It’s been a whirlwind week in Hollywood.
The actors and writers are now both officially on strike, essentially shutting down film and TV production pretty much across the board.
At the same time, a TV show called Jury Duty, where writers and actors work together in a tightly planned but loosely scripted/partly improvised new type of workplace comedy/mockumentary/faux reality program, received four Emmy award nominations, including one for best comedy series.
Amazing what members of those two unions, along with help from many of the others, can do when they join forces.
The conceit of Jury Duty is that one unsuspecting real-life person (Note: As opposed to the rest of us perceived fake ones who work in Hollywood) is filmed serving in a three-week trial that ONLY HE DOES NOT KNOW is fictional.
But rather than be the butt of a cruel joke, he instead emerges as the HERO of the story, reminding us that not every random human in the world is the piece of sh-t we default think they might be these days.
Even in Hollywood.
The success of Jury Duty depends on the close-knit collaboration between a group of dozens of actors playing jury, judge, lawyers, defendants and court employees, with the writers who created not only their characters but the countless scenarios, plot points and alternate scenarios and plot points designed to bend to the spontaneous will of the one real life character among them.
In some cases writers double as actors, actors wind up writing (Note: Okay improv-ing via what WAS written) as they try to bring back the hero to the point of the scene, and non-acting writers huddle off-camera to create some new tweaks and challenges that will play out the quirky humanity of the characters and story actually being created to maximum effect.
It’s not that the producers, directors and crew of Jury Duty are not essential to pulling this gargantuan effort off. But it’s that special sibling-like kinship between writers and actors that has existed since storytelling began, that conjures the magic everything else draws from.
Binge watching all eight half-hour episodes Friday night after a week of listening to the overpaid, stone-brained studio and corporate heads (whose businesses only exist because of all of this magic) bitch and moan about their 21st century shifting business models, provided some temporary relief.
(Note: This week it was the newly two-year contracted, at $50-$60 million plus salary, Disney chief Bob Iger, calling working actors’ requests for some guarantee that a machine couldn’t duplicate their digital likeness from one day of work, in perpetuity, and over as many projects as they like, UNREALISTIC.
Unrealistic?
The only thing unrealistic is that studios and streaming platforms across the board WON’T do this and more. And maybe take their first-born. And if you don’t believe me, check out my post from last month about Black Mirror’s sadly prescient and pandemic-written season six opener, Joan Is Awful.).
Nevertheless, all of that writer-actor simpatico on Jury Duty was also energizing to me as a member of both the WGA and IATSE, and as an admirer of the many talents of so many unknown, just plain working actors I’ve come across over the years.
Because it reminded me of what we can do together. And how much power that partnership wields.
Jury Duty might not be your thing but it is yet another strange, new iteration of hybrid storytelling in a hybrid media world desperately in need of something new, and maybe even…..original?
It started as a workplace comedy by two veteran workplace comedy writers, evolved when some executive producers associated with iconoclastic actor Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat suggested the faux reality element, and went on from there.
Borat wasn’t my thing but Jury Duty was. Go figure. I tried to and suddenly my mind went to Netflix’s Squid Game, also not my thing but certainly as original as either of the former two.
And so it goes. And goes.
Until it is gone.
Not everything can be Casablanca, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, E.T., Raging Bull, Titanic, Parasite, or heaven forbid, Top Gun: Maverick and Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.
Nor should it be.
Still, if you don’t respond to mixed media metaphors think of it this way.
The great Norman Lear created Archie Bunker, loosely based on his father, but the equally great character actor Carroll O’Connor brought him to life.
The same way Tony Soprano came from the complicated mind of Sopranos creator-writer David Chase, only to be made indelible by the until then unrecognized brilliance of another late, great character actor, James Gandolfini.
It is these kinds of collaborations that moves entertainment forward and allows it to reach new heights.
Not only onscreen but off.
Amazing what writers and actors can do when they partner up, especially when their own very real lives are at stake.
The studio and corporate heads may not be listening now.
But they will.
Or their entire new 21st century business models will fall apart.
Fran Drescher’s SAF AFTRA strike announcement
notes from a chair 