By Jon Silberg, February 27, 2007
Every week, more than a million and half listeners tune in to Public Radio International's This American Life to hear the probing, often funny and revealing radio documentary hosted by Ira Glass. For 15 years, listeners have found the program's unusual stories and fascinating people so compelling that the show seemed to many television network execs a perfect fit for television. Glass was game in principle to make that leap, but the devil was in the details. None of the numerous offers actually panned out until the Showtime proposal came along.
"The thing that had been happening for years and years," Glass recounts, "was that someone from a network would approach us about adapting the show for TV. We'd say, 'If some filmmaker could explain to us what the show would be-how it would work, what it would look like-then sure, we might be interested.' And these people would say, 'No, no! You don't understand how television works. In television, you make the deal first and figure those things out later.' But we had no interest in making a deal unless we knew those things first. When Showtime called, we'd gone through this so many times that we were actually trying to shoo them away. I said, 'If you want to even talk about this, you would have to first find filmmakers we respect who have some ideas about how a television version of This American Life would work.' So they hooked us up with Killer Films, the people who did Boys Don't Cry and Far From Heaven and one amazing film after another. They were kind of calling our bluff."
The radio show generally consists of several segments tied together by a theme-"Evening the score," "It seemed like a good idea at the time"-and is made up, naturally, of words-interviews with people recounting an anecdote that may seem bizarre or perfectly ordinary but eventually takes on some kind of strange, often ironic turn that reflects the theme of the night and touches on some core issue that affects all of us. These interviews, some underscoring and a little commentary essentially make up the content of the show. The intimacy of the interviews, the making public of things most people would prefer to keep private, is the essence of the radio show's success. However, interviews plus music does not equal great television.
Viewers of the six-episode season will meet a man who clones his beloved pet bull with unfortunate results, a woman who tries unsuccessfully to use her boyfriend's death on Sept. 11 as material for a stand-up comedy act, a man who spends what most of us would call an inordinate amount of time at a mausoleum he created for his deceased wife, a teenager rethinking his ideas about love, and many other vignettes. Some of these started as radio shows and expanded to the television series; others are original to TV.
Glass and his staff conferred with director/co-executive producer Christopher Wilcha about ways to create imagery that would complement the stories. They chose an approach opposite of the reality TV look of constantly roving cameras and chaotic movements. Instead, they build clean, aesthetic long shots and use a lot of extreme close-ups of objects-almost abstract images-to help underline the stories without being too literal.
"Ira said he wanted the images of the TV show to work the way the music works on the radio show," Wilcha recalls. "I thought that sounded promising. The images will help tell the story yet be slightly abstract, not hyper literal."
Wilcha, Glass and Cinematographer Adam Beckman decided they needed to cover the interview portions with two cameras-one close up and one far off-allowing for a frame that provides a great deal of context to the subjects. This setup would also allow the staff to "copy edit" the materials without visible tricks like jump cuts or dissolves. The shots would be locked down, classical compositions, an equivalent of a deadpan delivery that lets the people themselves, their words and their environments tell the story without any self-conscious camera placement or movement.
Interviews were generally done with very little crew at all. "It was usually about just turning lights off, closing blinds and adding one or two lights," says Beckman, who carried a Photoflex Octagon soft box and a small ARRI light kit.
From the start, Wilcha was interested in the idea of not shooting the show with really high-end gear. The budget wouldn't have allowed them the freedom they wanted if they'd tried. "I wanted to see if we could push the newer consumer-grade camcorders and just play with the color temperature and find all the beauty we could," he says. "I didn't want everybody constantly thinking we always needed a better camera, lens or filter. The radio people do so much with such simple elements and tools, and it was a cool challenge to try the equivalent in video. The smaller cameras also allowed us the mobility and movement we needed."
