From: Gordon I. Murray (Galatea office director)
To: Frank J. Harris II (Programming department)
Subject: Journalistic Ethics
Mate, we might have a problem with Randy's little project. I
think he's gone native on us.
He’d just come back from the unit’s last contract and had
dropped by the office to do the regular check-in with us; drop off the footage
he'd recorded, touch base about the plans and the future direction for the show
and all that sort of stuff. Given where he'd been and what he’d been doing, I
expected as lot of good footage of Cappies getting the crap beaten out of them
which I knew that the audience would lap up. And that’s all well and good, but
there was something else that came with it.
Randy wanted to redefine the scope of the project and the approach
we were taking to the subject matter (ie, bloody mercs). We're playing him for
a lurid piece about mercenary life, full of blood, guts, action, explosions and
other such lurid details that we knew that the audience would love. Fly on the
wall, uncensored and uncut stuff that we can splash all over the promos and
make people want more of. And he was all for it when he set out. But now he
wants something different.
What he's thinking about now is a more dignified approach to
the subject matter; a nuanced and accurate retelling of events that will be all
about the conflicts and the effects that they have. He's looking to make some
sort of bloody doco, not the sensationalized high-publicity piece that we were
hoping for. In short, I think he wants to be a bloody war journo.
I have to wonder if the unit he ended up with might not have
been a problem. We were hoping that he'd end up with some bunch of yahoos who
would go around doing horrible things, getting drunk and having fights with
each other in front of the camera. Instead he seems to have gotten a rather
professional unit of good repute that don't do crap like that. I know that we
didn't have much control over that, but you can't help but think that it's been
an influence.
Don't get me wrong; he's getting some great stuff. The
samples we're getting are nice, and there's plenty of lurid bits in there. The
stuff he showed me has a lot of the material we like, especiallt all that stuff
about the illegal duels, don't get me wrong. But he's holding onto the bulk of
it, and he's talking about either renegotiating for more creative control or
alternatively taking it somewhere else. I’m hoping we can somehow reign him in
and get him under control. We've put a lot of money into this and I don't want
to piss it all away because Randy suddenly developed some journalistic ethics
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