A DVD recommendation

I just saw Little Caesar, a 1931 gangster picture starring Edward G. Robinson, see? The movie was good, but the DVD had a really fun feature. I know I'm probably the last DVD fan to discover this.

It's "Warner Night at the Movies," with an optional and pointless introduction from the late Gene Siskel. (He's the dead one, right? Probably.) Anyway, this feature plays the movie after a preview, a newsreel, one or two shorts, and a cartoon. The full old-timey experience. It's a lot of fun...especially projected...

Destiny, thy name is Austin Powers in Goldmember

We've found it at last: the holy grail of movies. Austin Powers in Goldmember.

Whoa there, friend. I'm not saying that Goldmember is anything more than the worst movie I've seen in recent memory. Because it is, in fact, the worst movie I've seen in recent memory.

But it does have a Smashmouth song on the soundtrack...

...and it does, indeed, feature "the robot."

Long time Furdell.com readers know that, by scrolling down the page and looking to the left, you can find two movie lists. The first lists movies, always comedies and often starring Adam Sandler, in which a character does the robot -- that breakdancing technique that is the Hollywood equivalent of laff trak, because it tells you when to laugh without actually being funny.

The second list attempts to document the millions of films for which approximately $2.50 was shelled out to secure the rights to any given song by Smashmouth, especially "All Star."

We have tirelessly pursued that holy grail of movies that has a Smashmouth song AND robot dancing...until today. And thank god somebody else made it so we don't have to.

I'm going to assume that it took us four years to discover that Goldmember had robot dancing only because nobody watched Goldmember, until last night when I took one for the team. But I know there are more robot dance movies out there. Stay alert, faithful reader.

To find the robot scene in Goldmember, just go to the part right before the most racist scene.

If you're on trial, you must be guilty.

Here's a description of James Woods's new CBS drama "Shark":

Multiple Academy Award nominee and Emmy Award winner James Woods stars as Sebastian Stark, a charismatic, supremely self-confident defense attorney who, after a shocking outcome in one of his cases and a personal epiphany, brings his cutthroat tactics to the prosecutor's office. Though Stark is seeking to redeem himself, he has no intention of cooling his underhanded approach to cases just because he's now working for the "good guys."

I just saw The Devil's Advocate, which made an even more literal claim that working as a defense attorney rather than a prosecutor is the equivalent of selling your soul, both because the pay is better and because your clients are always 100% guilty child rapists. Gee, good thing the system works so well, or we might try to convict innocent people!

Andrew's Local News Adventures Continue

I started working in local TV in Eugene back in late October. In under ten months, I've been promoted twice, from part time to full time technical director, and then from technical director to director.

I had been directing the weekend news shows -- the simplest and least watched news shows, where they put all the newbies like me -- for only a month or so when the possibility of another promotion reared its head. A higher-up director, the guy who hired me in fact, moved to Spokane.

It's not clear if I'll get promoted to the weekday 5 and 11 o' clock directing spots, and if I had to guess I'd say the odds were against me from the start because of my relative inexperience. But, in the interim while the people upstairs figure out what to do, I've been filling in on the 5 o' clock show, which is about 10 times more complex than the weekend shows I'm used to, and it has been awesome.

That's the setup. Now you're ready to read about yesterday. Press on, true believer.

The last time I had an adrenaline rush on the job was when I started, as technical director on the morning show. My station's morning show is the most highly-rated one in town -- more watched than the other two stations combined, even though we're the #2 station overall. At any rate, there's an easy-to-understand thrill in live TV, when you know that if you make a mistake it will be instantly noticed by thousands of people simultaneously.

After a couple of weeks I stopped making mistakes, and the adrenaline stopped flowing, which is a relief, because the morning show lasts 90 minutes. When I learned how to direct for the weekend show, I didn't have the same butterflies. As you probably realize, I'm a pretty confident guy.

Well, weekends are pretty easy. There's one anchor, who also serves as a producer, and she's great at both, which means less work for me. The show is divided into five predictable blocks:

1. The first and longest block is mostly just a string of "VO-SOTs" as we call them, or "V.O. Bytes" is another one I've heard. VO is "voice over" and SOT is "sound on tape," meaning a taped soundbyte, usually under ten seconds long. Other than commercial breaks, VO-SOTs are the most routine part of the job. A news show at its simplest will be just VO-SOT after VO-SOT.

   Also during this block (for the 6 o'clock, but not the 11 o' clock) there's a reporter, who shows up once during the show, either "on set" (next to the anchor at the desk) or, as she says, "cam nining it" (reporting her story from camera 9 in the newsroom, a camera whose only function must be to prove that there's a newsroom back there).



