Our rules...

I was just past Nephi when I realized that my MacBook was sitting in its case back in Salt Lake City. Didn't matter, I had no internet access in LA anyway. So here we are three days later, and I've got a bunch of updates to post. I realized that I need to address Taylor's question about the rules we set for the series, and somebody else made a comment addressing a concern that I've harbored for a long, long time about the portrayal of women in LDS media. It's 4pm, and I'm not sure how much I'll be able to get to before I have to pick my wife up at work.

Here's the first: Our rules. I wanted to give you a little context about how I was approaching the story before I went into detail about the limits that Todd and I set for our storytelling. If I'm going to be straight with you: There's quite a bit of seemingly conflicting expectation out there about how the drama in an LDS TV should be handled.

On the one hand, there's manifest desire for so-called 'real characters' with 'real problems' and somehow there always seems to be an assumption that dealing with those 'real problems' necessitates pushing the audience into uncomfortable ground in terms of: 1. Keeping within a family-values standard, or 2. creating a sense of moral morass where 'evil' is rationalized.

Simply, when there's talk about 'the real', it seems to assume questionable content; while showing 'the ideal' is deemed too soft to be taken seriously. It's a black-and-white expectation that's been built up by shortsighted storytellers that can't seem to find any drama in a religious context beyond characters questioning the foundations of their beliefs.

There seems to be only one viable question for the characters in these films: Do I believe or don't I? That's the only 'real' question for these characters.

The problem is most of you don't spend your lives teetering on the edge between absolute heaven and absolute hell, do you? And I'm telling you, that doesn't make you uninteresting people and that absolutely doesn't mean that you have no drama in your lives. But, you've been lead to believe that somehow an LDS film either needs to challenge your core beliefs (the so-called 'real') or confirm your core beliefs (the so-called 'ideal'). One or the other.

And I propose that there are other options. I've written about those options in my last post about my storytelling aim. Once Todd and I decided the types of stories we were interested in telling, we set about designing a set of operational rules to keep ourselves on track. The goal of these rules is to safeguard the quality of the show by keeping ourselves clear of what we felt were the pitfalls of religious film in general.

Okay, if I don't stop droning on and on, I'll never get to the point. So here goes:

1. Our story will never criticize the hierarchy of the Church.

I always felt like the stories I was interested in telling here we're local stories that revolved around a small group of people. I want to take a look at how being a member of the LDS Church influenced the way in which these people made decisions or how they interacted with each other. That said, I wanted to push the structure of the Church into the background and create a sort of base of assumed belief. I'm not here to explain an old grudge against the Church, or to 'air dirty laundry', as it were.

I'll be honest, I've had good and bad experiences within the walls of the chapel. We all have. But those experiences were all the result of interpersonal interaction with other individuals. There's the old saying that goes something like, 'The Church is perfect, but the members aren't.' And so we decided that we were interested in presenting an idealized vision of the Church functioning as the context of our series.

So what does that mean exactly? It means that every Sunday School lesson or Sacrament Meeting talk will be well-prepared and researched. It means that the bishop will be above reproach in his calling. It means that the ward will function exactly as it should. It also means that the Church itself isn't going to be creating the problems in the lives of our characters. Ever.

Why is this important? I want to take our characters, give them a solid base of instruction. And I want to look at how they in turn apply what they're taking away from Church. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, we all tend to live to different standards of belief. And there's the series conflict.

2. Our story will take place almost exclusively outside of the Church building.

If anyone is curious about LDS Church services, they can walk inside the chapel on Sunday, take a seat and observe. Or, the Church itself has produced a lot of material explaining the mechanics of LDS worship, including all aspects of our ordinance worship. We want drama, right? Not instructional video about how the Church itself functions.

Our story never enters the chapel. Period. We loiter around in the foyer before and between meetings, we walk down a hallway or two. We wait outside of the bishop's office. There's a little bit in the kitchen, and I'm planning on having a few scenes set in the nursery starting in the third episode. We might spend a little time in the cultural hall during a Young Men/Young Women service project. But, for the most part I want the drama to stay inside these character's homes.

Why?

First, there are some of you that are always going to be uncomfortable seeing ordinances or church services on screen. I respect that it pulls you out of the story.

The second reason is purely logistical, our Church meetings aren't terrible interactive. With about 45 minutes an episode to tell my story, I don't want to spend five minutes listening to a character give a talk in Sacrament meeting when they could be speaking with each other. How many times have lazy writers taken us to the pulpit where their characters can deliver a drawn out monologue about what they've learned or why they've changed? There are better ways to tell a story.

If anything, we catch a sentence in the middle of a lesson before it's interrupted by crying in the hall. Or a bit of a talk through the foyer loudspeaker as a father talks to his son. We see the members bow their heads and close their eyes, but do we really need a whole prayer? That's precious screen time.

3. We are telling stories of redemption, not apostasy.

I have no interest in examining the process of characters falling away from their beliefs. I don't want to walk that path with them. I'm not going to lie to you, things aren't always going to be rosy but I'm not going to tell stories of those trying to find the great and spacious building when I can focus on those seeking the tree of life. Right?

In this regard, I'm taking my cue from the way that the scriptures tell redemption stories. Think about Alma, or the sons of Mosiah... We get a verse or two setting the context of how these people begin. We get the story of their conversions, and then chapters and chapters of the good works that they accomplish afterward. There's no glorification of the Fall, no lurid details of what they were doing as apostates. These characters don't owe you confessions of all of their past wrong-doings, no more than your neighbors need to come over and recite a litany of their past sins.

Having said that, and going back to the beginning of this post, I don't think that most of us get to the point where we question our core beliefs. And as such, the so-called 'real' stories, the gritty 'is this true or not?' seems overplayed and false. If we restrict our story a bit to more subtle decision-making. This is what I was getting at when I was talking earlier about 'good versus greater good'.

There have been better explanations of this... I'm going to point you to one. Read Bruce Hafen's talk 'On Dealing with Uncertainty' from the August 1979 Ensign. Hopefully, that will explain more concisely than this rambling mess.

Along these lines, I want to tell stories about conflicting expectation: When either individuals fail to reach their own potential, or others unjustly measure their neighbors by their own personal standards.

...

And then, I suddenly just lost my train of thought. Hmm... I'll probably reread this tonight and have more to add. But, I think I pretty much hit all of it. Oh, and by the way, I'm hoping that you're just taking for granted that there's going to be an absolute absence of profanity, violence and immorality. No explosions or gunplay. I'm not going to murder or rape anybody. I don't think that we need extreme cases, when we can stick close to home, deal with close experience that's familiar to all of us.