Ask The A.V. Club - June 6, 2008

The
Privileged Few

I'm
pretty much paraphrasing what I left in the comments section on Sean's
Sasquatch write-up,
but since this really isn't directed at Sean, Ask The A.V. Club seems
appropriate.

First
off, I enjoyed Sean's write-up of the Sasquatch Festival, and have no problems
with him. But any time I read a festival review from a media source, I can't
help but feel jaded. The thing I dislike in these write-ups is that the
experiences seem so unreal from what I have/would have experienced. Things like
media passes, backstage passes, and random indie/comedy/indie-comedy celebrity
run-ins just don't happen to 99.975 percent of the festival-going public. I
don't blame anyone for taking advantage of these, but it comes off as being part
of a cool club that 99.975 percent of those interested (a.k.a. those reading
the write-up) can't be in. At a lot of festivals, I have to stand around for an
hour ahead of time just to be able to see, let alone be "close." If
I've been waiting around and someone tries to cut in front of me, by my
standards, they're a jerk. So what does that make media people with their
set-jumping-right-to-the-front-row ways? Write-ups heavy on the hanging out
with Okkervil River, or getting backstage passes from some other band, or being
let into a capacity-filled comedy show by the indie-comedic celebrity himself,
just seem very hipster d-baggish to me. (I'm at work; I don't want to use words
that may get flagged.)

I
may be offbase with my assumptions and spite, so I'm wondering about the facts:
Do media people get to cut in front of the crowds? Can they jump from set to set
quickly enough as to see multiple sets in the same timeslots? Are there any policies
about this at The
A.V. Club? Are there instances where you "try to keep it real"
more so than others? I understand where the festival would want the press to be
able to do these things (the more you'll be able to see and the better your
experience is, the better a write-up you'll do), but when does the line get
crossed to where one might feel like a shill? (Please understand that I'm not
trying to imply anything here about Sean or The A.V. Club.) If one were doing a
review for something (anything) and the company producing it threw a bunch of
gifts the reviewer's way, journalistic integrity might come into play. When do
media privileges turn into gifts that could affect journalistic integrity?

As
you can probably guess, most of my dislike comes from envy. But it's like
having your high-school experience be retold by the captain of the cool club.
(A wise teacher of mine would always say "analogies prove
nothing"—so actually, it's not.) Keep up the good work.

Steve

Sean O'Neal left the VIP area long enough to
answer:

Thanks for reiterating that you don't have a
problem with me, Steve. I was reading this over with my good friends Gary
Busey, Bijou Phillips, and the guys from Haircut 100, and we all agreed that
was very charitable of you—between convulsive snickers of derision at
your lowly Everyman status, of course. Then we hopped into one of those limos
with a built-in hot tub and motored off to a nightclub so exclusive that if the
unworthy were to speak its name aloud, their tongues would turn to boiling oil.
Being a big-time journalist rocks!

Anyway, to answer your question seriously:
Attending a rock festival as a member of the media—particularly in these
ill-defined times, when everyone with a blog can apply for press
credentials—is hardly ever the backstage rock 'n' roll fantasy you're
making it out to be. But I won't lie; it sometimes has its advantages. At
something like SXSW, for instance, the ability to sidestep the wristband crowd
and get into the much shorter badge line does enable us to jump from
set to set with only a minimum of worry that we won't be able to get in,
thereby ensuring more comprehensive coverage for you, the reader. (And yeah,
for more selfish pursuits, at certain "exclusive" after-parties, finding a fan
of The Onion
working the door means the difference between drinking free booze well past the
point of logic, and just going home and getting some much-needed sleep.) Plus
sometimes, in the "press tent," you get free bottled water or bags of Baked
Lays. Glamorous, right?

But no, in the case of something like Sasquatch,
having "media privilege" didn't net me much of anything other than access to
free wireless and the small strip of road between stages, which in turn
afforded me the opportunity to ambush musicians who'd somehow strayed away from
their handlers. Yes, my media sticker did include access to the photo pit right in
front of the stage, but I never thought to use it. (In retrospect, I kind of
wish I had.) I actually saw every set the same way as everyone else: In the
cold, in the rain, and often from the top of the hill—which required
lugging my increasingly soft blogger's ass from stage to stage just like the
rest of my fellow concertgoers, and straining to see over the crowd once I got
there. I didn't do that to "keep it real"; I just have no interest in fighting
my way to the front just because I can. Besides, being jostled by members of
the "real media" and their hugely phallic, "professional" cameras while I'm
fumbling with my tiny Nikon is an exercise in Freudian humiliation I just don't
need.

