Try Try Again Page 18

  Hub tried to modify his worried look. Money, yeah, but being associated with a flop was bad karma, and to him this sure sounded like a flop in the making.

  “Just think,” Frankie continued, “of what we could do here. Everybody thinks they could be an actor, so we’ll give them a chance! These people will be paying complete attention, as they act along with the trial and their speech and vitals are monitored to see who’s best at a given moment. Concentrating hard. Paying wonderful attention to the product placements we can insert during court recesses and so on, or just CGI onto the defense table, what’s that brand of water they always turn so the label’s showing and too bad we couldn’t use beer because that wouldn’t be real? And the ‘after these messages’ messages? If the contestants have to track these, too, that’s more concentrated attention than any ad ever gets now. And spin-offs? Just imagine!

  Hub imagined. It still sounded like a bomb.

  “And now the best part: trial footage would be free to us. A trial is a government show, y’know, no royalties to pay, no permissions. Take some public footage, hook a contest to it – how’s that for real reality TV?” He looked questioningly but confidently at Hub.

  “Contests, you know,” answered Hub carefully, “don’t last long unless everybody has a real chance of winning, actually wins sometimes even if not a lot. Psycho-bucks. Even a dollar or two brings them back. But if your contest is honest, how can we stop the best players, professional actors probably, from winning again and again, and everybody else dropping out?”

  “I have a director to figure that out,” said Frankie, pointing grandly at Hub. “Show rules can be tweaked so every dedicated agonist will win something every show or two – even if only a dollar or so – the scratch-off principle, y’know, in the lotteries? But you can figure all that out. Tell my tech people what to do and they’ll do it. No imagination, y’know, but if you tell them where you want the hole, they’ll dig their way to China.”

  There was a long pause. “So,” Frankie finally asked, “do you want to do this?”

  Hub nodded without enthusiasm. Another adventure with Frankie. Frankie will change his mind every third day, give direct orders to Hub’s employees without mentioning this to Hub. He will give the same assignment to two people who won’t know someone else has been given the same assignment until they almost come to blows.

  Frankie was a visionary and a money-finder and a money-spender. Just enough above the bottom of his profession to survive. But Hub had no outstanding offers from anywhere else, and no wish to the spend more time idling in his indoor swimming pool, even though he had enough money to do just that, he figured, for fifty-three-point-seven years.

  The deal was agreed, then. Frankie called WizWhiz Inc., an independent tech firm he often used, and told them Hub Landon would come by and get them started on an exciting, wonderful new project that would lift them into a high rank in Sector 71 of the North American Industry Classification System. Stan Collins, the president of WizWhiz, had no idea what that meant, but it sure sounded impressive. Frankie had no idea what it meant, either, but he’d picked up the phrase a few years before from a script he’d trashed.

  In the meantime, Hub told Frankie he’d identify a suitable real-life trial, something dramatic that had been captured on tape.

  This proved more difficult than Hub had expected. It wasn’t a lack of high-visibility high-drama trials that (with suitable changes) could be made into an exciting mini-series; it wasn’t even a lack of trials that had been captured digitally or on tape; no, it was the difficulty of putting these two requirements together. Hub had his assistants calling almost every state judiciary and Federal court, trying to find someone who remembered if a high-tension trial had been taped or not and if so, where was the tape?

  At last, days later than the date he’d been aiming for, a staffer discovered the trial of Charley Wayne Dukes, for the murder of Congressman Ezra Barnes had been taped by media students at Grantwood Junior College in Grantwood, Pennsylvania. Better yet, although it had been used for classroom study and snippets aired by local and state webV stations, the tape as a whole had never been seen outside the classroom and was still in existence.

  The assistant identified a contact point, an Adjunct Professor of Media named J.T. Jackson. Hub chose to make the crucial call himself, not trusting it to anyone else. The college, after all, could just tell him to fuck off, although this advice would be framed in more scholarly terms.

