Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,167
was, understandably, a madhouse. The time from initial pitch to live broadcast was 31 hours. The Suffering Channel would enter stage three at 8:00 PM CDT on 4 July, ten weeks ahead of schedule, with three tableaux vivant. There were five different line producers, and all of them were very busy indeed.
It was not Sweeps Week; but as the saying goes in cable, every week is Sweeps Week.
A 52 year old grandmother from Round Lake Beach IL had a growth in her pancreas. The needle biopsy w/ CAT assist at Rush Presbyterian would be captured live by a remote crew; so would the activities of the radiology MD and pathologist whose job was to stain the sample and determine whether the growth was malignant. The segment entailed two separate freelance crews, all of whom were IA union and on holiday double time. The second part of the feed would be split screen. In something of a permissions coup, they’d have the woman’s face for the whole ten minutes it took for the stain to set and the pathologist to scope it. She and her husband would be looking at a monitor on which the pathology crew’s real time feed would be displayed—viewers would get to see the verdict and her reaction to it at the same time.
Finding just the right host for the segments’ intros and voiceovers was an immense headache, given that nearly every plausible candidate’s agent was off for the Fourth, and that whomever The Suffering Channel cast they were then all but bound to stick with for at least one stage three cycle. Finalists were still being auditioned as late as 3:00 PM—and Style magazine’s Skip Atwater, in a move whose judgment was later questioned all up and down the editorial line, ended up devoting a good part of his time, attention, and shorthand notes to these auditions, as well as to a lengthy and somewhat meandering Q&A with an assistant to the Reudenthal and Voss associate tasked to the day’s multiform permissions and releases.
In 1996, an unemployed arc welder was convicted of abducting and torturing to death a Penn State coed named Carole Ann Deutsch. Over four hours of high quality audiotape had been recovered from the suspect’s apartment and entered into evidence at trial. Voiceprint analysis confirmed that the screams and pleadings on the tapes—which were played for the jury, though not in open court—belonged to the victim. This tableau’s venue was a hastily converted OVP conference room. For the first time, Carole Ann Deutsch’s widowed father, of Glassport PA, would listen to selections from those tapes. There with him for support are the associate pastor from Mr. Deutsch’s church and an APA certified trauma counselor whose sunburn, only hours old, presents some ticklish problems for the segment’s makeup coordinator.
Longtime People’s Court moderator Doug Llewellyn hosts. After lengthy and sometimes heated negotiations—during which at one point Mrs. Anger herself had to be contacted at home and enjoined to speak directly by cell to R. Vaughn Corliss, which Ellen Bactrian later said made her just about want to curl up and die—representatives of both the ACLU and the League of Decency are on hand for brief interviews by Skip Atwater of Style.
It is a clear Lucite commode unit atop a ten foot platform of tempered glass beneath which a video crew will record the real time emergence of either an iconically billowing and ecstatic Monroe or a five to seven inch Winged Victory of Samothrace, depending on dramatic last minute instructions. Suspended from the studio’s lighting grid to a position directly before the commode unit, a special monitor taking feed from below will give the artist visual access to his own production for the first time ever in his career. He believes what he sees will be public.
In point of fact, the piece’s physical emergence will not really be broadcast. The combined arguments of Style’s Ellen Bactrian and the Development heads of O Verily Productions finally persuaded Mr. Corliss it would be beyond the pale. Instead, the artist’s wife has been interviewed on tape respecting Brint Moltke’s abusive childhood and the terrific shame, ambivalence, and sheer human suffering involved in his unchosen art. Edited portions of this interview will compose the voiceover as TSC viewers watch the artist’s face in the act of creation, its every wince and grimace captured by the special camera hidden within the chassis of the commode’s monitor.
A consciência é o pesadelo da natureza.
It is, of course, malignant. Subsequently, though, Carole Ann