Tiger King Part. 1: What Gets You Hot?
Tiger King: Part 1. What gets you hot?
This week we’re going to be talking about Tiger King, the most appropriate possible topic for this crazy time. It’s most appropriate because it’s been a source of escape for a whole country who desperately needed one, and it’s also most appropriate because it shows the power we have as artists to shape reality, for better or for worse, and the risk we take when we let go of the ethical implications of every word we write.
We’re going to be talking about Tiger King as a documentary. But we’re also going to be talking about Tiger King as a film. We’re also going to be talking about Tiger King as a miniseries. We’re also going to be talking about Tiger King as an adaptation of a true life story.
We’re going to talk about why people got so hot and enthusiastic about it as a story. And we’re going to talk about why people got so hot and angry about it’s ethical and political failings.
As many, many articles have pointed out, Tiger King does not function like a typical documentary, in that, well, not everything in there is, um, exactly, true…
Rather, Tiger King has been rewritten like a work of dramatic storytelling, with the repurposing of certain clips and the exclusion of others, in order to make you fall in love with a character who you probably should be reviling.
It’s one thing when that happens in Breaking Bad, with a totally fictional main character. But what is our responsibility as filmmakers when the subjects of our documentary are real people with real lives? When the issues at stake are real issues that are actually happening, right now, in the world?
So we’re going to look at the ethical implications of Tiger King, and the ethical implications of writing any movie or TV show. But we’re also going to be looking at Tiger King without judgment, just like we do every film we analyze, to discuss what we can learn from it as screenwriters, documentarians, TV writers, and adapters of true stories.
Because there’s a reason Tiger King is successful. And that success has actually shockingly little to do with the questionable ethical decisions of its directors. Rather, it has to do with certain foundational ideas of screenwriting. And those are the ideas we want to learn from the film.
Whether you’re writing Tiger King or Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or Save The Tiger or Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, what your audience is coming for is a feeling.
We call that feeling “a genre experience,” and it is the only reason anybody ever comes to see a movie or turns on a television.
Because it is the only reason you ever go to see a movie, or ever turn on a television.
You turn on the television or you go watch a movie because you want to feel something. And our genre experiences, our genre preferences are very strong.
Oftentimes when we think about genre we break it down into categories like; romantic comedy, drama, documentary, thriller, horror film. But this is the most oversimplified possible way to think about genre.
And if you are making a documentary you know that Super-Size Me and Bowling for Columbine and Tiger King are as far different as three documentaries could be that in fact they live in completely different genres.
If you are writing a TV series, you know that Westworld and Succession, even though they are both TV dramas, are as far away from a genre perspective as they could possibly be. You know that Fleabag and Arrested Development are as different genre wise as TV series could ever be even though they are both TV comedies. And similarly, you would recognize that A Quiet Place and Chucky are as far apart genre wise as two horror movies could be.
And you start to realize that genre is not a label that you put on a movie, it is a feeling.
The easiest way to find your genre as a writer is to start writing and to create an experience for yourself,