, but improv actors work out a structure that they riff on in performance. Who else are you thinking of? Who would Barb be working with?"

Well, no one. The show would be built around Barb. The show would be Barb. There wasn't anything in the budget for anyone else. Unless Barb wanted to pay for them out of her pocket. The crepes were starting to curdle.

"Is there some kind of a set ... some kind of treatment ... document ... anything that sort of ... sets the rules for the show?" Anything at all that would make Barb any kind of comfortable with this?

It was Bill's turn to hear the cricket song. The pitch was the sum total of the concept. In other words, a blank piece of paper.

I looked at Barb. "What do you think?"

Barb politely said, "It could be interesting. But I'd like to see something in writing. I don't want to get tied down into something. I want to continue acting in other shows." And we want to continue with the plan to Get Out of Lexington in a year.

It was Bill's turn to unlax a little. Of course this wasn't exclusive, or even long-term. For its part, WLEX was looking at this really as a short-term project: initially thirteen weeks, through the first ratings period. Then they'd take a look at the show's ratings: they had already bought the movies, or were going to buy the movies, or had a movie package in mind that they were going to buy, so they were committed to thirty-nine weeks of movies. If hosted movies scored better ratings than the unhosted movies currently in the time slot, then the hosted show would continue; if not, why we all can just walk away friends.

Barb allowed that thirteen weeks didn't seem like too bad an idea, but she wanted to think about it. I picked up my cue: "Well, we're visual types. Could you ... write up a page or two about what you're thinking of and expect? Then we could react to it, tell you what we'd be willing to do, and maybe we could come to some kind of agreement? Because you guys are the ones putting money into this, it's just time for us ... so wouldn't it help to have something written like a business plan?"

This seemed sort-of OK to Bill. He wasn't thrilled; he wanted a commitment and got a nibble, but that's all he was going to get today. So he promised to get us something in writing, and we promised to wait until we heard from him. Check hurriedly called for, paid, thanks and handshakes exchanged, doors scooted through.

Barb: "Do you think he's serious?"

Steve: "Nah. Let's see if he actually sends us anything. If we don't hear from him in a week, let's forget about it."

In which Bill makes a pitch

2009-02-14T13:51:00.000-08:00

It was Channel 18's idea. We just happened to catch the pitch.

In April 85 Barb got a call from a producer at Channel 18, who wanted to take her to lunch. Being married n all, she thought it best if we went as a tag team; we knew the wiles of the Lexington theatre community and who could guess what deviltry might be on the mind of a so-called teevee producer? Best to show the Couple Front, just in case; it helped Barb to be more comfortable with the meet and I can always eat on somebody else's dime. So after establishing Bill's bona fides, to the extent that he was a known producer at Channel 18 and did have an expense account, we agreed to a lunch meet at The Magic Pan. The Pan was conveniently located in the Mall at Lexington Center, so I could get back to my day job in the arena; plus we liked the food. If you're getting a free meal, you might as well enjoy the food.

Bill arrived, and after his initial surprise at the two of us, exchanged the requisite pleasantries and got down to the Secret Plan. It seemed that Channel 27 generally owned the local teevee market at the time, which was somewhat galling to the good folks at Channel 18. They had, or were about to, come into a fair pile of cash from the sale of some underperforming assets, and were looking to put some of that money into programming to make dents into time slots where they thought Channel 17 might be vulnerable. One of those time slots was following Saturday Night Live, which was going to have a new and presumably much stronger cast in the fall; Lorne Michaels had taken the show back and was tasked by NBC to restore it to ratings glory, yada yada yada. Channel 27 seemed to be happy with endlessly programming movies in the 11:30PM slot, and Channel 18 thought that given a strong lead-in by SNL, the right kind of program could make a little dent into Channel 27's dominance. We enjoyed our soup as he continued.

This was the Age of Elvira, who was establishing a very big presence on that there cable teevee, the sworn enemy of over-the-air teevee; but if that brigand Bertolt Brecht could steal ideas with impunity why not our man Bill? It seems that Channel 18 had made some inquiries about acquiring the Elvira show outright for the Lexington market; but whatever riches were going to fall into their laps were apparently not enough for the likes of Elvira. So the fallback position was to develop a homebrew Elvira. Which is where Barb came in.

The good execs over at Channel 18 had agreed that if a local sufficiently Elvira-like presence was available, then it stood to reason that a homebrew Elvira could be brewed. The problem, as they saw it, was that there were no local sufficiently Elvira-like presences to be had for ready money in central KY: they had surveyed the local acting scene and found it wanting. This was believable; we knew the local acting scene as well as anybody, and it wasn't exactly teeming with strong personality actresses, much less strong comic actresses. People were generally either Taking their Art Seriously (goes with the territory staked out by post-college actors), or performing for a hobby (goes with the territory for geezers). It was at this point that Bill took a left turn at Albuquerque, and the waiter delivered the crepes.

Bill had taken it upon himself to scope out various local auditions in search of the perfect proto-Elvira, and had come upon Barb auditioning at Studio Players for The Man Who Came to Dinner, the Kaufman and Hart vehicle with the immortal star turn entry line "I may vomit". The director had called for improv auditions, and Barb had responded with improvs that had at least Bill rolling in the Bell Court aisles. Bill had inveighled whoever needed to sign off on his discovery to join him in watching the ensuing production, and they had concluded from Barb's performance that She Was Their Girl. Hence the free soup: was Barb interested in becoming Channel 18's Elvira?

Well, acting is acting and paid acting is better than unpaid acting; but since I was supposed to be the practical one, I had a few questions besides the obvious "Are you nuts?", which didn't seem to be the most polite opening statement. We at least knew enough brazen careerism to appear interested, and while imitating another actor's shtick was out of the question there seemed to be a decent opportunity somewhere in the proposition. So after stipulating that there would be no Elvira-imitatin' goin' on in these here parts, we wondered what the suits at Channel 18 saw as the connection between Elvira and Barb. That was easy: Barb took chances on stage. True that. So anyone who was willing to take chances on stage was tailor-made for live teevee.

Excuse me? Live teevee? After Saturday Night Live live teevee? Which, if I remember properly, ends at 1AM Sunday morning live teevee?

This was necessary, Bill explained, in order to have the proper sense of daring n danger to the show. He wanted a show in which anything could happen, might happen, and did happen. No rules. Ad-libbed. Wacky, zany, spontaneous. Not for the teeming masses, but for a dedicated cult audience. For which he was offering the princessly sum of fifty dollars per show.

"You want Robin Williams for fifty bucks a week," I summarized.

"That's it exactly," said Bill. I suspect he missed the irony.

"We'll think about it."