This American Life: Radio, TV, at the Movies
I’ve listened to This American Life on NRP (or PRI, or whatever) here and there since I started obsessing over talk-radio back in the fall of 1999, but it wasn’t until their Showtime program began last spring that I really became a fan. Before that I don’t think I really “got it.” The pacing is such that you really have to give it some time before you get sucked in (not unlike a really great television show) and if the first story doesn’t happen to grab your attention during the dial can be awfully easy. But the series changed all that. Maybe it’s because I was already spending so much time parked in front of the television. Perhaps it was bound to happen. All I know is the storytelling was remarkable, the visual style felt unprecedented in its richness and by the time the six episode had aired I had become a vegetarian (which lasted through the summer).
So when some friends told me about a live This American Life stage show that would be put on in New York City and then broadcast live to movie theaters across the country, I felt that it was something I should certainly attend. I’ll tell you about it after the jump…
I live in Nasville. The This American Life broadcast was showing at two theaters in town. One screen was in Green Hills, the super-trendy, upscale neighborhood surely home to some public-radio-listening well-to-dos and the other was at Opry Mills, a preposterous shopping center/tourist trap on the edge of town (and closer to where I live). Tickets were $20, far more expensive than New York City’s $12.50 and an astronomical leap from Nashville’s $9. Clearly the presentation was billed more as an event than as a movie (and rightly so), but because of this I was most interested to see what kind of crowd this would draw. In my theater, I’d say there were forty or fifty people. Not a huge crowd, but as I was walking in I actually thought that there might be a chance that I would be the only person to fork over the cash. Toward the beginning, Ira Glass, the muppet-voiced host/creator said that there was a theater in California that had only sold two tickets – and then suggested to those two people that they go get a drink together after the show. (He also made an announcement saying if you were stoned and confused Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay was actually showing in theater five.)
The reason I’m even blogging about this is because the event was, ostensibly, a promotion for the second season of This American Life on Showtime, which begins this Sunday. Over the two-hour run-time they showed a lot of the material that had to be cut from both seasons and also showed some whole segments that we can look forward to in the coming weeks. Some of the highlights were a piece about a young Iraqi man who is forced to move to the US after the war begins and his trip through the south where visits various locations sitting in a booth labeled “Ask an Iraqi”. It is a piece that starts out quite funny, turns brutally uncomfortable and ultimately had my eyes welling up and forcing a lump into my throat – classic TAM, I suppose. Another brilliant segment was about a class at Gotham Comedy Club in New York for kids to learn how to do stand up comedy.
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this whole thing was just watching Ira Glass sit behind a desk and a mic mixing the audio live. The difference between what he and your average club Dj does is simply that Mr. Glass works with interview clips instead of pop tracks. As he speaks he’s constantly adjusting the trim and tracking music and cuing clips, pressing the “take” button like a painter applying meticulous dots of titanium white to a modernist masterpiece. It’s probably a good thing we don’t usually see him doing this or we’d never be able to focus on what it is he’s actually saying. The motions themselves are mesmerizing.
All in all the show was a lot of fun and made me super excited for the new season of the television show. What they do isn’t particularly revolutionary, it’s a series about telling stories, but the way they do it is simply unparalleled (in either format).
Tags: Ira Glass, Live TV, Movies, NPR, Showtime, This American Life
