On The Not

Fourteen months ago today, I was saying here that the On The Lot website had gone live and I was contemplating submitting a short. In the end, I didn't shoot one (wrote it out, it would have been cute), and when the deadline came up I told myself that I probably would not have shot it in a dazzling enough fashion to get a berth on the show.

Cut to this week, when the final six contestants ran their films. Their assignment was romantic comedy. Of the six that were shown, the only one with romantic spark was a film about the courtship of two office desklamps.



Wouldn't you guess that after this short (directed by the so far reliably charming Will Bigham, check the film out at the link), Carrie Fisher gave him a hard time about having very little dialogue?

My wife jokes that I am the only viewer that didn't give birth to one of the contestants, and while the ratings could never have been expected to be huge, there's one big honking reason why people are lining up to stay away from this show.

The stories suck. The stories onscreen and the story offscreen as well.

Can somebody get these guys some writers? Please?!

They announced the other night that the lucky winners of this week's show will be fortunate enough to feature Jerry O'Connell in their films next week.

Yeah, that'll fix it. Good work.

The first episodes showed some promise. The directors had made it to L.A. only to find they had to pitch a project the next day on one of five predetermined premises to judges Carrie Fisher, Garry Marshall and Brett Ratner. They spent the night preparing, for me a more relatable and compelling scenario than Idol wannabes who can't learn the words to "My Girl". There were interpersonal conflicts and artistic headbutting, the kind of thing you'd expect to see when you load fifty artists into a room and tell them the other 49 are out to beat them. It was good television.

By the end of the first week, there were 24 contestants left, and a new challenge to direct one page of a script on a real set with real actors in one hour, with six directors going home. The promo at the end of the show said to tune back the following Monday to see who would make the final eighteen.

And then the ratings came out.

And that following Monday brought us, instead of the 24 one-page scenes, 18 directors in a live show with a new host and not only no mention of the six who'd gone missing, but none of the internal conflict that had made the first shows so watchable.

I don't know if it was Fox or Mark Burnett or (most likely) the producers of the show who panicked and gutted the show down so much, but the next thing you know they're running one live show a week instead of the promised two-show formula that has been used for voting-public reality competitions thus far, thereby eliminating the last possibility of keeping viewers interested in the next episode.

There are even allegations online that Fox used the directors submission films that second week as though they'd been made in the intervening week, just to cut a week out of the show's timeline. The last two weeks cut two directors instead of one, and now the finale is set for just three weeks from now.

So, what went wrong? Well, certainly the lack of visible star power after Spielberg's name was thrown about so often in promotions. Could it have hurt to have him show up once in a while as a Trump-like figure? Even if it was just pretaped footage of his reaction to the shorts, you'd have him invested in the outcome throughout instead of the inevitable finale appearance.

The main reason this show has failed, however, goes back to the lack of story. Cutting the backstage conflicts paints too much of a glaze on the process. While there are still behind-the-scenes sequences, it's the same damn thing every week with the host appearing and one or two directors leaving, along with thirty-second capsules of the director at work. If you're familiar with The Apprentice, picture a show where all you see is the end result of whatever wacky promotion Trump has the teams perform, but none of the suite footage, no preparation footage, nothing, just a few minutes at some product launch or charity function. Boring. The story is in how they got there to the endpoint. Without it, there is no investment in the contestants.

What is left is the contestants' films and a horribly-produced live show. The lighting alone may have been responsible for one contestant's departure (she looked like someone smudged her upper lip with motor oil before each episode), and the host has no credibility as the most sophisticated ad-lib she seems capable of is, "That was great, guys."

After all this butchery, though, if these films were great, none of the rest would matter to me, and there are bright spots to be found usually once a week. Where these films fail, however, is universal.

These filmmakers aren't writers. The judges keep looking for story and each week they get less meat and more flash. As long as they're being set up with premises and sets and actors (Jerry O'Connell!) and an assembled crew, give them real scripts!

And when one of your contestants gives you an original take on a cliched assignment like romantic comedy, don't give him grief because he didn't make a lamp talk.