Episode Two of TV’s latest disaster begins with an unanswerable question: who’s a more obnoxious ass? Yep, get your micrometers out, guys - Jeff and Marty are gonna compare sizes while they continue bickering over their wretched short film. It’s pure machismo brain-farts, really - some nonsense about an assassin and a plan to kill a woman, but wait - there’s a reversal! She gives him poison (or some sort of pill, I think, which I suppose we’re to assume is going to kill him - coherent storytelling isn’t really that big of a deal!)

Meanwhile, we cut away to a trio of nerdish fellows making some sort of movie about people arguing. Self-styled ’special effects guru’ Zach Lipovsky is key to this trio - it’s his special effects (some time-stopping effects you can find the instructions for on any serious effects board on the Internet) which are going to carry their weak premise to victory!

And then we cut away to some more people we don’t recognize at first - oh, but wait! There, I recognize Kenny Luby - he’s the one with the massive chip on his shoulder about having never gone to film school. He’ll shout that, multiple times, on the verge of tears, over the course of this episode. He erupts into a tizzy over how poorly his partners are editing his section - it’s true, the editing is pretty meaningless, if the brief segments we’re given are any indication, but then - so is Luby’s cinematography, which is, indeed, often out of focus and  features a dozen and one compositions that look cool but are effectless as emotional and narrative devices.

In their editing room, Marty and Jeff continue to bicker, prompting Jeff to pull out some hi-larious bullshittery: “I’ll do my sound mix in ten minutes.”

Back at the screening room, Garry Marshall hasn’t decided to grace us with his presence: in his place we get floppy Jon Avnet, introduced as the director of Fried Green Tomatoes and Risky Business (a title Paul Brickman lacks the power to dispute at this point). Instead of dwelling on Avnet’s career, we instead head right into the shorts (or, at least, vaguely chopped-apart versions of them):

First up is Random Acts of Kindness, which is basically every bad ‘calling card’ short film every filmmaker in America is making today: add one part hijinks music to two parts flat Wes Anderson-derived compositions. Add a dash of soul-crushingly banal ‘dark comedy’ (to show you’re edgy), and you get a crappy-looking movie.

Carrie Fisher: “That was great!”

Our unseen narrator informs us that this film set the bar high. Good living God.

Next up we see Kenny Luby’s Thing (which I don’t remember the name of) - it’s about criminals or something, and betrayal, and yada yada yada - really, guys? Like the previous one, this film has some sort of ill-advised voice-over informing every shot, and an obnoxiously self-conscious gangster aesthetic. I just hate it. Whatever. And of course the judges praise it, except for the sequence directed by one of Luby’s partners.

We also get a taste of Jeff and Marty’s Love Child, made, apparently, with a third partner named Trevor. Jon Avnet informs us that Jeff’s tasteful shot/reverse-shot in the restaurant scene wasn’t as accomplished as Marty’s filmmaking. Ratner drools over Marty’s use of ‘long lenses - like surveillance,’ as if this metaphor weren’t a massive cliche. At this point, because the show has little sense of how to tell a story, it’s basically telegraphing to us that Jeff is gone and that “Marty Martin” (seriously?) will stick around to be smug for a whole other week.

Last of the four shorts we actually get to see anything of is Time Out, the aforementioned film by special effects guru Zach Lipovsky and two other dudes. I’ll say this - Lipovsky and his partners seem genuinely enthusiastic about what they do, ridiculously earnest. That their film isn’t very good - there’s some ridiculously overplayed acting and some rather theatrical staging - doesn’t really matter though, because Lipovsky’s special effects blow everyone away. One filmmaker comments that the special effects ’set the bar high.’ Another marvels that he doesn’t even know how to do special effects. The judges’ massive acclaim for the short - especially Ratner’s - speaks volumes about the value system in today’s Hollywood. Sheer technical wizardry in service of easy-to-grasp-if-nevertheless-senseless narrative is the Best Thing Possible. Of course, this is all based on my observations of thirty seconds of this film - I might be able to praise the exceptional compositional integrity of their work or the concrete sense of narrative flow IF THEY’D LET US WATCH THE DAMN THING.

At the end of the episode, a few directors are cut - including Jeff and one of Luby’s partners - but who are these other people? This show is in a bad habit of kicking out everyone with whom the audience could possibly create any sort of attachment, and then establishing a new set of filmmakers to follow the trials of in the next episode. When Hitchcock did that in Psycho it was a radically break from classical Hollywood storytelling. When Burnett does it in On the Lot, it’s a failure to communicate effectively, a violation of the trust between audience and storyteller.

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
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• BROWSE / IN Miscellaneous
• « Welcome to the Hack Show (On The Lot - Episode One)
• » Enter the Pain (On the Lot - Episode 3)