VALUABLE LESSONS - Nicholls + Vickers

Valuable Lessons 261
with them. The WB Network bit in early 2002 and built an enormous
plexiglass cube at a studio on Sunset, seventy-five feet on a side, to shoot it
in. By this time, because of fears that the game was too hard, the “one
amazing thing in common” had become three pretty pedestrian things – you
all had braces, visited the White House and saw a dead body! There was a
handsome host inside with the contestants, dry ice smoke, music, an
applauding audience... basically everything but jugglers and U2. The
contestants, kept apart before the show, weren’t allowed to speak to each
other for more than fifteen seconds in two “Spill” segments. The result bore
about the same relation to my original idea as Shrek 2 did to William Steig’s
drawings. But you never say no to a paycheck.
The changes had been made mostly because of producability
concerns. Despite the impression most reality shows attempt to create, of a
wild free-for-all atmosphere, every tiny thing in them is scripted, timed and
staged in excruciating detail, or else you might not be able to get a camera or
a boom mike on the person who’s about to speak – or you end up with too
much material, or too little, or too many dramatic “moments” crammed
together, or too few. Or your First Act is longer than your Second, there’s
no obvious “cue” for audience applause, there aren’t enough laughs, the host
is caught off-guard or doesn’t have a ready quip at his disposal. To allay
these fears, every episode of reality TV that I’ve been involved in has been
scripted up the woo-hoo, at least as much as any variety show or telethon.
The Canadian sci-fi film The Cube (impressively shot for C$600,000)
came out in 1997, but I hadn’t heard of it until after we’d pitched and sold
this. Research And Legal found the title too close for comfort and made us
change ours to Into The Cube.
A major concern among our producers was that contestants would
speak at the same time and overlap, which was sort of what I thought would
be the fun of it; they’d have to get organized and efficient fast, or lose. I
mean, they sometimes overlap on Big Brother and Road Rules and Survivor
don’t they? They’d have to cooperate, argue, expose secret details about
themselves and their history that were dead ends game-wise but would make
for funny and surprising TV.
The WB saw what they’d ordered and passed.
A year later, MTV optioned the format and we shot it again, this time
on a game show-type set with six chairs and a host... but with a cheering
audience, booming music, frantic graphics and, oddly, since there was no
cube, the same title. Again, the contestants weren’t allowed to speak except
in brief precalculated slots. I futilely re-pitched the original idea – drop