Mind the Bollocks

Of late, bollocks have been big on TV. So have balls. “You’ve got to have a giant pair of bollocks to succeed in this profession,” growled fearsome head chef Gordon Ramsey on a recent episode of BBC America’s Faking It (Sunday, 8 p.m.). And on Project Greenlight (HBO, Sunday, 10:30 p.m.), in which three movie rookies win $1 million to make their first feature, creepy Miramax honcho Chris Moore was astounded by the cojones of fledgling director Efram Potelle, who had the nerve to ask the studio to provide him with a new car. “I can’t believe this guy’s asking me this question right now,” said the outraged Moore. “I mean, the balls of it!”

Most of the time, however, the trouble with Potelle and his co-director Kyle Rankin is a lack of balls. Ditto for Erica Beeney, who wrote The Battle of Shaker Heights, the script Potelle and Rankin are set to direct. In the opening episode of this year’s series, we watched as actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, together with Moore and a couple of movie execs, decided on the winners of their $1 million competition. There were two categories: best script and best director. But rather than go straight to the envelope, we got to see the finalists in both competitions make their pitches. The screenwriters discussed their screenplays, and the directors talked about how they would direct them.

The setting was Park City, Utah, in the midst of winter and the Sundance Film Festival. The meetings were held in a swanky ski lodge. All of the filmmakers were novices, and making them pitch was the judges’ way to size up not only their talent but their nerve. Almost everyone was interesting, which on a reality show is unusual to say the least. One felt bad for the losers, the ones who almost made it and had to go home with nothing. But that was the first episode. By the end of the second episode, you realized it was the winners who were unlucky. I know you’re not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth, but this one should have been examined by a team of oral surgeons.

You thought hazing was a problem in the military? Try Hollywood. Now back in L.A. to prepare their film, the victors’ weaknesses are picked apart with sadistic relish by Moore and his lieutenant Jeff Balis. (Can that name be a coincidence?) Potelle and Rankin have gone from being heroes to zeroes in a matter of days, and they know it. They sit tongue-tied through the casting, production and script meetings they’re supposed to dominate. When they interview an actress for a possible role, they can’t think of any questions and just stare at her as if they’ve never actually seen a working actress before. In the meantime, the writer, who was the greatest thing since Virginia Woolf back in Utah, is now informed that parts of her script read like a Lifetime movie of the week. There’s no denying it: Moore and Balis are clearly disappointed in their prizewinners. What they never ask themselves is: If they’re so lousy, why did we pick them? Sure, we’ve got balls, but maybe we lack, er, insight? Not to mention other human traits such as compassion, generosity, humility, etc.

Perhaps it was an honest mistake. More likely, though, it’s all part of a diabolical master plan for making compelling television. And compared to most of the junk on the networks, Project Greenlightis brilliant. But, so far anyway, it’s also very, very cruel. Most reality-show contestants are so narcissistic it’s hard to care about them no matter what humiliations are heaped on their heads. But Potelle, Rankin and Beeney are just movie-mad people who’ve worked really hard to get to where they are. And now, as Moore puts it, they’ve been handed “the opportunity to fuck up the rest of their lives, or make the rest of their lives.”

In other words, are they winners or losers? Do they have the balls or not? Will they choke on match point or serve an ace?

Faking It, an excellent BBC import (there’s an American version too, on TLC), is also about making the grade. The premise is that each week a new contestant will be given a month (and a lot of expert help) to switch professions and then convince a panel of experts that he’s the real deal. But it isn’t always a question of moving up in the world. In one episode, an upper-class Oxford student tried to pass himself off as a street-wise bouncer; in another, a ballet dancer had a go at professional wrestling. The best episode so far, though, was definitely about moving up in the world, and it was a beauty. In it, Ed Devlin, “a happy-go-lucky fast-food vendor from Newcastle,” was given a month to turn himself into a convincing simulacrum of a head chef from a first-class restaurant. Almost all the episodes on Faking It are good, but this one was genuinely illuminating and moving.