Reprint: His Master's Voice

IT'S MY FOUR YEAR BLOGAVERSARY, so I'm reposting a few nice pieces from that first month of blogging.

Originally published 8/20/2005

A few years ago, in a previous life, I was a television producer at a hip TeeVee station. I would do the kinds of stories where you talked to authors, people plugging their new book, videogame, pyramid scheme -- things like that. I didn't do many musicians - there were other people for that. I did lots of people who were big in advertising and marketing. Though I was tangentally related to that field, mostly the act of interviewing those people made it utterly clear to me that, boy, was I ever glad that I had not sought out a career in advertising and marketing.

Being an interviewer and producer was a strange gig, especially at this place where there was such high turnover; that kind of low level info tv is a factory -- you churn out one story after another, each one as disposable as the last. I was always an "off-camera interviewer." It meant that you tried to keep your questions short, and leading. You were constantly trying to get people to expound - not to have a conversation with you, but to talk for posterity, like they were communicating directly with that audience of one, watching at home. If you do it long enough, you start to feel like a ghost. You become about process, ever aware of the camera and the clip. It got so I could hear when we were coming near the end of the tape, because of the change in the whirring of the camera motor. I would always get my camerapeople to turn out the red light, and tell them to start rolling early, and just ease into the conversation. People got less nervous when you did that. While they were talking, you became the master of not interrupting, of feeding back signals of response that weren't verbal. A whole lot of smiles, and nods, and hand motions - everything short of speaking so that your voice wouldn't be heard on the tape. You learn to listen in clip. As you followed the conversation, there would be a dispassionate part of you that said, "bing. there's my opener. bing. that's a closing clip. bing. there's the clip I need to bridge the piece." You were simultaneously of the moment, deep in the conversation, and utterly apart from it.

Rarely in this life do people get to talk, really talk, as long as they want to. Conversation demands that you follow along, that you engage the other person; that you cede ground and give and take. An interview isn't like that at all. You could always tell the media-trained people, who spoke in soundbites and never veered off the mark. But with other people, civilians, the same pattern would always emerge. People can talk on one subject for about twenty seconds. Sometimes as much as thirty, but usually not much more. After that amount of time, they either go off on a tangent, run out of steam, or start repeating what they've already said. Try it sometime. It's uncanny.

Over the course of a few years, I probably interviewed close to five hundred people. Just the ghost in the chair listening to clip as the camera motor whirred. A couple of times in my social life, people would grow cross with me as they caught me "interviewing" them. They would call me on it, and ask me to stop. One woman put it best, when she said to me, "I'm not sure I like you when you do that. You go so far away."

Looking back on it, I realize that job for was perfect preparation for what I do now, though my life couldn't be more different. Then, I'd meet fourteen new people each week. Now, I spend most of my time alone, and the people I try to make speak, are entirely fictional constructs. Though some of those advertising types would give them a run for their money on that score.

What's remained is that separateness, that apartness. Part of actually being a writer, a working writer, is having an ability to disengage from the world, and from the people around you. To take that step back; to listen for the clip, the line, and notice the inflection and the rolling cadence of how people talk. Sure, it's artificial. But when you saw my interviews on the TeeVee, they were naturalistic, and you believed them. And that's just what I'm striving for when I write a script. It takes an awful lot of craft, and stepping back, to make things seem natural. To create a believeable world, one must sometimes take yourself out of this one.

For a long time I thought those years spent talking to people as an off-camera interviewer were wasted years; an unfortunate eddy that I'd followed for a while. For a long time, I saw that time of my life as a man who knew what he wanted to do, but lacked the courage to do it.

Now I'm not so sure. Though those interviews became tedious near the end -- I knew I had to get out when I found myself with a pasted-on smile listening to some guy talk about his new Molson ad thinking, "I could reach across right now and poke out your eyes, and you'd probably keep on talking about the breakthrough creative of your cheesy beer ad," -- I gravitated toward that job for the same reason as I settled into this one: because it suited something in my personality. I never wanted to be the centre of attention: not at work, anyway. But I did want to pull the strings.

I can hear the camera motor. I'm almost out of tape. And to think, I started out this entry wanting to explain what "Dead Things On Sticks" meant. Ah well. I'll get to that.