…inside a bombproof safe inside the belly of a very old whale who will only cough it up if you solve these three riddles…
What I am saying it. I’m a complicated guy, and I get so tired of dealing with myself sometimes.
I am my own impatient parent.
It’s this damned advanced metaconscious mind of mine. Sure, it does a great job of allowing me to monitor my own thought processes for errors and correct them, but those same forces are the ones that rip apart any kind of stability in my find in their relentless hunger for something to distill, separate, and analyze.
And then there’s the hall of mirrors of my self-doubt. I question X, then question my questioning of X, then defend it from a new angle, and so on and so on until the whole chain of thought collapses under its own weight.
Voila! Genius. Or at least, a reasonable facsimile thereof.
Today’s been pretty decent. Got my keys back, praise be to the Steve. Was able to let myself in when I got back from school. I will probably get over the whole incident in a few days.
And that’s great and all. But I wonder why it takes me so much longer to recover from this kind of thing than it took to get freaked out about it. I embrace joy with the same reluctance with which I let go of pain. There is something deeply damaged about my fundamental table of values, and it worries me.
I think it has gotten better over time, though. So possibly it all stems from the deep deep damage I sustained from being sexually assaulted when I was barely old enough to talk. That put me into a state of mind where it was far more important to avoid pain than to seek pleasure. Where the highest value was put on safety, so high that it precluded all but the most stationary and sedentary pursuits.
And the mind prioritizes things via memory. Thus, due to my fucked up mind’s fucked up brain chemistry, pain is remembered with razor sharp vividness and pleasure is treated like anomalous noise and disregarded the moment the pleasure fades.
No wonder we depressives are all a bunch of addicts. We’re trying to self-medicate in ways that always cost way more in the long term than we gain in the short term… but wise investments are only available to those who have enough capital to spare.
Depressives, on the other hand, are always on the verge of starvation.
Let’s see : this morning, I had Short Script. It was our last day of getting to just sit around watching short films and chatting about them after. Next class, we will need to have three pitches for three different short script ideas.
I have too many ideas. When I try to pick one out, they all rush the gate trying to get out, so I have to slam the gate shut or be trampled by the herd.
Art is hard.
And I am doing way too many short paragraphs.
Or am I?
Afternoon class was TV Genre with my favorite prof, Rick Drew. And today’s genre was…. COMEDY! I was so excited it hurt. We didn’t get into as much detail as I wanted, but I had a great time anyhow. Comedy is my THING, man. Like I always say, I am there for skitcom or sitcom.
Then, after class, I had a mentorship (in other words, a half hour chat) with Rick, and he helped me flesh out a vague idea for a sitcom that has been on the back burner of my brain for a week or so. It would be a show about four people living in a rented house. One of them is a bedridden invalid who used to be a big shot business consultant before his illness took his life away. One is a crushingly shy victim of social anxiety, who hasn’t been able to leave the home in sixteen years. The third is a psychosomatic multi-allergy sufferer who nevertheless considers herself to be the only competent one in the house and acts as a kind of ad hoc den mother for the group.
And the fourth lucky resident is the niece of the previous owner of the house, who died suddenly and left it to her. Nobody expected this to happen so soon, and so she knows very little about any of her aunt’s many properties, let alone the people living in them. But she is a very upbeat, can-do kind of person, so she ends her lease, sells off most of her stuff, packs the rest in her adorable chick car, and drives across Canada to live, rent-free, in the house she now owns.
Only to find out that she has to share this house with three housebound people with a firmly established group dynamic and legal protections that make it so you couldn’t evict them with nuclear weapons. And they are not happy to give up their storage room (otherwise known as the fourth bedroom) to some stranger they have never met who just shows up out of the blue with no warning.
Thus, the niece (who burned her bridges getting here) has no choice but to move in and try to make the best of the situation (wait… so THAT’s why they call them situation comedies!). At first, the three are openly hostile to her and she thinks she has been thrown into Hell while still alive, and the situation is very tense.
But of course, as the show progresses, they relax and start to get along, and despite her initial vow to just treat this home as a place to sleep, the niece find herself drawn deeper into deeper into the strange, sad little world of these three people, and the show can explore its real subject matter, which is what happens to people when they are cut off from normal life and are forced to deal with no longer being a part of the world.
Not bad. Needs lots of work. Names would be good. And I need some secondary characters. A social worker, maybe, and a physical therapist/nurse.
You know, I just might be good at this kind of thing.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
Or neighbours?
The house would have to be made very, very interesting, visually I mean, to compensate for the fact that the premise is so confined. It sounds like (except for the origin story of the young landlady) we’d never get to see the world outside the house. So all the rooms would have to be over-decorated and busy, and regularly changing so we don’t start to mentally filter out the decor, which would be a challenge for the production’s continuity staff.
It would also have to be a house with a lot of narrow spaces, so no character is ever far from a wall. That would make filming more difficult—it would have to be all hand-held cameras. There wouldn’t be much room for those big cameras on wheels.
One way to cheat when it comes to not leaving a confined location is to do it via TV and radio and so on. We can escape our stagey prison by having the characters watch TV (and of course you have to actually show the thing they’re watching, not just have a flickering light reflecting on their faces and hear audio). Then you can have the characters react to news from the outside world, or watch an old B-movie (which would be fun to film).
Also, the windows of the building. Things should happen outside them. And not in a fake way, where there’s clearly nothing out there but a studio wall with some trees and occasionally the neighbour walks by, but a real world, where you could point the camera out the window and see a lawn and a street and houses, and characters doing weird stuff. For example, I would have a scene where there’s some kind of huge police incident on the street just outside. Unruly crowds of people. Helicopters. Smoke grenades. Think of the shantytown raid in They Live. And you’d actually take the handheld camera over to the window and look outside and show it. No being cheap and just having a red-and-blue police-car light shining in through a fake window while the characters describe things to us.
OK, you could fake the helicopter with a sound effect. I’ll allow that. The sound alone provides pretty good atmosphere. But even that’s pushing it. I’d rather you insert stock footage of a helicopter than take the stagey way out.
Looking back over the idea, I can see our token healthy person as being a way to move things out of the house. Plus, while our characters can’t go out very often, other people can come in.
Remember, Friends mostly took place in two apartments. Cheers took place almost entirely in the same bar. Confined locations don’t have to feel confined if you keep things moving and the audience is laughing.
Oh, and remember that each of the four residents has their own bedroom, and there can be other rooms of the house too, like a kitchen or a solarium or a library or the back yard or a simple hallway.
It’s not as claustrophobic as it sounds.
Oh, and yes, neighbours would be perfect. Probably more than one set.
Yes, there are definitely ways to make the most of the limited location, and you’ll see that some of my suggestions are to do with that. Cheers had a very expensive-looking, realistic set. Good production values help with a limited location.
With good enough writing you can make a limited location less stagey but the best thing is to not have to. The genius of Seinfeld was that it could suddenly cut to anywhere. We weren’t limited to the two cameras in his apartment, like on Barney Miller, where it sounds like something interesting is happening somewhere but we know with that sinking feeling of despair that we’re only going to hear about it later when they get back, not see it directly.