I was hoping to do a full three week stand here – one post for each day of the centerDesert TV Recapper’s conference. That’s impossible now, so I will end things with parts of the story I told the budding recappers in my workshop last Wednesday. It is the story of my own recapping.
- I was put in touch with a person who asked me if I wanted to write recaps of a reality show. I said yes!
- He warned me that I might not be good at first. But that was okay. I would do a sample recap, and if it didn’t turn out right, well, we would try again…and we wouldn’t stop till we succeeded. Heh-heh-heh, I thought, of all the things that shan’t be the case.
- But a day after I submitted the sample, I got a grim-sounding voice mail asking me to call. It turned out I had done the exact opposite of what I was supposed to. I still don’t know how it happened. Like I had listened wrong. So my sample confirmed his fears, and why wouldn’t it? It would be like wanting to hire a firefighter, and having him put out fires as a test, and something about the way he held the hose makes hot hot fire shoot out.
- It was the type of situation where you want to “explain” but can’t. “Of course I can write a recap.” “The only reason I got it wrong is when you said what to do I heard the opposite of that.” “I’m fine with doing another one, but I want there to be an understanding here that of course I can write a recap. I want you to know that in your heart.”
- I did the new sample. This time he liked it! Phew. But now he said he wasn’t sure the network wanted recaps anymore. They might be getting rid of them for all shows, because they didn’t like them.
- So I took that to mean: NO RECAPS!!!!!!! Even though I had only been “doing” them for two days, they were already my Life’s Problem. But now I was free! It was like a fresh night in high school when I got to miss a guitar lesson because my teacher didn’t show up. It almost never happened, but when it did…Why, it felt as if all that nervous peering out the window at the driveway, hoping that my teacher wouldn’t show up (and probably doing a little thinking of “Maybe he’ll crash his car. No! It’s wrong to think that!…But thinking it won’t make it happen…even if it did happen, you might feel guilty and weird for a few days, but you’d know that your thoughts had not caused it…Maybe he’ll crash his car and his legs will be hurt so he won’t come anymore!”) had been worth it.
- My teacher’s name was Jason, and he was in a jazz-rock band called the F.O.B.E.S. (First Order of Bovine Excrement Scientists, you see): “Some have described our sound as ‘Zappa meets Steely Dan’. Our sound is eclectic ranging from rock to funk to jazz to ska/reggae to classical and blurring the lines between these styles. Lyrically the FOBES use humor and satire to make observations of the world around them.”
- But it was not to be. The people at the network’s not liking recaps and wanting to get rid of them was outweighed by their not liking recaps and not wanting to think about them at all. I would be recapping.
- I signed an NDA and got a little DVD by FedEx every week. I remembered how scary reality shows are for me, because I hate seeing people get in trouble or be worried about money or their jobs on TV. Sometimes I had to walk away from my computer and just listen.
- I wrote lying on my bed with my computer on a pillow in my lap, because I had a very huge bed and a small room. Sometimes I would sit on my exercise ball at the foot of the bed and use my mattress as a desk, because my bed was also very tall. But that setup was more for the show-watching or dining.
- I went from: staying up late to finish the recap and revising it in the morning to waking up super early to write the recap from an outline I had made the night before to spending the first hour of work writing the recap by sneaking sentences into a Word document I minimized constantly, and sending it off as soon as I typed the final period. That happened in the span of three episodes.
- This was the third season. In the first two seasons the realtors had gone on dates with hot ladies attracted to the real estate lifestyle. But in this season all the realtors were gay. It was the same people. One of them “came out,” one went from dating girls to dating guys without comment, and one “had some big news to announce,” and you thought it would be him coming out, but it was that his partner of five years was going to appear on camera sometimes. He went on so many dates in the first season.
- I never really had to talk with the people who worked for the network. Halfway through, the show switched to a different night and I didn’t know till I saw an ad online. So my recaps were two days late for a while. That was one time I talked to them: I asked if I could get the DVDs earlier. If not, no problem! I’ll just stop doing recaps and we’ll all be okay with that! But I could get them earlier.
- I never stopped wondering if the stars of the show read my recaps, and whether this would lead to friendship/opportunities. I could not stop thinking that. Months later I saw one of the guys at a movie and I wanted to go introduce myself as “the guy who wrote the recaps!”
- The stars had their own blogs on the website. You could tell that they actually wrote them.
- Around the third-to-last recap an editor emailed me. He said he liked my recaps, but: “As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I cut many of the same things each time. For instance, accusations of anyone committing a crime, or suggestions that the stars should commit a crime, especially a violent one.” I hadn’t noticed because I would never look at the recaps once they were posted, but now I realized that in all of them, I was having the stars do things like kick a mean client in the stomach.
- Also: “In discussing how uninspiring the landscape is, I’d rather we avoid phrasing that seems to suggest that our camera shots are ‘gross,’ so it does not seem as if we are taking a swipe at the production team.”
- I made these changes. A little while later I was all done.
- And again it was like guitar in high school. I had been forced to have my guitar lessons, but now they were over. I had hated the times when my teacher had me improvise while he played a jazz progression, and I was so bad at it and never learned scales (this week, though, I will learn them), and it was just the two of us in my room facing my amp. But it wasn’t totally terrible because other times Jason would smell even more like weed than usual, and maybe he’d take out a book with the tabs of Hot Rats and just let me do that, or maybe we’d talk about how his sister had been clubbed by police at a riot, or having long hair. And then I canceled a lot of lessons in a row because of soccer games and homework and he never came again.
So, there you have it. My story. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to do more. But my time on the computer is up now, and I am happy to get out of the prison computer lab and go back to my cell.
“Prison cell, prison cell. Lordy, how my cot smell! Prison cell, prison cell. How’d you get those eyes!”