  At two thirty p.m. that day, JTJ received a call that held both threat and promise: the threat her work might be appropriated without adequate professional credit, that is, her name would roll at the end of the show somewhere between the Assistant Gaffer and Jerry’s Subs, who’d catered something.

  But then the promise: JTJ had made commentaries during trial recesses, and those were on the trial tapes too. If Hollywood wanted to use them, well, … Visions of sugarplums were nothing compared to what JTJ was tasting in her mind.

  Hub received a download of the trial film from JTJ and viewed it carefully. He and several writers edited it down into five eighty-eight-minute episodes, one two-hour episode for each day of the actual trial including commercial breaks. This of course involved editing out the less-compelling parts of the trial. Also of course, the tape didn’t catch sidebars with the judge, whispered words at counsels’ tables, etc.

  Over the next two months, the idea went from concept to story board to edited trial tape ready for viewing. The tape of the trial was edited and paced for viewer interest and story continuity (and to allow for commercial breaks at just the right moments). Advertisers were lined up, product placements agreed and implanted.

  Hub was wrestling one day with a question: was a commentary needed, to go along with the trial rebroadcasts, and if so what the commentary should achieve, how many times per trial-day, etc. Agonists, and ordinary viewers, would need context and continuity to keep them aware of what was happening in the courtroom, and why, and to hint what was coming up next.

  Hub knew the show’s continuity was weak, and a “Greek chorus” character was needed. Looking up webV news breaks from the trial, he focused on JTJ, the woman who’d sent him the tapes. She seemed to be a highly telegenic presence, and she’d reported on the trial as it happened.

  On the original trial tapes, JTJ had appeared twice each day: at noon recess and again after adjournment for the day; and these commentaries were contained on the trial tapes provided by Grantwood Junior College.

  Hub replayed JTJ’s commentary several times. The voice and face and gestures and bodily movements of “This is JTJ, reporting from Grantwood County courthouse” began to grow on him. Why not use her?

  A real break, Hub figured. JTJ’s commentary was pretty good, and she herself well worth the attention of male viewers and a segment of the female demographic, too.

  But Hub judged JTJ’s commentary, although fine for its time and place, would not – quite – work for the agonist version of the trial, addressed to people whose recollection of the Dukes trial, if they had any, would be vague.

  Her commentaries, in addition, were aimed at home-town viewers. Impact on the Seventeenth Congressional District and the Pennsylvania delegation to the House of Representatives and the Senate was emphasized, but the viewers Hub was thinking of wouldn’t care about that.

  As Hub explained to Frankie the next day, “We need a writer to come up with a new set of trial commentaries. And – ah – I’d like JTJ herself to read them on the show.”

  “She got to you, eh?” said Frankie.

  “Well, yeah, in a way. But look: she’d be great at this – screen presence, sexy look, great bod,…”

  “OK, hire a writer to update JTJ’s words. Make them fit the audience, provide clues to what’s really happening, tattle on the sexual proclivities of the principals, and so on and so on. And fly your new pet to L.A. and give her a screen-test – OK? I’m sure you’d like that.”

  “OK!” said Hub, who hurried off to give J
TJ the good news and tell his agent to find a writer for a very rush job. Neither Al, Bennie, or Chas was considered.

  The evening JTJ arrived in L.A., Hub explained the arrangement to her after dinner. JTJ wasn’t happy a writer would be re-writing her undying words, but she saw several possible Hollywood futures for herself, and agreed. As promised, she had a screen test and to no one’s surprise, (least her own) she was adjudged “great presence” and “bombshell.”

  A few days later, Hub handed the first draft of JTJ’s revised commentaries to her, said she’d be taped for “Try Try Again” in two weeks.

  After studying the script with greater and greater annoyance, JTJ called Hub and pointed out that all the weighty political and sociological content in her commentaries had been trashed, and what was left was, as she said, “just a lot of happycrap,” one word. “I didn’t say that stuff during the trial, and it’s dumb and makes me look stupid!”

