lost in 'tarnation'

I won't lie to you - I've been hiding. I've been - sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously - avoiding 'Pedal'. It's been somewhat easy considering the last two weeks I've been visiting family in Michigan, more than 22-hundred miles from the half-edited pilot-footage waiting for me in North Hollywood.

It's no good, and it [the pilot-episode] needs to be re-shot. There are a number of problems with what we came back with after those very short and often rushed 5 days. Esthetics-wise: 99% of the shots are too wide, which tends to lack emotion. Emotion-wise: there isn't enough heart-to-heart from the bicyclist, or even just honest dialogue, I feel there are a few different reasons for this:

1) I made the huge mistake of covering too much ground in too little time, I'm happy with the look of where we started the episode (San Francisco) and where we ended it (Goldfield, Nevada), but getting to point "a" to "b" hurt the pilot more than it helped.

2) Needless to say, the cast was not made up of professional actors & actresses and occasionally lugging your packed bicycle out of the back of an air-conditioned RV while attempting to fake that you've been riding for the last 6 hours doesn't often work as well as actually riding for 6 hours.

3) Creative differences. My choice of story-telling approach, going in to the pilot-shoot, was not standard for reality-television. The cookie-cutter formula for any Road-Rules'ish show tends to get under my skin. Maybe it's because I can't watch it without feeling as though I'm being pandered to, or maybe it's because it's just so damn uncreative. Whatever the cause - I wanted 'Pedal' to be different, I'm confident that it's a powerful-enough and universal-enough story that it doesn't need to resort to the same old tricks.

I guess I should pause a moment to explain the "universal-enough" comment, you might bethinking "I've never ridden a bicycle coast to coast, how the hell would I relate?", as cheesy as it sounds: it is not about the bike. At it's core, 'Pedal' is about those brief moments you get the urge to leave behind everything comfortable - and that pessimistic voice that always seems to convince you that you, for any number of reasons, can't. That's why it's universal, because 'Pedal' is just a story of people who are 95% sure they can't, but slowly and surely prove themselves wrong. My first bike trip was definitely an eye-opener as to what the human-body and mind are capable of... people always say they would never make it, but they would be very, very surprised.

Where was I? Right the "same old tricks", so I felt 'Pedal' would never have to resort to the confessional-styled story-telling of so many other MTV-spawned reality shows, I didn't want the bicyclist to ever break the 4th wall, I didn't want this to be a reality "show", I wanted it to be a reality story. That meant narration from the main cast, which would be laid on-top of related footage from their uninterrupted and uninfluenced bike trip. But apparently studios cringe at narration - despite it's common use in popular main-stream shows, 'Scrubs' for example.

You could argue that 'Scrubs' is a fictional and scripted show and what works for 'Scrubs' doesn't work for reality. Another excellent example that comes to mind of narration-only story-telling is 'An Inconvenient Truth', mixed in-between Gore's powerful slideshow presentation are short personal stories of his life... watching it reminded me that I wasn't as crazy as the studios would probably have me out to be.

Another approach I'm very interested in taking with 'Pedal' is giving the bicyclist a personal camera - I would encourage the "cast" to tape as much as possible, both each-other in their on-the-road everyday routines as well as themselves. Almost a video-blogger style approach, this also is an idea I'm loosing the battle on. I'm told it doesn't work. I don't feel it's too radically different than a produced confessional-booth approach. A very moving and very well done example of this was the documentary, 'Tarnation'. I'd like anyone to watch that film and then try to argue that personal hand-held footage can't be far more powerful than the typical alternative.


I'm loosing my train of thought... it's getting late and my eyes are getting heavy. The main point of this post was to be honest in what's happening not only with the pilot-episode but also what's happening in my head. And to explain how the two are related - part of the problem with the footage was creative differences going into the shoot, part of the problem was even those ideas weren't executed ideally. There seems to be a constant tug-of-war on what I want 'Pedal' to be and what I'm allowed to get away with on television. But I don't look at that as a sign that I should give up, I look at it as a sign that I'm doing my job.