[arg_discuss] Topic of the Week Oct. 26: Choices

[Kim Plowright]

I heard a genius thing about the way they  set up the productions of
Sacha Baron Cohen's stuff, the other day.

Instead of setting up a company to produce the film as a whole (and
hence limit liability to the shell company, rather than the investing
parent companies if there's legal action) - they set up a separate
holding company for each scene in the movie.

Hence, if something went wrong with a certain scene, it wouldn't bring
down the whole movie.

With Routes - I'm sure I've said this before - we had to clear
*everything* with the legal compliance team at the commissioning
channel. They were brilliant - not at all about 'shutting things down'
- but about asking us questions to make us think about why we were
doing things in certain ways. We had a lot of 'Ah...... yeeees. Right,
we'll rethink that.' moments in those meetings.

eg - sending people round to doorstep people. From the point of view
of the storyteller, this sounds like an awesome experience, and it's
really easy to forget that the reader/player might experience this in
a very different way. They also questioned sending people in to
schools 'from a drug company' - essentially, when you move stories
like this out of the proscenium and in to the 'real' you start hitting
issues around things like fraud law.

We were bound by things like OFCOM rules, and the channel's editorial
guidelines (Which are really worth reading).
http://www.independentproducerhandbook.co.uk/ (in particular, viewer
trust section)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/ifi/codes/bcode/
These are there for good reason: to protect the broadcaster, the indie
producer, and the public. The three docs above are a distillation of
70-odd years of experience with making public media - they've grown
out of problems with producers doing things like 'faking' guests on
talk shows, but have also grown from real incidents. For example,
there's a fairly well known case in the UK where the BBC did a 'real'
ghost hunt on live television one halloween, and a chap committed
suicide as a result of being scared by the programme.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwatch

I think, as a maker, you tend to assume the audience is 'like you' -
bright, playful, capable of navigating their way through the boundary
between fiction and reality. This really isn't the case: the audience
are diverse, and you can't guarantee that they're as literate at
reading these experiences as the makers.

I don't see any of these things as blocking creativity, or 'stopping'
things: it's all about a basic  duty of moral care to the audience.
Constraints are good for creativity - it stops you having to work with
a blank canvas!

There was also a point where an idea of getting a group of teenagers
up on to a roof where they'd witness a sniper shooting someone was
mooted. I think I said no to that one, purely because of trying to
arrange insurance and sufficient health and safety assessments
wouldn't have been feasible in the time. Kids! Guns! High places! noo!

2009/11/1 Zenox Bochastle <zenoxbochastle at gmail.com>:

>>Does Sasha Baron Coen have this problem?

>

> Heh. SBC barely avoids jail as it is. And he doesn't avoid prosecution.

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