The fact that a lot of my write-up was heavy on
the "hanging out with Okkervil River" side can be blamed on two things: First
of all, I have this icky compulsion to write about events exactly the way they
happened. As some of your fellow commentators pointed out, that often
translates to a lot of "whining when I should have been rocking," and
obsessively chronicling all the minutiae of where I am at any given moment. My
editors call this "behind the curtain" reporting (as in, "O'Neal, this report
is a little too 'behind the curtain'"), but while it probably takes some of the
shine off events like this, in my opinion, it makes for a more engrossing read.
My favorite kind of music-festival reporting uses this navel-gazing,
warts-and-all approach—such as Charlie
Brooker's hilarious piece on Glastonbury from last year—and for
me, it actually seems kind of counterintuitive to do it any other way. Granted,
that attitude is symptomatic of the new "me-first" reporting style that,
depending on your personal opinion, is either reinventing or killing journalism
as we know it. But personally, I figure that if readers really just wanted
flat, editorial appraisals of the performances without any color, personality,
or irrelevant digressions, there's always the local weekly.

Second of all, most of those "hanging out" stories
are a byproduct of things that have nothing whatsoever to do with so-called
"media privilege." In my case, I've known the members of Okkervil River and
What Made Milwaukee Famous for years, simply by virtue of living in the same
town. My own bands shared stages with them in their early days, and—as I
mentioned in my write-up—Will Sheff used to work with me at a video
store, so hanging out with them has less to do with me hobnobbing with "indie-rock
stars" (note mocking tone) than me desperately seeking out familiar faces while
I'm so far away from home. And writing about it is just my way of trying to be
entertaining—not to mention humanizing a world that too often gets caught
up in fawning idolatry. But the rest of my celebrity encounters either happened
by completely random chance—and believe it or not, most of them occurred
on festival grounds, far away from any sort of VIP Shangri-La where celebrities
and media types fed each other grapes and engaged in witty discourse—or
through painstaking planning, weeks in advance, with various publicists. I'm
positive you or anyone else could have had the experience I had with folks like
Brian Posehn, Eugene Mirman, David Bazan, and Kathleen Edwards, for example,
because my own spur-of-the-moment interviews were repeatedly interrupted by
"regular" folks coming up to unload questions of their own. (Jerks! Didn't they
see my super-serious "media" badge?!?)

You've pointed out the only time I exploited my Onion credentials at Sasquatch
(asking Matt Besser to let me into the Upright Citizens Brigade show), and I
hope you also noticed that I copped to it in the article. In that moment, my
natural instinct to not be a badge-waving, name-dropping douche was usurped by
my need to report on the show—and in instances like that, yes, I am
thinking of the reader. Had I been forced to wait in line like everyone else,
my write-up wouldn't have included anything at all from the UCB shows, because
I just would have given up in favor of trying to cover something else. And I
hope you also
noticed that my getting preferential treatment didn't color my mostly tepid
appraisal. That same commitment to "keeping it real" goes for any sort of
"special" treatment I get, including any and all free merchandise sent my way.
In fact, the opposite is usually true: The more a publicist bothers me, the
more likely I am to have a preemptive grudge against their band. That's how I
operate, anyway, because I'm naturally kind of bitter.

In summation, I resort to using my media
credentials only in service of a better, fuller story, and not to be a dick.
And I would argue that my festival experience really isn't more fun than anyone
else's—in fact, it's usually a little bit less so, considering I never
get to just watch a show and have a few beers anymore. Instead, I'm always
scribbling notes and worrying I should be elsewhere—with the threat of
the "I can't believe you didn't see (blank)! For shame!" comment always in the
back of my mind—and enviously watching other folks just "rocking," since
at the end of the night, they all get to go home and pass out while my workday
is only beginning. So if you're jealous of me and all of my supposed
specialness, allow me to throw that right back at you: Any shred of "privilege"
we get comes with that price. Though don't get me wrong, because I absolutely
love what I do; having seen rock shows from all sides (as a performer, as an
audience member, and as a journalist) I'm definitely happiest in my latest
role. But the existence of any sort of "cool club" is only an illusion, and one
that's totally relative—just like it was in high school.

Who Got The Look?

I
used to think of TV directors as workmen for hire, craftsmen as opposed to
artists, who, at their best, get the job done quickly, efficiently, and with as
little fuss as possible. However, as production values have increased and a
more sophisticated/cinematic quality has become the norm for television dramas
in particular, I find myself increasingly aware of and impressed by what a
skilled director brings to the table. Still, directors rarely appear to be a
primary creative force behind TV shows, which brings me to my question: Who is
responsible for establishing the "look" of a show? Every show has its
own distinctive look, from lighting to camera positioning to scene transitions,
and so on. In film, one would feel fairly comfortable identifying the director
as the one determining what the product ultimately looks like (even while
acknowledging the contributions of the cinematographer, production designer,
etc.), but TV works differently, doesn't it? Directors are still hired guns,
right? Are directors intimately involved in the development of a new show? If
so, why aren't they spoken of as creative forces in the same way as producers,
creators, and show-runners?

