So in the interest of making sure I have at least one regular feature on this blog, I’ve decided to watch and comment on new episodes of On the Lot, the new Fox reality program produced by Mark Burnett (Survivor) and Steven Spielberg (1941). On the Lot is an attempt at making a reality competition out of filmmaking, and as offensive as that premise is for me, it’s nonetheless kinda promising: for the next summer, we’ll get to see misanthropic, solipsistic asshole ‘artists’ hem and haw about how great they are, and in the end, America will reward the $1 million dollar production deal (shades of Project Greenlight) to some middling twit with a nice backstory and an achingly middlebrow sensibility. And that’s if we’re lucky.

Instead, we might get someone like Jeff Seibenick, who made it through the first round of elimination and assures us that he wants to make movies like Brett Ratner. Politely, dude, kill yourself. Seibenick’s got a lot of ego, which you need in order to survive as a filmmaker, but which, even if he makes it to the rounds of public voting, won’t endear him to a public that likes their reality winners hugable.

But let’s start from the beginning: the show opens, like any good train-wreck short film, with a bit of crafty hijinks music. You know the type, especially if you were cruising iFilm in the late 90s or early 00s - a little wink of Alan Silvestri, a dabble of Disneyesque whimsy, and a whole lot of mischevious woodwinds. This is the worst shit I know of. Add to it a half-assed Chuck Workman montage about ‘the magic of the movies’ (*koff*) and some defiantly overstated shit-eating grin reaction shots to the magical Universal Studios backlot tour (Golly! That’s the plane crash from War of the Worlds! We must be in Holly-wood!) Over this, a half-attractive non-starter of a host tells us all about the season-long process of finding the next big director, and how ‘three Hollywood legends’ will help with the process.

When later introduced, Garry Marshall, Carrie Fisher, and Brett Ratner prove underwhelming as Hollywood legends or as judges, save Marshall’s exasperated sighs of ego-despair, which sound like a death rattle. For all I strongly dislike Ratner as a filmmaker, and I do, he actually comes across the best of the three - a bit megalomaniacal (he chews one filmmaker out, rightfully, for prefacing his pitch with excuses), but shockingly humble, telling one of the contestants that he was the type of filmmaker that Ratner was jealous of in film school.

So after a few half-hearted attempts at introducing a few of the contestants who will obviously make it through to the finals, we get the first challenge: the contestants must pitch an idea to the judges based on one of five terrible, factory-issued loglines (”A slacker applies to the CIA… hijinks ensue!”) Little attention is paid by the show’s creators to the actual ideas being tossed around, but rather to the dreaded notion - emphasized over and over again, that creativity isn’t easy, and it’s so hard to come up with an idea for a movie in 24 hours.

And of course, because this is a Mark Burnett show, and on Fox, we have to sadistically watch a dozen or so people completely choke and marvel that these people were able to make what are apparently halfway watchable shorts in the first place (after all, the contestants featured in this episode were 50 chosen from 12,000 shorts uploaded to the In the Lot website).

Finally, we get someone pitching a story who seemingly has some understanding of interpersonal communication. His name is Andrew Hunt, and he has to pitch one of the less-enviable loglines, about a priest who falls in love just before he’s supposed to be ordained (or something) - he manages to make it almost work, turning it into a sort of Keeping the Faith crossed with a bit of old-fashioned Romancing the Stone white-people-in-exotic-South America adventure film, complete with some malarky about the free-spirited woman who allows the stuffed-shirt priest to let himself go (they do tequila shots!)

A few more people with communication skills pass through (Ratner delivers his highest praise to one contestant: “Your ideas are very commercial!”), and one final flop of a contestant, before the judges eliminate 13 and move on to the next round of hoops for the contestants to jump through. This one is borrowed from every bad small-city film community in America - a 24 hour film festival! The contestants must pair up in groups of three to write, direct, and edit a three-scene 2.5 minute film based on given settings and actors. Egos, of course, clash, but since we haven’t actually gotten to know these characters yet (ahem - weak exposition), we don’t actually care. I just want all these annoying idiots to go away and for them to give me the contract. (Hell, with a million bucks, I’ll make five films and have enough money left over for a nice dinner).

These scenes drag on and become insultingly petty: Jeff, the aforementioned Ratner fan, asks one of his partners to water down a Coke to make it look like scotch, to which the partner snippily replies, “I don’t even know what that looks like.” Cool, dude.

At the show’s end, we’re left at a crisis moment: obnoxious faux-art filmmaker hack Kenny Luby is trying to shoot a scene at the train tracks (which, it seems, he’s doing in some sort of strange Dardennes-inspired close-up hand-held long take) when… another crew shows up! How can you ever record sound if another crew is shouting ‘action’ occasionally?

And that’s what we’re left on until this Thursday’s episode. A modest shrug of tension after a modest hour of uninspiring tedium. But I’m sure the pitch for this show was great.

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