Today we spend most of the lesson in the TV unit of my course at UCLA, discussing the new Terminator TV series. Our assignment was to read the script for the pilot episode, today we break it down and compare it with screenings from the pilot broadcast a couple of weeks ago.
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As I watch in the darkened classroom, I'm a little down. The script and show got savaged by a few students. As my WGA striking TV writer teacher, has worked on Star Trek and Charmed; I was hoping for a Terminator love fest, but the guy was being a pro and showed us exactly what worked and what didn't. I got the impression my teacher loved the show, but was trying to remain objective.
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As a fan, I don't have that burden. The script was perfect, the show better, but then I'm a Terminator geek, I even loved the third film, easily the weakest.
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Sharing the long bus road home through the silent sterility of Beverly Hills with a classmate, who has the unfortunate fortune to also live in Hollywood - A discussion on pilot ideas and the differences between European and American TV shows. My classmate has worked as an assistant Director and is in 'The Biz', so I leave most the talking to him.
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My classmate lives nearer to Hollywood and Vine, so I say goodbye at Cherokee. It's been a week since I moved to Hollywood, just off the Walk of Fame. I don't miss my time over in Westwood. Making my way homebound from the bus stop, in the five minutes it takes to walk, I pass around 4 night spots.
Thin girls in thin clothing click clack across roads and scream at each other. Bouncers and valets are stony faced, frat boys gelled and trying to look older than 18. Black and White Cop cars prowl around the grid, never looking like they want to leave their cars, tourists, much like the real ones lost in the middle of this - Los Angeles pretending to be a city.
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Hollywood is the closest this city gets to a London, New York, Paris, Helsinki, Tokyo type of thang. Downtown has the skyscrapers, but that just feels like any financial centre.
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At the top of my street, a hot new Hollywood spot funded by hot Hollywood A-Listers is drawing a crowd. There's that LA orginality of the Limo traffic jam. I have to pass the side street entrance to the Hollywood Blvd hot spot to get home, naviagte the red rope, the valet, the bouncers and shop window blondes.
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It amuses me how the door staff all look up at me as I approach them with much confidence, then they slowly work out, no, I'm not here to pretend I'm on the C list of the clipboard in your glove, I'm going home.
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The Terminator discussion gets me thinking, now I'm writing for a couple of magazines, an interview with the new breed of Terminator, Summer Glau , the star of the new series.
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So who do I contact, go through official, Fox, Agents, Management Companies? That's only gonna work with the authority of the magazines. I forget about the idea and chat on Facebook.
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Then I decide to search Terminator ( Summer Glau) and I find her. For fun I search other celebrities and there seems to be a pattern of Celebrity and Facebook.
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Typically your average actor, musician, person who get interviewed, will have an official fan site, another profile that appears to be the 'real' celeb, whether they mantain the profile or have 'people' to do that for them.
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But the most interesting profiles are the pretend celeb profiles. It has their name, it even has a picture sometimes and a fair amount of friends. You can tell the fake ones, as they'll have a 20 friends compared to the 'real' one with a few thousand.
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But how do we know if the real one is a real one? With the A listers, the ones that have a decade or more of the limelight, it's a dead give away by the sheer numbers. Surely Madonna would say something about someone performing a form of identity theft in Myspace, or wherever, especially if thousands of people were worshiping that thief.
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What about the minor celebs, a couple of TV shows, nothing huge? The ones who's most popular profiles never outnumber a few hundred?
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Let's take Zachary Levi, star of NBC show, 'Chuck'. The show is relatively popular in the U.S. It's come up more than once in my TV class, it's made by Mr O.C, Josh Schwartz.
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When I was last in Finland, I saw two people fight over a DVD for a particular season editon of the O.C, that show was huge!
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Anyway, I find the star of the show on Facebook, it has his picutre, lives in LA, but he only has 210 friends. But the pic is definetly him.
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But wait, I find another one, he lives in Los Angeles too, and he has 585 friends, remember there are other Zachary Levi's amongst these two, but I'm going by the ones with a pic. Zachary Levi version 2 pic is off focus, it's hard to tell if it's him or not. Could Zachary 1 ( 210 friends) be a faker? Or, just like Hollywood, the real faker be ironically Zachary 2 with double the amount of mates?
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There are a couple that could be him, (obscure pics of objects) some of which have level of friends that hover around the other two Zachary's. I'm skipping through pages of Zachary's like the guy has clones.
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Only one of these profiles can be Zachary.
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I pick a random Terminator profile and send a message, 'Hi Summer, I'm an entertainment writer at...........'
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Press send.
But what if this fake Summer writes back, agrees to do an email interview. I could be feeding the ego of a 49 year old Swedish business man that fantasises about being an American girl who plays a robot in a new TV show......
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