Jake Kasdan: TV — The Movie
In Jake Kasdan’s new feature film, The TV Set, Sigourney Weaver plays Lenny, a network television boss who never met a script she couldn’t love — with sufficient rewriting. “Honestly, Mike, I love this project, love it, I really do. But frankly, original scares me a little,” says Lenny. The object of her affection in this case is “The Wexler Chronicles,” a one-from-the-heart script for a new series by an earnest TV writer, Mike Klein, played by David Duchovny. “If I don’t worry about the content of my show, then I’m part of the problem. I’m making the world more mediocre,” says Mike.
And so the game is on. But the outcome, Kasdan suggests, is very much determined by a universal law of television development that works to flatten even the most promising script through an irresistible process of “helpful” iteration. In fact, Mike’s script, initially loved, is incrementally changed until it is radically transformed by Lenny and her network cohort as it moves from script through casting to pilot. It’s a process Kasdan knows well. Besides directing two previous features, Zero Effect and Orange County, he experienced the laws of television development firsthand directing pilots for several cutting-edge, cult-inducing, short-lived TV shows, including Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared.
Kasdan makes it clear that the movie is not a true story, but rather a distillation of his experience in television. “The people in it are not me, they’re made-up people,” he says. “The pilot is a made-up pilot. The dialog is all fictional. That said, it’s all real.”
Results Are In
Although it is specifically about television, The TV Set was inspired by Kasdan’s close watching of the 2004 presidential election. “It was an idea that I had a long time ago, but I actually started writing it the day after the election. It felt to me that what we had seen in the campaigns was similar to what happens to the pilot in my movie, which was basically that the most complicated story lines and the most complicated people get simplified so that they can be sold to a massive audience at the expense of their nuance and detail and complexity. And what you get is a watered down product.”
Motivated by his massive exposure to candidate spin and election speak, Kasdan was able to write his script in just six weeks. “I had a spec script that I started showing around to actors, which is kind of how that process works now,” he says. “You try to get the money, and you try to get the actors, and you try to get both of them at the same time.”
Shot in HD
To try to make the film inexpensively, Kasdan opted to shoot in HD instead of on film. “The more money you need, the harder it is to make a movie,” he says. “And I felt that this idea, because it was very compact, with just a few locations, could be done at a much reduced scale. I’d seen a lot of really good-looking high-definition photography by then, and I felt as if I wanted to take a crack at it.”
Kasdan attributes a large part of his success with HD to the talent he used to light and shoot the film. To effectively ground comedically critical exchanges between Mike and the network, which giddily bridge the real and the surreal, in a convincingly natural setting, Kasdan hired as his director of photography Uta Briesewitz, whose work he had admired on the HBO show The Wire. “That’s a great show, and a great looking show,” he says.
Although Kasdan chose HD chiefly for reasons of cost, he came away more impressed with its overall efficiency and quality. “There are enormous advantages that far surpass expense in terms of my process and the way that I shoot,” he says. “The two biggest differences on the set are that you can see exactly what your footage is going to look like while you’re standing there, which is just not the case with film. And if you don’t like what you see, you can make an adjustment. It’s a level of control that solves a million problems later on. That’s a very big thing.”
Kasdan says the advantages in shooting in HD are evident even in the quality of the performances he was able to get out of his actors. “I do a lot of comedy and generally like to be able to let the tape run, to let the actors go off the script a little bit and come back to it,” he says. “You get this by eliminating the incredible expense of doing that on film, that’s where you do start to make some real savings and it facilitates something good creatively.”
Post Ops
The significant advantages of shooting in HD carried over into the cutting room, largely because Kasdan, a longtime user of Apple technology (he remembers starting on an Apple IIe at age eight), decided to cut the film with editor Tara Timpone in Final Cut Pro. “Final Cut Pro supports HD in a really great way, because the HD workflow process is right at the heart of its design,” says Kasdan.
Kasdan, whose past projects had been mostly cut in traditional large and inflexible editing suites, was especially impressed with the flexible workflow that Final Cut delivered. “We loved the portability of it,” he says. “While I was shooting the movie, my editor was home cutting the previous day’s work on an iMac in her house.”
Editor Timpone, who had first used Final Cut to edit a previous low-budget project on a laptop at home, seconds Kasdan’s endorsement of Final Cut’s portability, but was even more impressed with its interface. “I really liked the features in the timeline. The way you edit resembles actual film editing, more so than with other systems,” she says. “That’s what I like most about it.”
Now Playing
Having wrapped and opened The TV Set, Kasdan — currently directing the comedy Walk Hard starring John C. Reilly, which he co-wrote with frequent collaborator Judd Apatow — believes that the combination of accessible high-definition cameras with off-the-shelf tools like Final Cut Studio have forever changed the process of making movies.
“It’s just become so compact and consumer achievable,” he says. “Now in Final Cut Pro you can cut in full-res HD, spit out a pristine HD tape from your computer, project it, and it will look like it does in a movie theater, or better. All of this has the effect of making filmmaking much more democratic, so it’s about talent and skill rather than trying to find the millions of dollars you need to achieve even one scene. You just don’t need that any more.”
Gallery
David Duchovny, as writer Mike Klein, offers the sign of peace to network bosses.
Ioan Gruffud, as new network executive Richard McCallister, struggles to support Mike and still produce a hit show.
Sigourney Weaver (Lenny) and Ioan Gruffud (Richard) develop a few “thoughts” on the set.
Director Jake Kasdan on location for The TV Set.
Mike (David Duchovny), with his manager and director, watches things go south.
Network boss Lenny (Sigourney Weaver) presents her new season programming at the “upfronts.”
