This week in media one, our readings and our lectorial focussed on the idea of ‘collaboration’, and its relevance to the media industry. To be honest, I thought the readings were a little lengthy and business-oriented, and I couldn’t help but spend most of my time reading them thinking of Denholm Reynholm’s ‘I love teams’ speech in episode one of The IT Crowd (Channel 4 won’t let me embed this one but do take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGFGD5pj03M).

Of course, it is an important concept for media professionals as the media industry is one in which collaboration is key; imagine trying to make a feature film with only one person, or with a crew that couldn’t communicate.

While the texts were a little dry, it was with the above thoughts in mind that I could apply the readings not just to my work in media one but to my contextual study, textual crossings. I’ve blogged quite a bit about textual crossings because its focus on the effect of a medium on a story or story world is really relevant to our studies in media one. This week, the concept of collaboration was particularly relevant to our viewing, Lost in Mancha.

Lost in Mancha started out as a behind-the-scenes documentary of Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote adaptation The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, but turned into the story of a failure as the film slowly fell into disaster and total abandonment.

While most of the film’s problems seemed to come down to shocking misfortune (actors’ illnesses, bad weather, small budget), it was interesting to see how the production team dealt with the issues that they faced. At one point, we see the production team meeting a few weeks into filming to deal with some of the issues they are facing, and the narrator of the documentary comments, “Usually when things are not going to plan the solution is to fire the first assistant director.” How’s that for collaboration? Maybe I’m biased, but it seemed to me like this guy was doing the most problem-solving out of any of them. But, as it turns out, he didn’t get fired. Because he quit. He said on camera that he was planning to tell the producers that he could no longer work with them because of the “direction” in which they were going. Rats on a sinking ship, anyone?

All right, that was a little harsh. If you ever see the documentary (and I highly recommend that you do because it is fascinating in a train-wreck kind of way), you’ll see just how many problems and how much adversity these film-makers had to face. In difficult circumstances even the best of us can turn on each other. And there’s also a part of me that can’t blame the first AD (and the various other crew members who left at different stages of production); I mean, why should he have to clean up the mess of a project that’s never going to have the box office return to pay for itself?

However, it is interesting to consider how (and if) things would have panned out differently had all the crew members stayed on board a little longer. If they had pulled together and stuck it out, could they have combined the best of each other’s talents to create a high-quality box office hit? Or were the problems they faced too great for any team? Like all what-ifs, these are questions that are nearly impossible to answer, but in continuing to think about collaboration it’s important to consider not just the cases in which it is successful but the cases in which it has failed.