Reality Under the Gun in ‘Series 7’

If they were ever to face off, Dawn would give last summer’s “Survivor” winner Richard Hatch a run for his money. In the opening scene of “Series 7,” a satire of reality shows, Dawn, followed by a hand-held camera, walks into a convenience store and guns down a patron. None of the other customers seems surprised or appalled. Soon we find out why. Dawn is the returning champion of a show called “The Contenders,” in which five randomly selected contestants are given a gun and told to kill the other four, plus the champion.

“The tone of it is what makes it special,” says the film’s director-writer, Daniel Minahan, over sandwiches at a restaurant in New York’s SoHo district. “It’s a movie that’s mean to an audience because you find yourself laughing, and then all of a sudden it’s not funny anymore. There’s a joke, and then there’s someone with cancer. There’s something funny about the way it’s being represented, but you don’t feel comfortable laughing about it.”

In other words, the film--which was actually shot before “Survivor,” the 800-pound gorilla of reality shows, aired last summer--is not as broad or as exploitative (or as violent) as the premise would suggest. It merely calls attention to the fictions such shows as “The Real World,” “Cops,” “Big Brother” and “Temptation Island” pass off as reality--the arbitrary rules, the contrived conflicts between characters, the idea that these people are unaware of the camera.

“On ‘The Real World’ they cast the skate punk who stays out late every night, and then they put him in the same room with the born-again Christian who goes to bed at 9 o’clock,” Minahan says. “And then they have the lesbian in the same room as the virgin. So I made a point of writing the characters that way and giving them way too many problems, so that it was clearly a tabloid exaggeration.”

So, in addition to the unmarried, very pregnant Dawn (Brooke Smith), there is Jeff (Glenn Fitzgerald), who is gay, closeted, married, dying of testicular cancer, and the great love of Dawn’s life (will he shoot her?). And Connie (Marylouise Burke), a rigid, morally upright nurse who is forced to deliver Dawn’s out-of-wedlock baby (and possibly shoot her). In lesser roles, there is Tony (Michael Kaycheck), an unemployed asbestos removal worker with drug and marital problems; Lindsay (Merritt Wever), a nubile teenager with overprotective parents; and Franklin (Richard Venture), a paranoid crank.

Minahan cleverly structured the film in three acts, or episodes, complete with bombastic promos hyping each upcoming show, voice-overs by the participants, video diaries, reenactments and B-roll footage (giving a sense of context)--in short, the whole reality-show bag of narrative and visual tricks. In fact, he shot it as he would have a documentary or a TV show, only it was scripted. It screens today in the Premieres section of the Sundance Film Festival.

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Minahan, who is from Danbury, Conn. (where “Series 7” was filmed), and was educated at the State University of New York at Purchase, started out producing documentaries for Britain’s Channel 4 and the BBC. He was lured away from the BBC by Fox, where he learned firsthand about tabloid television from the masters of the genre. (“I’ve been to the dark side,” he says wryly.) From there he co-scripted “I Shot Andy Warhol” with fellow BBC alumnus Mary Harron. It was while developing his first feature, a bio-pic of the designer Halston, that he started pitching the idea of “Series 7,” initially as a television show.

“I met with this network, which will remain nameless, and they would come back to me with notes,” he says. “They really didn’t understand what I was trying to do. They wanted there to be continuing characters. The premise is that the people die. You get attached to them, they die. I thought it would be this changing cast. The weirdest note we got was ‘Can you make it more like ‘Ally McBeal’ ?”

Instead he decided to make it a feature film, developing the project at the Sundance Writers and Directors Lab with Brooke Smith. Initially the idea was to show the difference between what was going on in front of versus behind the camera. When he went to Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente of Blow Up Pictures for financing, they encouraged him turn the whole movie into a TV show, reasoning that it would be difficult to distinguish between the two realities, especially since both parts would be shot on video.

Smith was unsettled by this at first because she wasn’t sure that Dawn’s disgust at what she has to do would be apparent to viewers. For example, as originally scripted, Dawn almost throws up off screen after shooting the guy in the convenience store. Now she had to suggest that within the show’s context.

Minahan had the same problem, only on a much larger scale. According to Kliot, what’s quietly brilliant about “Series 7” is that Minahan suggests a whole off-screen world. Would the cameraman flinch when Dawn shoots the guy? Minahan’s attention to these details is part of the movie’s implicit off-screen reality. By the same token, we know about the network that made this show by the way it is edited, even as we know the minds at Fox and MTV by the way “Temptation Island” and “The Real World” are edited. (And, of course, the kind of society these shows are pandering to.)

In fact, this off-screen reality is so powerful and yet so understated that Minahan himself says that for the longest time he believed Connie is the villain of the piece. Then he realized that it is the producers of this show, whom we never see, who are suggested only by what they choose to show us.

According to Minahan, the result has polarized audiences, a reaction that surprises him. He says he didn’t set out to provoke people. He doesn’t hate TV. He loves to watch it. What bothers him is how exploitative, invasive and exclusionary the premises of many of these shows are (“I want him off the island!”), even though the people who participate in them know exactly what they’re getting into. Also, he doesn’t see why audiences enjoy watching conflicts that amount to little more than office politics, something they get enough of in real life. In that context, the network request to make his TV pitch “more like ‘Ally McBeal’ ” doesn’t seem so inane.

Obviously, Minahan is not unaware of comparisons to “Survivor,” but he can say with all honesty that he was there first. Aside from bragging rights, he says this made “Series 7” a stronger film, because it was built from the ground up rather than on top of “Survivor.” In other words, he’s not satirizing one show, he’s satirizing all of them. And to critics who think the market is already saturated with reality shows, Kliot says that “Series 7” has something to offer viewers who are sick of them and those who love them--though he does admit that the film may be difficult to market because of its “high concept.” This doesn’t seem to concern Minahan, however. He foresees another three episodes, this time to be shown on TV, probably on cable. He says he’s in negotiations to do just that.

“I think it would be a blast to see it on TV,” he says. “In a movie theater you have the safety of going in and watching it as a film and having that kind of distance from it. But I think seeing it on TV would be really shocking.”