“I am Catatafish. I am a great wizard. And, I am a friend. And I am a ghost, besides, of course, being a fish.” - Catatafish, South Park
Being a senior at a film school, I hear a lot about employment. We talk a lot about how to act while employed in the film industry, how the production machine works and how we're expected to work within it. It's a great thing to learn. It makes sense and it's necessary, especially if I want to continue eating.
I'm a production major, so my focus is the final product, which generally means I either shoot, direct, or edit. The funny thing is, they're not pushing us towards feature film production these days. In terms of all this employment advice, I'm hearing mostly about how smart it is to get into webisodes or other online content. There's more to make, more to shoot, direct, or edit. Screenwriting majors, on the other hand, apparently hear a lot about television. They say TV is the route to employment, and coincidentally, the best format for a writer.
I once read something somewhere about TV being a writer's medium and film being a director's medium. I get what that means -- TV moves faster and its production schedule is accelerated, so writers' work goes pretty much untouched in its translation to the screen, where a feature script can go through a team of a dozen writers before it reaches its final form. I'm not saying that's the way things should be done, but a lot of the time it just is done that way. Seriously, you thought a living, thinking human being with a family and a life and genuine experiences that they remember could actually create something like Bride Wars?
Sometimes when individuals work together they produce something incredible. And other times they produce the most horrifying pieces of garbage imaginable. I see shit like the Wars and I have to wonder about that whole production machine we keep learning so much about. The right way to do things. But when something like the Wars lashes out and attacks you, you have to sit back and tend to your wounds and you can't help but wonder "is this the only way? Is this all that's out there?"
And that kind of thing can get onto television, too, and sometimes it does. But last night I watched the new South Park episode "Bass to Mouth" and maybe it was Lemmiwinks' guides' reappearance or the revelation that the wizard/ghost/talking/levitating Catfish is some kind of aquatic sex criminal, but the not-exactly-unexpected creative insanity of the episode inspired me to put into writing what I've been thinking for years: South Park is the American Surreal, and it's one of the greatest cultural achievements in this nation's recent history. The best part is, I don't really feel much of a need to elaborate. 60 Minutes is pretty popular and they covered that idea recently.
Probably thanks to the success of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, their original and still most-famous project (South Park) has been getting a lot of coverage recently. Comedy Central, the channel that airs SP, recently documented the show's strange and by-now-very-well-known production cycle in an hour-long special called 6 Days to Air. I watched the doc a few days before this new episode aired, so I had their method fresh in my head as I experienced the final product.
I'm not even saying that this was one of the show's best episodes. It probably wasn't. What I'm saying is that in the film and television industry, production method is like scripture. The one thing that is hammered over and over again into my head as a film student is the importance of production protocol.
The fact that these two have carved out a niche for themselves and that they get to make their brilliant shit in their own brilliant way, well, that's really inspiring to me. I don't know for sure, but if South Park is any indication, maybe getting creative with working method will generate creative product.
But secretly I just think the world could use more wizard catfish.
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