Beckman shot the interviews with two Panasonic AG-HVX200 camcorders in standard-definition mode. "They looked pretty great," Beckman says. "The HD was great, but the producers didn't want us to shoot on P2 cards. There was too much material, too many terabytes of storage. There's a comfort factor to a producer of having tape on a shelf. There were only a few times where we did use the cards, when we wanted an effect like in-camera slow motion." A Panasonic AJ-SDX900 camcorder, which shoots that manufacturer's flavor of DVCAM, was used for additional shooting.
The radio show staff played the same role in the creation of these episodes as they do on the radio show, but they learned quickly that there are some pronounced, essential differences in how the two media are produced. They were used to doing any number of interviews for segments that never pan out. The commitment to go ahead with even a bare-bones video shoot is far greater in cost and effort than it is to go out and record an audio interview.
"Showtime understood that a few times we would go out in the field and shoot something at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars and it would have to be killed," says Glass. "It's documentary filmmaking and it's a numbers game. You have to hope that something pans out. But we had to be a little more careful about what to shoot than we are in radio about what to record. So you really do the research and the preparation and you pre-interview people."
There were other visual considerations that had just not mattered in the world of radio production. "We didn't want any interviews to happen during sunset," Beckman notes. "We wanted to either be able to take advantage of available light or come in and do one lighting setup. We didn't want any lighting changes. These are little things that are just different from what [the radio staff] is used to. They never have to grapple with deciding what it is we're supposed to look at."
Beckman wanted to use the form of his shots to convey something of the content of what the people were saying, and so he'd work with framing, color and lighting in any way he could to make that work. "For the woman who lost her boyfriend in 9-11 and decided to turn the experience into a standup comedy act that bombed," he says, "we had some of her performances on tape, and we watch her as she watches the tapes. Chris asked me to use the monitor to light her face. So we put the monitor a foot away from her face and the light gave a wonderful, flattering but also melancholy glow. This cold light from the monitor reflects the feeling of the story in an organic way.
"In the episode about teenagers falling in love, we wanted to shoot a family at dinner," he adds. "Instinctively, we set the camera up at the dining room table, but it was kind of wrong and awkward, so we took the camera outside and shot them through a window and a door and they are semi-disguised through reflections. There's something very beautiful about it. Also in that segment, we used the HVX200 and the P2 card to shoot the kids in school in slow motion. We wanted to shoot it more as a way of seeing behavior. The camera was very helpful for that because we wanted real in-camera slow motion, not a post effect."
For the story about the widower who spends his time in a shrine he built in memory of his wife, Beckman used composition to help underscore the man's emotional situation. "It's really an opulent place," says the cinematographer, "and he spent so much time there as a commitment to his wife. He has a bench on either side. For the interview, we sat him on a bench outside the mausoleum. If you put him off to the side and the interviewer is off camera, the shot is composed as a two-shot and her presence is in the frame. You can see the cemetery, too, so the frame is a kind of portrait of this man's commitment."
Glass quickly came to appreciate the many subtle ways Wilcha and Beckman could add life to the stories with techniques like these, but he recalls that what finally sold him on the idea that television could add something substantial to the format was actually both simpler and more profound. He noticed it on the very first segment the team shot.
"There is this man who had a pet bull that he loved," says Glass. "The bull dies and he uses cloning to create an exact copy of this bull, but the new bull isn't as friendly and it tries to kill him. There's a scene in the hospital after he's been gored by this bull where he says he's going to get back out there and not accept defeat. He's going to train that bull and that bull will love him. It's a poignant and brave speech. We had originally run the story on the radio show, and it works very well on the radio, but on the TV show we see there's a moment where he gets a look on his face of utter exhaustion and defeat, and that doesn't come through on the radio.
"I had thought, 'Oh, it would be fun to do TV,'" Glass says. "I'd worried about what might not translate from radio to TV, but I never thought, 'What would TV add? What would be better with pictures?' But the look on somebody's face is an intensely powerful thing, and his face communicated so much that right there. I said, 'Oh, wow! This is great!"
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