A man has been working in a circus for 30 years. He is responsible for collecting the elephants’ excrement and setting it on fire at the end of the day to get rid of it, with the pestilence that entails. One day, his brother offers him a lifeline: a job in his office, with a decent salary and normal hours. And the lord of the circus looks at his brother and shrugs: “So what? Leave show business?”
This anecdote is told in the first chapter of The franchise (Max), the latest series by Armando Iannucci, along with Jon Brown and Sam Mendes, who directs it. The franchise tells the vicissitudes of the team involved in the filming of a film of a minor superhero franchise, and it does so from the eyes of the first assistant director, the most slave and stressful position on a shoot. They define it as a parody, but anyone who knows the sector a little will identify everything. The ego fights, the misunderstood hierarchies, the disquisitions about nonsense, the dysfunctionality… Whoever tried it knows it.
It can cost the same to make a good movie as a bad one. And I’m not talking about money. Or not alone. What I mean is that movies and series are not an equation in which the final quality of the work depends exclusively on the maximum performance of its participants. Of course, I am not trusting everything either to the natural talent of the craftsmen, or to any kind of supernatural mystique that many hang on the guild. The factors at play are so many, so complex and so interrelated that one can have all the right ingredients and it can go wrong.
I wish it only depended on adding the rest. How easy it would be: you would just have to put in the effort. As if we didn’t already do it, with how hard people work in audiovisuals. There are terrible series and movies that are the result of teams—from the director and actors to the last worthy one—that have given their all, as Sofía Mazagatos would say. And there are fantastic series and movies in which no one has spent an extra hour filming. The franchise tells the story of one of the first case. One of useless efforts that, according to the Ortega principle, lead to melancholy. According to the show, many of us have been happily led to collect more elephant shit.
