When I saw CBS promoting a 60 Minutes interview with a Pentagon official who called something a ‘”gamechanger,” I went to the CBS website to see what was up. Minding the brand, dontcha know.
Turns out the Pentagon offical is Sue Payton, the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, and the gamechanger she’s talking about is a ray gun, a weapon the military calls the Active Denial System (ADS). I have read enough comic books and seen enough Star Trek to know that any kind of ray gun (or phaser) is automatically a gamechanger. No questions asked. When a ray gun shows up in the scene, something is going to change soon. So I agree 100% with Sue Payton.
The story reported by 60 Minutes is that the Pentagon isn’t spending much on the ray gun project. As my friend, Michael Wolfson, likes to say, “No bucks, no Buck Rodgers.” Even though its potential to edit dangerous scenes peacefully can, in Peyton’s opinion, save huge numbers of lives, she says there are political concerns in Washington that, especially if deployed in the Middle East, the ADS may be perceived as some kind of torture device.
The improvisation lesson: All three levels of communication, Cosmetic, Emotional and Meta are ‘readable’ in this well-produced piece. On the Cosmetic level is the factual information about the funding of the ray gun, the politics, the technology, the effect it has on its targets, etc. On the Emotional level is the story of Ms. Payton, the project leader, Colonel Hymes, and Lance Heal, who used to head the Pentagon’s non-lethal weapons projects, all of whom advocate ardently for the military to fund this program. On the Meta level, the ‘targets’ in a test of the ray gun shown in the segment are a group of American guys waving homemade protest signs that are all about peace, love, and ending war — a subtle but tangible suggestion that to the Pentagon, peace is the enemy. War is what it’s all about. Saving lives is not the business they are in. It would be interesting to know the backstory behind the mock protesters and their signs. Whose payroll are they on? CBS’ or the Pentagon’s? Who cast those roles and composed the messaging on their signs? It’s a little meta-riddle lurking in the background of the story.
A second 60 Minutes story this week also holds lessons in improvisation. It is the story of Remote Area Medical (RAM), a volunteer organization that provides medical treatment to tens of thousands of needy people in the Americas every year, every year more and more of them in the southern U.S. The initiator (i.e. founder) and central character in the RAM scene is Stan Brock, a native Brit and world adventurer in the spirit of Phineas T. Fogg, someone you’d see as a costume character inside the Adventurer’s Club on Disney World’s Pleasure Island. Jaunty chap. Can-do spirit. As a young man, he earned a living as an Amazon cowboy featured on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, one of the first television shows to mix it up with exotic, often dangerous, animals, and a classic pairing of content with marketing. Brock got paid to do things like get chased by water buffalo, which in turn led many people to want to buy Mutual of Omaha Insurance.
Brock still plays that character — leather aviator jacket, military shirt with epaulets, still flies his own World War II vintage DC-7. Hello, then, let’s get on with it, shall we? Pip-pip! We’ve got pythons to wrestle!
The improvisation lessons: First, strong characters make for strong scenes. CBS gave time to this story because of its colorful central character. Second, know the difference between playing a character and having character. One gets you noticed, the other gets things done. Britney Spears gets noticed. But to what end?
Tags: 60 Minutes, Active Denial System, ADS, CBS News, Character, GameChanger, GameChangers, Marketing, Mutal of Omaha, Mutual of Omaha, Pentagon, RAM, Ray Gun, Remote Area Medical, Steve Irwin, Wild Kingdom