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Excerpted from: Supernatural: The Official Companion Season 2. Titan Books, 2008: 149-150.
( Read more... )Lots of things in our everyday world are there by accident. If I trip over a stone that causes me to bump into someone, that jostling encounter is probably not part of a higher design. It’s just a random occurrence of the sort that happens all the time, with no enormous significance in the real world. There is a temptation to treat film and television in a similar manner, as if spontaneous things occur by chance. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Hollywood films and network television shows are some of the most highly scrutinized, carefully constructed, least random works imaginable. Of course, we know this, having read Entertainment Weekly. We all know that it takes thousands of people to create mainstream media: directors and actors, grips and gaffers. We know that producing film and television is a highly coordinated effort by dedicated professionals, but to most people it’s a bit of a mystery what all these people do. When we watch film and television, we are encouraged to forget about all that mysterious collective labor. A movie usually asks us to get caught up in the story being told, in the world that has been created for us, not to be aware of the behind-the-scenes effort that brought us this story and this world. We tend to forget the thousands of minute decisions that consciously construct this artificial world.
When I put on a shirt in the morning, I do so with very little thought (as my students will tell you). A movie character’s shirt is chosen by a professional whose sole job is to think about what kind of shirt this character would wear. Similar decisions are made for props, sound, cutting, and so on. Most mediamakers work hard to exclude the random from their fictional worlds. Sets are built so that the mediamaker can have absolute control over the environment. The crew spends a great deal of time and expense between shots adjusting the lighting so that each shot will look as polished as possible. When mediamakers want something to seem to be random, they carefully choreograph this random-appearing behavior. For instance, extras who are merely walking by the main characters are told where to go and what to do to appear “natural.” Even seemingly random events and minute details in a film/television program are chosen and staged.
But what about directors who don’t sanitize the set, who try to let bits of the real world into their work (from the Italian neorealists to Kevin Smith’s Clerks)? What about actors, such as Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams, who like to improvise? What about documentary mediamakers who don’t script what happens in front of the camera? What about reality TV? Don’t these let a little bit of chance creep into the film? Not really. One could say that these strategies let some chance occurrences make it onto the raw footage. However, the mediamaker and the editor watch the collected footage over and over, deciding which portions of which takes they will assemble into the final cut. They do so with the same scrutiny that was applied to the actual shooting. Even if they recorded something unplanned, they make a conscious choice to use that chance occurrence. What was chance in the production becomes choice in the final editing.
Source: Smith, Greg M. What Media Classes Really Want to Discuss. Routledge, 2010: 1-2.
CW Source: [W]hat's it like writing for the new girls?
SG: The new girls! I've been having a really good time with them. We've tried to introduce women on the show before -- it's been a unique challenge on this show, actually...
CWS: That's a very diplomatic way of putting it...
SG: It's an interesting thing about doing a show, especially a genre show, where the fans are invested and are very active in their online communities. In the year 2007, you don't introduce a character on Oct. 10 in an episode, you introduce a character months before that when the deal is made with the actress. There are weeks, sometimes months, for speculation to grow online and people to have their opinions. You sort of feel like instead of moving a good size hill, you're moving a giant mountain.
I think the approach we took with the girls was really good, in that we weren't trying to create pals for Sam and Dean, and we definitely weren't trying to create damsels in distress. Instead, we looked for ways to antagonize them and make their jobs even more difficult -- I like to say torture them.
We're breaking an episode that we'll return to when we have put down our picket signs, and it's an episode where there's a real, substantial turn for Bela. When she arrived on the scene, she was just a mercenary, she didn't really give a crap about anything the boys care about. In fact, I think she finds it quite amusing that they are so altruistic in their dealing with the supernatural. I always suspect when someone is that blasé that there's something underneath, and we're finally getting into that. I think she's actually a lot like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. She would be so incredibly valuable to them, if only she cared, or if only what they were fighting for meant something to her compared to what she's been carrying around.
As for Ruby, she's really complicated. I think that she brings a new dimension to demons on the show, because she you can't dismiss her, you can't just shoot her with the Colt. She is bringing Sam an offer he can't refuse, really, and in upcoming episodes, especially in episode 11, she really steps up in a very major way to offer valuable things to Sam and Dean. We've been working hard to make her three-dimensional that way.
CWS: Why do you think that fans have such an extreme reactions to the new girls?
SG: You know, I think it was sort of like an accidental thing that happened. It was just the unique chemistry of this show, it's just the way that Sam and Dean's characters came together to form the central relationship of the show that makes a certain segment of our fan population really nervous about anything that would pull them apart from each other. I guess it's a testament to how sticky and deep that relationship is and how compelling it is, but I don't think when Eric devised this show and devised these two brothers he intended that to be the case. Shows are alive, and characters become more and more alive the more you write for them. This is just something that happened, and it's posed challenges.
CWS: That's actually something that I wondered about, because when you started promoting this show, it was very much "Two guys in a muscle car, classic rock, killing stuff." Which is awesome. But it's evolved into something that's dealing with grief and angst and what looked like clinical depression and it got a lot heavier than I think anyone was expecting. Was that something that was your intention, or did you see the chemistry between your two leads and you figured hey, we can do this?
SG: I feel like there has been this very deep vein of darkness in the show since the pilot. Hunters in our world generally become Hunters because they've had personal tragedy -- usually something horrible killed their family. So they're all carrying around this certain brand of damage. Their dad was [gone] in the pilot, and the girlfriend is skewered on the ceiling at the end of first episode -- I think we kind of went down the rabbit hole with them.
One thing that was important to us was not to blow over the emotional consequence of what happened to these two boys. When their father dies, we have to deal with it. The juggling act for us is to stay true to the sort of emotional stuff that they're going through and really go there with the dark stuff, but also have cool monsters and lots of blood and guts and really, really funny moments and the car zooming off to classic rock.
Source:
Exclusive: Supernatural's Sera Gamble on Old and New Characters, Plus Dealing with Gore! (November 15, 2007) cwsource.tv Retrieved July 27, 2015.
