On the Lot, and into the Fire

A guest contribution to the Indyish group blog, written by: Christopher Olson

The new reality series, On the Lot, now airing on FOX, promises eighteen up-and-coming film directors the “chance of lifetime”, the “opportunity of a lifetime”, or the chance to fulfill a litany of clichés about fulfilling your dreams. However, what they’re offering isn’t a million dollars, but a million dollar contract with Dreamworks.

Viewers get to decide who the lucky winner will be after shortening the list of contenders right down to the smallest common denominator. But therein lies the problem. It’s not that audiences can’t make the right decisions, or even that they should be allowed to (case in point: The People’s Choice Awards). In fact, audiences already ostensibly decide the winners and losers at the box office week after week in a head butting competition that ensures large opening numbers for some, while many deserving films go overlooked or unseen. In the “golden” years of cinema, movie theaters were owned and operated by film studios, so if you wanted to watch a Paramount movie you had to go to a Paramount equipped theater. But walk into a movie theater today and you’re bombarded with the latest releases, like Live Free or Die Hard, which can take up half-a-dozen screens per theater, crowding out the limited releases. If you want real choices, you have go to an independent movie theater, and suddenly we’re back at the beginning again when good films were sequestered and shut off from the general public.

In the struggle for more screen space, film and television studios have learned to pack everything into short installments, just like a 30-second TV commercial or a one minute movie trailer. A film’s success is decided in a single weekend, and although it may go on to rake in millions of dollars, its that crucial Friday afternoon that decides a filmmaker’s fate. Because films take years to make, you can forgive film executives for counting their eggs before they’ve hatched, and releasing estimates to shareholders way in advance.

But when Disney has to send its marketing gurus, some of the best advertising specialists in the world, to quietly lower the financial estimates for its latest picture, Ratatouille, suddenly you have studios sabotaging their own pictures–and their own artists.

It matters little that the film wound up #1 at the box office on its opening weekend, or that it made $47.5 million, because Disney-Pixar told everyone they would make $70 million.

On the Lot, unfortunately, follows the same formula that governs Hollywood. Filmmaking as an art is reduced to a survival tactic in a Darwinian game of Survival of the Fittest. But instead of producing a tried and true director, it seems more likely to produce another Michael Bay or Eli Roth, two of the directors who have appeared as guest hosts in the season thus far. It’s a formula that was best used in Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, which ran on the idea that the show’s contestants weren’t working for a cash prize but for a job, and thus the best way to determine who gets “hired” and who get’s “fired” is to see how the applicants deal in workplace situations. Little did it occur to Trump, or anyone else watching the show, that mistakes are a fountain spring of knowledge, and that the contestants who made it to the end were succeeding by refusing to get their hands dirty, or to show the flaws that will inevitably surface over time. After suffering a fate worse than death (cancellation), Trump was quick to compromise the show’s format to get it back up and running. Thus you’ll be seeing The Apprentice: Celebrity Edition sometime soon (and no, Rosie O’Donnell will not be a contestant).

Patton Oswalt, a comedian who prefers touring cross country to doing TV (and who is now the voice of the rat in Disney’s Ratatouille), sees elimination-based shows like Last Comic Standing as a relic of a bygone era–the late ‘80s. “That show is so fucking evil and poisonous,” he said in an interview with the kick-ass AV Club. “I love the comedians that are on it, [but] I can’t stand watching these talented comedians get dragged back to the way comedy was in the late ‘80s,” where comedy routines had to be made to fit the common consumer of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. “Your whole career comes down to two minutes, and if you fuck that two minutes up, it’s over. So you’d better second-guess, third-guess, fourth-guess everything you say.”

It can’t be easy making a movie, even a short film, in less than a week, which is probably why the first few weeks of On the Lot featured the contestants’ contest-winning submissions, and not their latest content. Perhaps as a coy commentary on the cut throat film industry run by the show’s parent network, FOX, the contestants are forced to battle the same hurdles as the movies they are will eventually be expected to make. But then it’s out of the frying pan and into the fire, because reality is a lot worse than reality TV actually depicts it. For audiences expecting drama, the stress and anxiety of making movies may be too much.

Critics will blame viewers, like they did with American Idol, when their favourite filmmakers get kicked off On the Lot. But blame the network for constructing a system where viewers are forced to pick their favourite contestants like they were their own children (expect a reality TV show version of Sophie’s Choice advertised as an incredible social experiment, like seeing if a pro tennis player will date the 20 year old ‘kitten’ or the 40 year old ‘cougar’ on Age of Love). God, how I wish that audiences actually had the power to decide which TV shows get canceled and which get renewed. Ratings don’t matter as much as you’d think. It’s how TV executives interpret those early ratings that decide whether they get canceled or whether they get saved. Since Steven Weber only plays a studio executive on TV (on the now canceled Studio 60), I can only imagine that real executives spend the majority of their time rolling dice and betting money on the latest Nielson ratings, the way people bet on which number a monkey will pick out of his handler’s hat. It’s a little bit more like horse racing, actually, because when that film director don’t put out good movies no more, it’s out to pasture for him, ‘cause daddy needs a new pair of dice.

It’s a myth that audiences are to blame for not supporting good television.
The truth is that good television is just too difficult to find.

There are so many movies, and so many television shows released all at the same time, that instead of watching them all, audiences wait for good word of mouth. But there can’t be good word of mouth if you cancel a show after only three episodes. With the carefully choreographed plots in today’s shows, that’s barely enough time for a story arc. Heck, that’s barely enough time for Jack Bauer to go to the bathroom.

TiVo, which has given audiences an opportunity to see the shows they can’t because of scheduling conflicts, or the occasional intrusion of a life in the outside world, has become Studio-Enemy number #1, because it allows viewers to neglect their main source of income: the 30-second TV spots. Fortunately, some are embracing the idea of putting their programming on the internet and onto iPods, so that people have enough time to know if they like a show before it gets canceled. Still, quality remains the most important part of the package, which is why the relatively-amusing-but-something-is-missing Andy Barker: P.I. was canceled regardless of having its entire 6-episode order posted online in advance of its television premiere.

Not only does On the Lot follow the flawed format of today’s film and television market, it also follows the flawed format of American Idol. The winners of that show may have fallen off the charts this time next year, even if they were “America’s choice”, but at the same time, “losers” like Jennifer Hudson and Clay Aiken still have huge careers ahead of them. Simon Cowell, the curmudgeonly critic with all the brains in this outfit, made a powerful point when he noted that Jennifer Hudson was voted off by the viewers, while it was his experience and expertise managing the careers of musicians that was able to spot a winner with music lovers before even they knew it. The critic is right: trust critics, not the quickly formed opinions of a populace that doesn’t even know what it wants.

Though American Idol has indirectly spawned the successful careers of many of its early dropouts, the contestants on On the Lot have a far lesser chance of making it into the big times after they’re voted off. Most of them will go back to making small films, cause it costs too much to make features (the pilot episode of Lost cost $12 million alone). The real problem for Dreamworks is waking up one day and finding that the show’s winner dropped a dud at the box office, even after surviving the gauntlet they set out for him.

If Hollywood keeps up its self-destructive habits, it might see another string of failures on its hands. And we, as the audience, might be forced to see them as well.

Note: If you want to see filmmakers given free reign to do what they want, check out Masters of Horror, and its soon to be released spin-off, Masters of Science Fiction. To fill the void in several classic film director’s empty schedules, these talented filmmakers have banned together to do one hour movies once a week, airing on the Showtime cable network. It’s the antithesis to FOX’s On the Lot.