  She told Hub he could cram the new script where the sun didn’t shine. It made her out, she said, to be mindless, like those amazingly cute young women who offer on-field commentary during NFL games.

  Hub politely asked JTJ how much she was making as a junior college adjunct, how vital and important being an adjunct was, and how much recognition her weighty sociological mind had been getting lately.

  Hub made a few cosmetic concessions, however, and JTJ began practicing her new trial commentaries, memorized most of the words, but that’s OK honey, just be yourself and remember as much of it as you can. In your natural voice, you know? Viewers will love it!

  Hub proposed including some “at home” segments to Frankie, as “character” supplements to the trial action: not just JTJ, but Liv Saunders and Brent Nielsen too. “Imagine,” he said, “Brent arguing with colleagues about trial strategy at lunch, in trial breaks, etc. Let’s give the agonists some hint that the trial principals had a life beyond the courthouse, so increasing viewer interest in them.”

  JTJ, at least he said, would be a natural, in addition to being smart and lively and very sexy and more or less black. That last characteristic was, they head-shakingly regretted, important, since no one in the actual trial, including any of the jury members, was any color other than a pasty February pinko-grey.

  But Frankie thumbs-downed this idea, making the valid points; scripts would have to be written for these “at-home” characters, which was a cost, and the principals engaged, which would cost, and who knows if they were any good at acting? And how would these segments fit into the show? Not easily.

  One day, Hub asked his creative staff what the show should be called. Their answers, while various, lacked creativity. He called JTJ, asked if she’d like to come over and work out a hard problem with him.

  About two a.m., JTJ returned to her hotel, her virtue unblemished, to Hub’s disappointment; and Hub had a name for the show.

  Hub immersed himself in developing the show, watched the original tapes over and over, cutting each day of the trial down to the most compelling eighty-eight minutes.

  Deciding how and where to insert product placements into the trial was also a challenge, but given trial recesses could be fictionalized, and exciting overnight developments he could imagine, including driving sporty cars of various makes very fast and swigging different brands of cheap beer, no problem. He had the WizWhiz artists CGI a few brand-name products on to the defense and prosecution tables, as examples to show prospects. Nothing outrageous, just MICROSOFT SURFACE tabs, GALAXY phones, and BUBBLE-UP PURE NATURAL SPRING WATER, specially flavored to imitation inner-city tap water. Or so it was claimed.

  There was one regret, explained Stan Collins of WizWhiz: the vitals and heartbeats and DNA and all the stuff Frankie wanted to monitor, well, all that was impossible unless each agonist were hooked up to something more complicated than an EKG machine, and a lot more expensive. What they could do, however, was to remotely monitor facial expression and speech and physical movement – licensing technology similar to that which had originally appeared in the Kinect – wouldn’t require any cables or wires or tubes up the nose or crap like that.

  That was one problem solved. Hub regretted he wouldn’t be able to fake any of the dialog, but that was prohibited by the network’s contract. Just think, he thought, Brent Nielsen could say I THINK I’LL HAVE A LAGUNITAS IPA OR MAYBE TWO AS SOON AS COURT RECESSES FOR THE DAY. He had mentioned this possibility to Frankie, who metaphorically wet his pants but objectively did not.

  Frankie set high prices for product placements, because advertisers would know, in advance, exactly where Brent-agonists and Liv-agonists, and so on, would be looking at each moment. That’s where the products, as if by magical coincidence, would appear.

  “And the wonderful thing,” he said to fifty-three potential advertisers, “is millions of viewers will be paying intense attention to the show, therefore including its CGI’d placements. That’s undivided attention, rather than playing to an empty chair while the viewer is rummaging in the fridge for a beer, or pissing away its warm remains.”

  Finally, show development was complete, programming of agonists’ real-time technology was complete (although late and very much over-budget), and promotional materials were nearly finished. An interactive pilot, for publicity and practice, was developed and made ready for release: How to register as a character, how to play, how scoring was done, how money could be won; and a free practice app was programmed and approved for downloading by the High Lords, Apple and Google.

