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The Philosophy Behind Ruby

by Tom Lopez

I just finished mixing RUBY 5. It's sort of sci-fi, with a tough, sassy, female galactic gumshoe. It's 3 minutes a day and goes on for 13 weeks.

When I wrote the first RUBY back in the early 80's, I said to myself, how can I tell a continuing story that airs daily for 3 months and have it make any sense, people will only catch an episode now and then. And how do I recap what's going on, that could take 2 minutes to explain. But I realized a recap should tell only what the listener needs to know to understand what they're about to hear. So, Ruby sets up the scene in one or two sentences, and then bang, we're off.

The other problem was time. Short form pilots I had heard, done for commercial radio (usually 2 1/2 minutes), were so dense, so much stuff was jammed into 'em, that the episode flashed past and was gone, leaving me gasping for air. Yuck. So one evening, when I was wearing my favorite bolo tie (the one with the photo of Einstein), I suddenly grasped the relativity of time. I realized that if you slow down the pace, the time extends.

I'm still fascinated by this, when the pace picks up and the action gets intense, the time flies by, but if you have 'em sitting, talking, with long pauses between their lines, the time ... slows ... way ... down.

My favorite discovery, while writing the first Ruby, was the Android Sisters, two women, voices processed slightly, who do "speak songs." There's something about their fragmented poetic form that does the oddest things to one's sense of linear logic. Sometimes it appears to be just a bunch of fragmented lines, god knows what they're talking about, and then suddenly it all snaps together at the end.

The composer I work with, Tim Clark, creates an original piece of music for each of the RUBY episodes. Tim composes the music while listening to a rough mix so he can be extremely specific, shifting the mood on a breath, or emphasizing a word or a gesture. I write knowing his music is like another character, it reveals things my lines aren't telling you. I want these 3 minute episodes to be like a record single, I want to push the music to the front, mix it hot, and Tim knows how to stay out of those mid range frequencies where the soft speaking voice dwells.

In this new RUBY, I wrote a piece for the Android Sisters that needed a dog. I used a recording of my old faithful companion, "Meatball" who we locked in the studio with a pan of water and couple of mikes and walked out while he howled, whimpered and pleaded. Yes, art can be cruel. (He was rewarded with a dog bone, more than I get sometimes!) Anyway, I sent Tim the barks and whimpers, he sampled and synced it with the beat, and then, when I did the final mix, I put it into a ring modulator that spins the barks around from speaker to speaker. It reminds me of a dog chasing it's own tail. It's quite delightful. The name of the speak-song is, "Are You Barking Up the Wrong Tree of Reality?"

My philosophy is, there's no one out there who wants to hear what I have to say. They are busy, distracted people, talking on their cell phone, cursing at the traffic, punching the dial on their car radio, and I have to get their attention, quickly, and by any means necessary.

The 3 minute form is frustratingly fun, it's a real discipline, get to the essence of what you have to say and get out. When I read scripts by young writers I usually think, you know, they could toss out half of this - it needs to breathe.

So, remember kids, when you think you've finished a script, set it aside for a couple of weeks, then sit down and edit edit edit, "Take that and that you stupid line." Show no mercy. It's painful, I know, but the listener will be so grateful.

Tom Lopez is the creator of a long-running series of daily modules about Ruby, The Intergalactic Gumshoe.

This article was first published in the Midwest Radio Theater Workshop Journal.