Plausibility and Good Advice from the Crew

Back in my Stanford writing workshop days, all of my literary fiction professors would routinely warn us about what they called “plot-dominated” fiction.   Some poor, well meaning sophomore (like me) would be thinking detective mode, or combat story or espionage epic and we were then schooled in the many loftier aims of fiction, including the interior space of the characters, the beauty of the language, the free-fall rush of moral ambiguity, and all the things that get you published in the Prairie Schooner for an audience of seven people reading short stories between fellowship applications.

It’s a matter of balance. You need it all, and you especially need plot, and it may sound painfully obvious, but one of the qualities you really need is plausibility. I see so many Hollywood productions that suffer from either a premise or a reaction that just doesn’t seem likely. Take the no-good-very-awful-really-tasteless movie “No Strings Attached,” where Ashton Kutcher wakes up in a strange woman’s apartment, unable to remember why all he has to wear is a towel. Instead of just wrapping himself in it as soon as he regains consciousness, he pretends to act as though he is clothed, just by toying with the towel as other people walk into the room. It’s an utterly false series of moments, made more and more unlikely with each attempt at physical comedy.

Or consider one of Pan Am’s middle aged, lecherous pilots who asks a stewardess, mid flight, to actually lean over the cockpit control panel and adjust a setting on the air ship (the one holding 200 people), so that he can get a better look at her. By way of revenge she then spills a drink on the skipper at 35,000 feet. While I suppose it’s remotely conceivable, it seems like such a contrived effort at conflict that it has “just go with it” written in big red letters on the side of the script.

I hope we haven’t had too many moments like this in Courage, but the whole crew has now reviewed the script for episode three and all I can say is there is value in so many wise eyes looking at the story. When you are constructing a fictional world, you are bound, as the writer, to propose a few human transactions that smell like baloney.   Most stories can survive a few of those, but our goal is NONE. I think we’re there on this episode.

Perfection

The more I read about the business side of television and film, the more I understand that, with Courage, we need to be very close to absolutely perfection in order to sustain ourselves — and even then it’s a long shot. Why? The lights and the sound stages and even the production expertise are a very, very small part of the global entertainment leviathan. If you think about the 8 hours a day spent in front of the television by the industrialized world, you realize that the very retail system of delivering stories to the public is their primary asset.   They own the customers.   In other words, they own the many different ways customers are likely to buy entertainment — theaters, cable TV, rental stores, and the big video-on-demand channels.    They merely sign agreements with production companies to keep the channels full of content 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Another way of putting it is this:  if a retail giant like Wal Mart had a reason for selling mediocre dish washer detergent, they could.   They could sell a LOT of it.   There would be a chemist on the sideline saying, “but I don’t understand;  my detergent is far better.” Well, the little guy’s detergent not only has to be better, it has to be so good people can’t stop talking about it.  They have to like it so much Walmart gets sick of hearing requests for it.

Similarly, if an entertainment mogul wanted to make his no talent girlfriend into a celebrity, he could.   If he wanted to turn his brother in law’s bad idea for a sitcom into a reality, he could.  With immediate exposure to millions of viewers, those decisions may never become run away hits, but they would achieve an audience, and maybe even establish a few long term careers and someone would be still be able to sell millions of dollars in advertisement.

Of course, it never is quite that dramatic by way of degree.  It’s not the really, really awful detergent Wall Mart sells.  It’s the really pretty good detergent that leaves the high quality maker lamenting slightly lower standards. It’s the so-so drama that isn’t quite as nuanced as Mad Men but that still has a few good looking girls in it and real emotion every three episodes instead of every minute.

I recount all of this because every few days, I wander over to my Mom’s place (the only place around here on Riley’s Farm with cable television) and watch a few shows and wonder “why the hell isn’t Hollywood knocking down my door to license Courage, as is,” without wondering if, oh, someone like Josh Holloway isn’t available.

The answer:  Courage not only has to be better. It has to perfect.