Looking Glass

The Baltimore Sun

Celluloid dreams. They infect the best of us, even those who seem immune. Take Ira Glass, host of This American Life. Early last year, Glass uprooted his innovative, popular public radio show and moved the whole shebang -- staff members, their families and pets -- from Chicago to New York to film a television series.

Glass is proud of the result, but there were costs associated with the transition from an aural to a visual method of storytelling, from lives that were changed, to a lessened involvement -- temporarily, he says -- with the radio show.

Was it worth it?

Even today, as the first episode of the television series is scheduled to air on Showtime, Glass isn't 100 percent sure.

"I think everyone on our staff has mixed feelings," says Glass, a Pikesville native. "I didn't understand enough about the television business to completely comprehend the deal we had made. I didn't truly know what we were getting into."

It's This American Life, and our theme this week is ambivalence.

Act I

Opportunity knocked, and Ira Glass told it to go away.

At least, that's what he did at first. In the spring of 2002, Showtime executives asked Glass to consider doing a series for the cable network, which has been trying to develop quirky, quality programming that can compete with its rival, HBO.

Glass turned Showtime down flat.

"For months, we put them off, assuming they weren't serious and would go away," he says.

After all, the Public Radio International program -- distributed on National Public Radio-affiliated stations -- consumed virtually his every waking moment. The hourlong show, which debuted in November 1995 and airs weekly on public radio stations, is a paean to the art of storytelling.

Glass and his staff organize each broadcast around a theme, such as Living by Proxy, about people who avoid their own problems by diving into the (superficially) messier lives of others, or The Allure of the Mean Friend, about why we pursue those who mistreat us. Each episode also is broken into a prologue and several acts, as if each broadcast were a stage play.

If mainstream media deal with the railroad tracks of daily life -- the war in Iraq, the plight of the public schools -- This American Life deals with the stuff that falls between the ties, such as the cost of stubbornness, or growth spurts.

As the joke goes, Glass has a face made for radio. He also has a voice made for print. It is oddly flat, without the variations in pitch and pace that characterize born broadcasters. Glass retains vestiges of the cadences of his native Bawlamer, sloughing off the more jagged consonants as though he fears they might cut his tongue.

None of it dims by even one iota his formidable charm. Glass' appeal consists not just of his curiosity, which is avid and unquenchable, nor of his wit, which is seemingly tossed off.

Part of the answer is that Glass' interests are wildly eclectic.

In a 20-minute conversation, Glass opines on the media depiction of people with strong religious beliefs ("We had some evangelical Christians working on the radio show. They're really sweet, incredibly smart, dear people, and somehow that never comes across.") to life in Iraq ("Who runs a laundry for a living and decides, 'I'm going to do it in Baghdad?'") to Harry Potter ("I'm a big fan of the books, but the first couple of movies were boring.").

By the end of the conversation, you're enchanted.

The show has both male and female fans. But before Glass was married in 2005 to his longtime girlfriend, editor Anaheed Alani, he had been dubbed "the Romeo of public radio" because of his popularity with the opposite sex. "He's engaging and engaged," says Nancy Updike, a producer on the show. "That's a large part of his appeal. He's interested; he's chatty; he'll sit there and ask you about your life."

Perhaps those same qualities attracted what turned out to be a most persistent wooer. Despite being repeatedly discouraged, Showtime wouldn't go away.

"We insisted that they find us filmmakers to collaborate with," Glass says. "We figured we'd never hear from them. And then they came back with all these great people. That posed a problem for us -- suddenly, we had to take them seriously."

On Jan. 20, 2006, Showtime announced that an agreement had been reached to broadcast a television version of This American Life.

The television series, it was decided, would adopt much the same format as the radio show. Glass would appear on the air only briefly, wearing a suit and sitting behind a desk set up in bizarre locations, such as a parking garage or on the Utah Salt Flats.

Act II

Glass and his staff were in for a reality check.

He has worked in radio for more than two decades and has assiduously studied its intricacies.

Think, for a moment, about those brief musical interludes, the bars of melody that separate moments in a story.

"Every now and then, people need to take a break from all the yammering," Glass says.

"We'll schedule six to seven seconds of music as a palate cleanser, just to let them reset mentally. Usually, they can reset in four-and-a-half seconds. Rarely do they need more than nine."

And he offers this insight into what he says is the greater intimacy created by radio:

"Every 'shot' in a radio show is a close-up," he says. "Part of the intimacy is that someone is whispering in your ear. You can build up to that moment of intimacy in television, but eventually you've got to go outside and smoke a cigarette."

Starting Jan. 21, 2006, Glass and everyone else on the staff had to throw away all of their acquired wisdom. They had to learn how to stop thinking for the ear and to start thinking for the eye.

Lesson No. 1: Television lives and dies on what the camera can photograph. That means selecting only stories occurring right now.

"At first, the staff proposed a lot of stories that happened in the past," says Adam Beckman, the director of photography for the television show.

"It was hard to convince them that we didn't have all the budget in the world to use animation to illustrate them."

Lesson No. 2: The camera is not the handmaiden of the words.

For instance, one episode is about a photographer who was snapping stills as a tragedy developed.

"Chris Wilcha, the director, had an idea to illustrate this story, which I thought was brilliant," Beckman says.

"He said: 'This guy was talking about being a cog in a machine, so why don't we film the equipment he uses to make his photographs? It becomes a metaphor for the problem.'

"When Ira and his staff saw the footage, someone said, and this is an exact quote, 'What's with the machinery porn?'

"They didn't understand that what we did wasn't literal, but it fit the larger purpose of what the episode was about."

Still, Beckman says, if Showtime agrees to a second season of This American Life, he'd jump at the chance to work on the show again.

He loves the aesthetic of the series, which, he says "isn't critical or snarky, unlike the rest of television. I really like the way the interviewers engage with their subjects. They are gentle and insightful, without doing taxidermy. The documentarian in me wants to see if the camera can play that role, too."

Lesson No. 3: Something's gotta give. And in this case, what gave was the radio show.

"We've been doing 30 new [radio] episodes a year," Glass says. "This last season, we did 17. I'm not so down with that."

Their original contract with Showtime called for 30 episodes to be broadcast over four years, though the cable network reserves the right to cancel after the first season. If This American Life is renewed by Showtime, Glass will ask to hire more radio producers.

"Showtime would like it if we would consider doing more episodes," he says. "We asked them if we could do fewer. That put them into shock. They said: 'We don't hear that very often.'"

Partly, it's simple math: The radio show has 1.7 million listeners each week. If the television show draws half that amount, Showtime will be ecstatic.

"When we agreed to do the series, I didn't quite realize that some TV networks are much bigger than others," Glass says.

"So every week that we do the television series and not the radio show, we're walking away from almost a million people.

"The trade-off is that we get complete creative freedom from Showtime. They have been very respectful of the choices we made. No one ever once asked us to be 'edgy' in some corny way."

Act III

"All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."

The best part of the television deal for Glass is that it's allowing him and the staff to try something new.

"It was fun," he says. "We learned on the job. We were just starting to get comfortable, and then we had to stop. We'd love to do a second season."

At least, that's what he's saying today.

mary.mccauley@baltsun.com

Ira Glass

Born:

March 3, 1959, in Baltimore

Residence:

New York

Education:

Bachelor's degree in semiotics (the study of symbols) from Brown University

Job:

Founder and host of This American Life, a public radio show and now, a Showtime television program

Awards:

This American Life won a Peabody Award in 1996

Trivia:

He is the first cousin, once removed, of minimalist composer Philip Glass

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