Week 5 - Wires and Lights

I think we all felt rather ashamed after Screenwriting this week. Richard had asked for the speakers of the debate next Monday to prepare their speeches and none of them were at an adequate level. However we got our act together throughout the rest of the week and I began to really look forward to the debate.

A nice relaxed class with Adam on Monday afternoon and we watched Takin’ Over the Asylum; a classic example of bleak Scottish filmmaking. Seems to have more depth than most American TV shows which can be very sugar-coated and one dimensional. However, this means it is not so easily consumed; it is a bit too heavy and serious. I did enjoy the spectacle of David Tennant as a ‘loony’, as they put it; quite a contrast to the good old Doctor.

Exciting stuff on Tuesday morning. Basically a job offer for an event known as Show Light. It’s not so much a job offer though as an opportunity for the BBC to take advantage of cheap student labour but of course I’m fine with that because we get experience on a live shoot and the chance to almost run a studio (and free meals!). The guy did talk for ages about who they were hoping to have speaking (which doesn’t really affect us all that much) and used up almost all our camera time. However we had enough time to get out the monitors and learn how to calibrate both them and the viewfinder.

I had rather a busy Wednesday. MER meeting in the morning, which was very interesting and I think will be very useful in the future, then a Programme meeting and then we watched Erin Brockovich. Yet again, I underestimated how vital the star was to the success of the movie. As a Julia Roberts film it was rather good. As a Stephen Soderbergh film it was fairly average. We were covering structure of a screenplay on Monday and I did notice that the film managed to follow very closely the accepted Hollywood structure. I suppose the real story was pretty good Hollywood material from the beginning; a single mother taking on a big company. It’s that kind of David and Goliath situation again which audiences always enjoy.

We’re getting on to a bit of marketing in Andy’s class; looking at trailers and posters. It’s terrible really. How commercial the whole thing is. I actually really enjoy looking at how they sell films but it is a bit of a shame that it seems to be all about the money and very little about how good the film is.

Good Night, and Good Luck was actually a really good film. I liked the style and the attention to detail but it was quite a tiring watch. It seemed a lot longer than it was simply because there was no music to move it along and they did use rather long clips of actual 50s television footage. Ever since studying The Crucible in Higher Drama, which Arthur Miller wrote in response to McCarthyism, I’ve been very interested in that period of history. So this film was very illuminating on how exactly events happened and the part Edward R. Murrow had to play. When I read his speech I had imagined him as rather a benevolent, kindly gentleman; rather different from the character portrayed in Clooney’s film. It annoyed me that he would look at the camera to say "Good Night -" and then look away when he said "and Good Luck" as if he didn't really mean it. He did it everytime and I would think Ed Murrow would have been much more sincere than that. One other thing struck me whilst watching it: they smoked a lot of cigarettes in the 1950s!

The Ross/Brand incident, where they left an offensive message on Andrew Sachs' answering machine, was discussed in class on Friday morning. What it shows, I think, is that the BBC is not taking sufficient responsibility for what it broadcasts. What concerns me most is that the BBC should be providing a service for the public and it is the first place people go for quality TV or radio. We have to ask: are we getting the quality we expect? In my opinion the answer is no. If that is the case then something must be done.