2. Block 2 is for weather. The meteorologist, who is, impossibly, much younger than me, predicts the future for three minutes while I sit back and relax, turning on my headset every thirty seconds or so to give a time cue.


3. Block 3 is like a very short first block, with just one or two stories, both read by the anchor. National or world news might get put here if it's not big.


4. Block 4 is sports. This is the hardest part to direct. There's a lot of ad libbing, so you have to use telepathy to figure out when to go from one tape to the next; and, depending on the sports anchor, there's a danger that he might go way too long and leave us with no time for the last block. I remember a weekend broadcast (back when I was a part-timer, and therefore was just doing audio on the weekend show) that ended with a fifth block that was exactly 1-second long and consisted of the anchor and the sports anchor looking into the camera and saying, and I quote, "Bye!"


5. If you have enough time, the last block has a story, a ten-second weather update, and a goodbye from the anchor, the sports anchor, and the meteorologist. If you don't have time, the first two are expendible.

That's a lot of set-up, I know. But I want you to fully appreciate the complexity of the 5 o' clock weekday show, and specifically the one I directed yesterday.

Like the weekend shows, the weekday 5 is a half-hour show broken into five segments, and the first one is the longest. There's no sports -- that shows up in the hour-long 6 o' clock show. And instead of one anchor, there's two -- a seemingly minor variation, but it's another thing to think about when you have to specify whose microphone should be turned on and who should be reading what.

But the biggest difference of all is the remotes. Whereas the weekend show has one reporter, the weekdays could have half a dozen, some in distant bureaus like Coos Bay and Roseburg and Corvallis. All of these people need to be coordinated by me, and they all seem to show up in the first block, which makes for some hectic directing.

My confidence started waning around 4:15 yesterday when I still didn't have scripts in front of me. It takes me about 15 minutes to mark a half-hour of scripts with the complex monologue I'll be giving -- commands to the audio person, the switcher, the tape ops people, the floor crew, and to the ominous Master Control. Yesterday's would take even longer, because I could see from the rundown that it involved a lot more remotes than usual, and hence was much more complex than any show I had done before. Even scarier, one of the remote reporters wasn't one of our people, but somebody on loan from another affiliate. I needed time to talk to all these people, check their microphones and make sure they could hear me and knew when they'd be on air.

The first block would have an on-set, and a reporter at cam 9; Ben at the Coos Bay bureau on receiver 27; Nicole in Corvallis on receiver 3; Casey, reporting from the fairgrounds, on receiver 1, and she would be handing her microphone to meteorologist Stephanie for the weather segments, which presented its own problems; and this guy, whose name apparently started with 'P' (Pete? Paul?), God-knows-where, reporting on a fire on receiver 17.

When I finally did get scripts, I found that many pages were blank -- they hadn't been written yet. That can be frustrating. I could mark them immediately, but then someone will come in later with reprinted pages and I'll want to mark those. It sounds like a minor concern, but it's important to know what a reporter is going to say and when they expect you to go to each tape.

About fifteen minutes before the show started, we learned that Pete or Paul or whatever wasn't going to be on eceiver 17 at all, but rather on receiver 3, Nicole's receiver. That meant we should check P's microphone now so that we could then switch receiver 3 over to Corvallis, since Nicole's story came before P's. Then, in the middle of the first block, Master Control would have to switch receiver 3 over to this guy whose name I couldn't figure out.

Unbeknownst to me, this receiver-swap was necessitated by a problem getting tape from Pete/Paul. First of all, we thought he'd be introducing a package -- a minute-or-more full-sound tape with narration on it -- but instead it was going to be a VO-SOT, which we were supposed to receive at 4:45. Trouble on our end delayed the transfer, so my producer -- who is, thankfully, the best producer we currently have -- was not in the booth sitting next to me at 4:56:25, two minutes and three seconds from broadcast time, when my confidence began to falter.

I had been unable to contact Pete or Paul on receiver 3. We could see him and hear him, but I couldn't communicate with him. I was sure my producer knew how, but she had vanished. The floor director offered to fetch her, but I decided against it -- wherever the producer was, she was probably doing something important. I had Master Control switch receiver 3 over to Corvallis, and the show began.

The 5 o' clock starts with a bang called the Grabber. It's a brief tease of three or four stories, super-fast, and often with bureau people involved. It starts with an animation, which reveals -- via an effect called a "lumens key", which replaces the "pure black" on the tape with whatever we want to replace it with -- to a VO. Then we wipe to Nicole, then to another tape, and finally to Stephanie, before mixing to the shotbox animation that identifies and opens the show.