  Word of the forthcoming show leaked, of course. This was a concern for Frankie until they’d locked in exclusive rights to the trial footage; after that, the more leaks the better. The best were leaks that contradicted other leaks, leading to controversy, leading to confidential interviews, leading to more leaks. And more controversies. And more free publicity.

  On a cloudy winter L.A. day sometime thereafter, there was a go-nogo full-scale presentation of the final version of “Try Try Again,” to Frankie, complete with software and mock-agonists. Frankie was delighted, and prepared the big pitch he’d make to the networks and cable channels.

  The first two episodes, corresponding to the first two days of the actual trial, were now edited, CGI-enhanced, and ready for webcast. Frankie had his advertisers lined up. Now he had to wait until a favorable webV network time-slot came open. He had a well-founded ‘hunch’ one of the new fab fall favorites would be cancelled, and he thought he knew which one.

  A webV ‘reality’ show about a group of wacky female stunt pilots, at first called “Flighty Fems” and then, after a few protests, renamed “Airheads,” was cancelled after two weeks and three crashes. Frankie saw his chance. The only broadcast-ready show the network had was “Try Try Again,” the Dukes trial redux. Hub and his team, and JTJ, rushed to finish the third through fifth episodes.

  One week before the premiere, a Special was aired explaining what “Try Try Again” was all about, the fabulous prizes that were offered, and the tagline “From a Buck to a Billion,” although “billion” was well-asterisked.

  The required home setup was carefully explained, although for the past three years all major-brand webVs had come with motion-sensing, face recognition, and voice-sensing technology built in.

  Viewers were linked to a practice site where they could figure out how the show worked and get ready for serious competition. Online pre-registration as the contestant’s character of choice was urged, although real-show-time registration was also supported (all fingers crossed at WizWhiz).

  Frankie’s genius, planted news stories said, was to see a technology intended for couch-potato-ism and muscle-cars-vs-zombies gaming, could also be used as a network contestant input device with no modifications required.

  The show previewed with a one-episode pilot in late February, representing day one of the Dukes trial. At first only a few agonists jacked in, but the idea quickly picked up steam, especially after several thousand dollars was awarded to each of seventy-five randomly selected agonists.


  Publicity went into overdrive, even though not one American in a thousand knew what ‘overdrive’ actually was. ‘The ultimate reality show’ it was called, and ‘A show to die for’ (a slogan quickly withdrawn).

  Several thousand habitual game-show fans became mildly interested, soon to be several million more, and with increasing levels of fervor.

  But others had differing responses.

  Sybille Haskin was annoyed. Her long-planned goals were about to be achieved: a President of the United States completely under her control, required to do her secret bidding. And now this bother had to happen, a stupid webV show with plenty of publicity. People would remember once again, Thomas James Conning’s political future had been saved in a shocking and bloody way.

  And not just publicity. She was concerned someone might notice something that had happened during the trial she had attended, Charley Dukes’ startled glance when Chief Gardner testified neither he nor Barnes’ security guard had fired. No one else seemed to have paid attention to Charley’s look at the time. But now, someone might notice, be moved to figure out what it meant, what had surprised Dukes. Many skeins could be unraveled.

  Jillian Hall had just had another fight with Roger Hall, her husband of five years. The subject was, once again, Suzanne Garofalo, their neighbor, with whom Roger had become increasingly friendly. Jill had found evidence Suzanne had visited her home when Jill was out. Additional evidence led her to believe Roger had tried to clean up after these visits but of course, being male, he hadn’t succeeded.

  That afternoon, home from work, her careful inspection of the premises revealed someone with Suzanne’s scent (both natural and perfumed) had lain on her and Roger’s marriage bed. When Roger came home and denied everything, she asked him to leave and find a hotel again and he did, although not to the same hotel as before, which had since been closed by the county Health Department. Jill spent that evening burning the bedclothes and trying to bend Roger’s golf clubs into interesting abstract forms she was sure he would appreciate.