What's the Story (Morning Glory)?

I know, I know, not the best name for our posts thus far. But it's been a crazy week, and I'm too tired to care that I'm openly quoting one or both of the Gallagher brothers. Though Noel rises in my estimation whenever he praises Johnny Marr. Ahem.

We have our manifesto, if you will. We have some vaguely drawn characters and we have a quite frankly utterly compelling justification for the chosen setting and basically the entire series. In the spirit of random thoughts and (in my case) colour-coded handwritten notes in small notebooks, I have endeavoured to share my thoughts on some story ideas.

Flying High

The ideas I have for the pilot are being heavily influenced by shows like Spaced and Freaks and Geeks (I like to think I introduced Spaced to the world down here - shhhh, people who told me about it my first year of uni in 2001), but also the Wes Anderson film Bottle Rocket.

In particular, it's the opening of Bottle Rocket that I'm most enamoured of. It begins with Anthony (Luke Wilson) leaving a mental health facility with his friend Dignan (Owen Wilson), who has coordinated the escape. Unbeknownst to him, the facility is one you can choose to leave and Anthony doesn't have the heart to tell him that leaving was his decision and plays along, doing the whole 'bedsheets tied together and thrown down the window' trick. Dignan craves adventure and as his friend, Anthony doesn't want to spoil it.

I feel as though Samantha's decision to leave home will ultimately stem from what she feels is a sense of crippling ennui. Her parents and their indifference, and their realistic attitude toward life makes it difficult to be creative, or to freely explore the ideas given to us by the arts.

In Bottle Rocket escape from reality feels like an anticlimax and rebellion seems like it needs to be done in an extreme or outlandish fashion, with the risk that it leads to a person feeling even more confined than they were before. With this in mind, I feel that Sam will forever be trying to escape reality by entertaining her more artistic ideals of what life should be like, which will make her defeats and her crashes back to Earth all the more crushing. I don't want this to be a constant thing, and I don't want it to be too depressing, either. This isn't Party of Five. Think of it more like The Mighty Boosh or the IT Crowd - the characters never get anywhere but you enjoy watching them try. And try to remember that things like this aren't really a reflection on real life, but more a reflection of a particular time in a person's life, when everything is stunted and everyone else seems to move forward except you.

Sam and initially her sister Lauren as well are struggling these issues - their recognition of their place in the real world and their desire to escape it using their knowledge of pop culture as their tools. You need to escape reality, but then you also have to go to work or school.

I think this could be more of a running theme than just a way to kickstart the series and I think it works for all of our characters, not just Samantha.

On a more structural level, I think the premise of the pilot will be Samantha and our male protaongist's entrance into the house. I think we should start by researching a lot of pilot episodes of sitcoms and try to work within a set of rigid conventions - like Spaced before us. I also like the idea that everyone is watching the pilot episodes of tv shows throughout our pilot - super reflexive, man!

And back to the opening of Bottle Rocket. Atfer watching it, I got the idea of perhaps opening with Samantha leaving home. While she silently takes in the house she has called home for the better part of 25 years, she sees bedsheets thrown down the window. Then her sister begins climbing down them, landing gracefully at the bottom. Her sister walks casually over.

Sam: Mum and dad aren't home, you know.
Lauren: yeah, I know.
Sam: well, I'm going.
Lauren: alright. Facebook me when you get there.
Sam: sure. Where are you going?

Lauren walks over to a tree by the house, picks something up and walks back over. It's a backpack.

Lauren: School. Where else?

She checks her watch.

Lauren: I better go or I'll miss the bus.

She walks away. Sam waves halfheartedly.

So it's not in proper script form - I'm lazy. But you get the idea.

I feel that Sam and her younger sister Lauren are both trying to have the experience of life that they feel was promised to them by film and television, but unfortunately they seem to be just like their parents. So one moves out in an attempt to have the sharehouse experience seen in film but exists almost exactly as they did before, and the other sneaks out of the house, but still goes to school. Anyway, I feel like I'm repeating myself.

The Kids Are Alright

Another theme I feel our series will cover a lot is the internal struggle between the anxiety about growing up and the desire to feel grown up. There's this feeling that we're not real people until we get a career as opposed to a job, we move out of home, and we meet someone and get married and/or have children and everything else is merely an apprenticeship, or a simulated environment.

In an episode of my favourite music quiz show (sorry Spicks and Specks, you're second, but only to episodes Simon Amstell presented) Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Simon Amstell, my favourite music quiz show host (again, really sorry Adam Hills), fluffed some lines on the autocue, to which his former cohost on Popworld Maquita Oliver said, 'Come on Simon, you can read.' He said something like, "I can read, I'm a real boy!" And this line has stuck with me ever since, because sometimes you feel like that - that you aren't real until you can do grown up things. I feel like this could be a recurring line for the characters whenever they struggle with small tasks, or attempt to grow up.

In the vein of this anxiety about/desire to grow up, I like the idea of some or all of the housemates participating in a challenge - to act like children for a week. After lamenting the freedom of childhood and the pressures of adulthood, perhaps Samantha (remembering that she will resemble Daisy Steiner in her creative avoidance of work) suggests that they all start acting like children again and the challenge begins. I really just want an excuse to have an adult dressing like Spider-Man to go to the shops, and dropping to the floor and having tantrums in McDonalds, and asking the elderly insanely inappropriate questions and getting away with it.

Ultimately, however, it fails. As Where the Wild Things Are reminds us, childhood can really be awful - lonely and even more restrictive than adulthood.

The Great Goldstein

So Goldstein is a working title type name, but I needed a name starting with a G and sounding almost as great as, well, erm, Gatsby. Because if the title didn't already give it away, I want to steal the plot of F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece for an episode.

Again, this may already be obvious, but we're fascinated by the character Nick Carraway (note: he doesn't look like Scott Baio in Charles in Charge). In the novel's opening paragraphs he reveals himself to be a man who has had the darkest secrets of other powerful men revealed to him. He supposes it's because of his nature as a man who is not outwardly judgemental. He's someone who seems to attract confidantes without trying - there seems to be something so appealing about a person who gives nothing away. Sometimes, people are attractive to others for reasons unknown to themselves.

For those unfamiliar with the novel, The Great Gatsby is the story of a man who recounts one summer when he moved to the city and with his strange gift of attracting dark characters, gets involved with a group of selfish, amoral rich kids, with it ending in tragedy. More than simply wanting to write down the details of this summer, he wants to tell the story of a man who attracted him as much as he was attractive to him. Gatsby is a man that everybody knows about but doesn't actually know - they come to his house, attend his lavish parties and speculate on his character. Indeed, most people don't even know what he looks like - Nick talks to him at one of his own parties without knowing who he is. And yet this man's nature is appealing to Nick and he spends the rest of the novel trying to decipher the meaning of Gatsby's actions.

I like the idea of one of our protagonists sharing the qualities of Nick Carraway and I feel he should meet his very own Gatsby. We've discussed a character who would make the perfect Gatsby, or Goldstein, but I would prefer to leave the description of this character to my good colleague. I think it also provides the perfect opportunity to do something that is also integral to our series; poking fun at pretentious wankers. Art Gallery opening, fashion show previews, obscure bands playing at the new flavour of the month venue, cafes aimed squarely at posers seem like the perfect world in which to set this homage to Fitzgerald and his Gatsby. Nick reveals that he secretly hates most of the people who feel compelled to befriend him, and so will our Nick Carraway.

Watch this to tide you over until we unleash hell on your preconceived notions of Australian drama.

- S