Steve
Wilcox

Noel Murray—who used to perk up when he
saw Asaad Kelada's name in a sitcom's credits—replies:

The main reason directors aren't cited as a
primary creative force on a TV series is because the demands of TV production
usually prevent a single director from helming every minute of every episode of
a TV series, which makes it hard to think of a TV director in the same "buck
stops here" way that we often think about movie directors. On TV, head writers,
show-runners, and executive producers—titles sometimes held by a single
person—outrank their directors almost every time. (Although they all
ultimately have to answer to network executives.)

But that doesn't mean that a TV director's
contribution to the direction of a show is negligible. When it comes time to
shoot a pilot, the producers and writers work in close collaboration with their
director to establish their permanent model. And it isn't always a smooth
process. In Bill Carter's book Desperate Networks, Carter describes the
conflict between Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry and director P.J. Hogan, whom
ABC wanted to head up the pilot. Hogan assumed he'd be the one in charge, and
would have the liberty to rewrite and reconceive Cherry's labor of love. When
Cherry balked, Hogan quit, claiming the writer was impossible to work with. And
since at the time ABC had more faith in the director of My Best Friend's
Wedding
than a former writer for The Golden Girls, Desperate Housewives almost died in
development.

At other times, though, producers purposefully
hire directors with a high level of taste, skill, and vision, and count on them
to get their ship launched in the right direction. And then they take the helm
themselves and follow course. Clark Johnson's work on the first episodes of The
Wire and The
Shield
come to mind, as does James Burrows' staggering list of sitcom pilots.

Given how rigid a TV series' style quickly
becomes, it can be an interesting experiment for auteurists to see how their
favorite directors submit to the will of the system. When Quentin Tarantino
directed episodes of ER and CSI, he was able to smuggle in some of his own
personal style, and even reaching back to the early careers of Robert Altman,
Steven Spielberg, and Sam Peckinpah, their TV work often bears traces of what
they would later do when they had total control. At its purest, directing is
supposed to be about framing, camera moves, and managing performances, and
sometimes it's easier to discern how directors handle those elements when most
of the stylistic choices have already been made for them.

In the end, though, TV is a fundamentally different
medium from cinema—in terms of storytelling, if nothing else—and
while some directors shine on both the big and small screens, the ranks of
directors who can be exclusively called "TV auteurs" is fairly small, and
unlikely to swell any time soon.

Look! A Wagon Wheel!

Having
grown up in the '70s and '80s, I watched copious amounts of Saturday-morning
teevee. I remember the annoying PSAs on ABC featuring the Time For Timer guy,
later parodied on Family Guy. I also vaguely remember, years earlier,
that same character in a surreal educational cartoon about the human body. The
most surreal element is that it involved Buffy and Jody from Family Affair. Through the magic of animation, they were
inside the body of Uncle Bill and helped fight off an infection. Does this ring
any bells? No one but my brother and I seem to remember this.

Gabe

Donna Bowman hankers for a hunka cheese:

Annoying? I think you misspelled "awesome" in your
question, there, buddy. Timer actually began his career in the ABC Afterschool
Special The Incredible,
Indelible, Magical, Physical Mystery Trip, which aired in 1973. You're right about the plot, but
wrong about the principals—nobody from Family Affair was involved. Your synapses appear to have crossed due to
the similarity of the characters' names—Joey and Missey and their ailing
Uncle Carl in the Afterschool Special, Jody and Buffy and their indulgent Uncle
Bill in the series.

Voice actor and wacky comedian Len Maxwell provided the
voice for Timer as he guided animated versions of the kids through their
uncle's overweight, stressed-out, couch-potato body. Friz Freleng and David H.
DePatie (who together are best known for the Pink Panther series) produced.
Composer Edward Newmark contributed five original songs, including "Have A
Heart." I'm betting anyone who saw the Timer bumpers on Saturday-morning
television can make up their own words to that title and sing it in true
vaudevillian-Timer style.

This was only the fifth Afterschool Special of the first
season, and it proved so successful that a sequel was ordered up for Season 2:
"A Magical Trip Through Little Red's Head." Lennie Weinrib, a
prolific voice actor who wrote and starred as the title character in all 17
episodes of H.R. Pufnstuf, replaced Maxwell as
Timer's voice. (He's called Timer, by the way, because he's the manifestation
of your body's circadian rhythms, telling you when it's time to do this or
that.) In this installment, he led two different kids, Larry and Carol, through
a healthy teenaged Little Red Riding Hood's mind. Little Red seems like an odd
role model for clean living, given the whole sexual tension with the wolf
thing, but these were simpler times.

Weinrib continued to voice the character in his PSA
incarnation on ABC, providing us with the immortal cheese-glorifying song and
others, like this instructive video on making fruit-juice ice pops. (Kids:
Don't ask the sketchy guys hanging out on the corner for any Sunshine On A
Stick.)

Next week: A matter of good
character. Send your questions to [email protected].