In a span of something like fifteen seconds, here's what I say:

"Stand by, ready Y¹ revealing to A and theme, roll Y, sting it², ready A roll A, key their mics³, cue⁴, stand by⁵, ready receiver 3, key Nicole, wipe, go Nicole, ready B, stand by⁶, key anchors, roll B wipe, ready receiver one, stand by⁷, key Stephanie, wipe, go Stephine, ready shotbox open, roll it, and mix.

¹A, B, X, and Y are tape decks. Y is the backup deck, used for animations or story-adds. Why X and Y? Because C and D sound too much like B. Also, they call eleven "yo" in craps because it sounds like seven.

²"Sting it" is my cue to the audio person to play a musical theme that starts suddenly.

³The audio person knows I mean to turn on the anchors' microphones specifically. I've also heard directors say to "open" mics, but I think it's important to save the extra syllable.

⁴I'm telling the floor director to tell the anchors to start talking.

⁵I'm speaking this directly into Nicole's ear by pressing a button corresponding to her earpiece.

⁶No special button this time. The floor director will inform the anchors that their mics are about to be hot.

⁷You guessed it -- I'm talking to Stephanie, the meteorologist, on receiver 1.

That's the first fifteen seconds. If I forget any of those cues, I'll stumble and start messing up other cues, and the whole thing can unravel and look like a mess on screen.

I have to hop in the shower and ride my bike to work now. (I've been trying to get some excercise, you see.) So, long story short, somehow everything worked out. We switched receiver 3 after Nicole's story, we figured out the cues for Pete/Paul's VO and SOT even though we didn't have a complete script from him, Stephanie managed to hand Casey her microphone without both of them bursting into flames or something, and we got through the whole show without a single mistake. I still think I'm not likely to get promoted, which is a shame, because the 5 o'clock provides a pulse-pounding challenge I enjoy a great deal. But at least nobody can say I'm not ready.

Six Degrees of Awkward

I just came up with a great idea for a game you can play at home! All you need is a cell phone, a high school education, and a group of drunk friends. Here's how it works...

Think of someone you knew at least 10 years ago, either in high school or college, but that you lost touch with completely after graduation, and so did (probably) everyone you still keep in touch with.

Starting with only the numbers currently in your cell phone -- no fair using outside sources like the internet -- call one of those friends you're still in touch with. You're only allowed to ask them for a phone number from their cell phone.

(Note: If you're too old to own a cell phone, I guess you can use your address book or rolodex or whatever old people have.)

You have one hour, during which you'll phone people you haven't spoken to or thought about in a decade, to find the person you had in mind in the first place. And you're not allowed to tell anyone why you're looking for this person, either.

If, within the allotted hour, you do manage to get this person's phone number, then you must call them and keep them on the phone for 15 minutes while you catch up in front of all your drunken friends, who watch in rapt attention as a completely awkward moment unfolds before them.

Well, now that I'm writing it out it doesn't sound so awesome.

We watched the first six hours of MTV so you don't have to

Recently, VH1 Classic aired the first day of MTV programming in celebration of that channel's 25th Anniversary. I've just finished the first six hours. Here's what I've learned...

• The station-opening sequence, in which a spaceship takes freaking forever to launch, takes freaking forever. I can't imagine anyone enjoyed watching that.
• A good 30% of the videos in the first six hours are either Rod Stewart or the Pretenders. Especially Rod Stewart, who plays at least twice per hour. And the Pretenders songs are all pretty obscure.
• One of the videos, Thank You For Being a Friend, was probably an awesome hit to rock out to until seven years later when it became the Golden Girls theme.
• Speaking of Golden Girls, check out Boys Keep Swinging by David Bowie, which ends in a truly creepy runway show featuring middle-aged rockers dressed like old women.?
• I totally forgot how great the video for "Once in a Lifetime" by the Talking Heads was. Extremely great, that's how great.
• Watching a lot of 1981 videos in a row reminds you that they only had like three video effects back then. Extremely popular: the chromakey (blue/green screen) effect. Leo Sayer's More Than I Can Say probably blew some minds back then. (The good stuff is towards the end.)
• Carly Simon makes an appearance with a completely awful song called Vengeance, which ends with a hilarious freeze frame of Carly rocking out.
• We've established that 30% of the videos are Rod Stewart or the Pretenders. About 50% are super boring concert videos of bands like REO Speedwagon, .38 Special, and The Who; and another 15% are songs and/or artists I've never heard of. Who the hell is Split Enz, and why do they have three videos in the first six hours?