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

[Hugh Davies]

Very interesting and useful stuff
Thanks Kim


On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 12:00 AM, Kim Plowright <kim.plowright at gmail.com>wrote:


> 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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