Amid all of the minutia about Hollywood agencies and development deals and networking (God, shut up about that already) that I'm learning here, there's an intangible skill that I had a hard time articulating until tonight: I'm learning to see media as a fully malleable product.
It's easy to watch TV or a movie and wish it were different or even enumerate what would make it better. I mean, I do it all the time. That's what being a critic is. But what I didn't know until I came out here is this: In Hollywood, you don't have to just wish things were different. You can change them yourself.
It's not hard to watch a scene in a movie or read a pilot and suggest some reshuffling, maybe something as small as a new line of dialogue to replace an awkward one. It's quite another thing to suggest changing the ending, eliminating characters or redefining entire storylines. But this is what I asked for. This is what the development execs I work for do and what I've been asked to do (in an abstract way) more and more.
I was bored at work recently, so I decided to root through my computer at TCFTV and read the earliest draft I could find of ABC's "Modern Family," an excellent freshman show my bosses developed. In the first studio draft, the show was originally titled "My American Family." The director of this ostensible documentary serves as the narrator. At the end of the pilot, he reveals that he also has a personal relationship with the family.
I don't really have a problem with this conceit, besides the fact that the director would bring the number of series regulars to a staggering 11. But otherwise there's something that appeals to me about the unifying nature of this idea, and I can see a lot of stories in it. I didn't read any of the other drafts that became the aired pilot, so I don't know when and why the narrator got cut in favor of the anonymous "Office" format. But it blows my mind that someone in the department had the power to say, "Yeah, I like the basic idea, but scrap this guy and the entire central concept."
In class a few weeks back, my professor invited a pair of new filmmakers to screen a rough cut of their unsold horror film, "YellowBrickRoad" (yes, no spaces, for maximum fear!). Afterwards in the Q&A, there seemed to be a lively consensus among the class that the ending of the film was completely wrong. We decided that at the very least, the directors should have stuck with the ending they described from their original script (although that also needed work, to be honest). What was so crazy to me was how we had just watched an entire cut of a feature film — nearly two hours long — and yet these two guys were open to the idea of completely rethinking the plot of their baby.
After a lifetime of only experiencing media as finished products that have passed the approval processes of studios, networks, editors and even the MPAA, it's a real crisis for me to suddenly be told that nothing is set in stone. I think studio execs are probably successful for the most part because they possess that particular, dubious skill of looking at something and thinking, without conditions or reservations, "How can I hack this up to make it better?"
My love for media means that I have those conditions and reservations, so I'm going to start shaking them off now. Deep breaths, and...
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Rebecca Goldberg is a junior majoring in American studies. She can be reached at Rebecca.Goldberg@tufts.edu.
