AustinImprovWiki - Austinville Storyline Tour Guide

"A Fine Day in Austinville"

Storyline #1: Mike the Tour Guide

The Misleading Tour Guide: a tour guide spreads misinformation about Austin.

Status: I think we've got the plot planned out; "Mike tells lies about Austin" can provide numerous skits. I'm going to try & write "Mike tells lies about UT".

Protagonist

(Why is it immediately apparent that this character is different from all other characters?)

Generally anxious & neurotic.
A facile liar.
Gets kind of desperate when things go wrong.
- This clouds his judgment.
Tries to look professional -- shirt & tie -- his clothes look new but cheap.
A recent immigre' from Canada.

Other Characters

Mike's boss.
Mr. Bradford, the visiting businessman.
- Represents a flange-and-fitting industry publication.
Businessman lackey #1.
Businessman lackey #2.
- Note that if a lackey 'disappears' in certain scenes (i. e. an actor flakes out on us), we could make that a story hook for later (i. e. "what happened to the lackey? Let's find out!").1

Scenes

Mike's boss tells him to entertain a Southern businessman.
- Mike's boss claims Mike is a genius.
- Mr. Bradford wants a tour of Austin.
  - He is considering holding a flange-and-fitting industry convention in Austin, and wants to make sure the location is "interesting" but "proper".
Mike tells Mr. Bradford about the South Congress bridge.
Mike tells Mr. Bradford about the Stevie Ray Vaughan statue.
Mike tells Mr. Bradford about something flat-out impossible.
- For a moment, we think Mr. Bradford will see through this.
- Instead, Mr. Bradford is just impressed with Mike's 'wisdom'.
They return to talk to Mike's boss.
- Mike prevents Mr. Bradford from passing along any of his lies.
- Mike's boss gives him a regular gig doing tours.

Little Questions

<none at the moment>

Big Question #1: Wherefore the tour?

Okay, we know in general terms that Mike2 is giving a tour of Austin for a visiting businessman. Ideally, Mike should desperately try to do a good job in spite of not knowing anything about the city.3 But can we nail down the specifics?

(What is the simplest possible answer to this?)

Some possibilities:

Austin is a possible site for a lucrative convention; their management has sent delegates to meet with the City Council.
- This is my favorite so far.
- What kind of convention would it be?
- So is Mike a councilman? Is his boss the mayor?
Mike works for a city-planning firm/think tank (or maybe they're architects?) trying to land a major contract from a city in Eastern Europe.

Big Question #2: How does it end?

I still feel like we don't have the end of this story yet. Mike tells all these lies to this businessman, until finally... what?

I suppose the first order of business is to just figure out the most natural way for the story to end, without any attempts at reversal or irony...

I guess the simplest denouement would be that Mr. Bradford loves the tour and signs the contract. (Another simple possibility: Mr. Bradford finds out that Mike has been lying all along and tears up the contract. But this is more negative.)

Possible twists:

The whole thing was a setup to test Mike's lying ability.
Mike has to work very hard to keep Mr. Bradford from passing along any of those lies to Mike's boss.
Mike succeeds so well, he gets a regular 'gig' doing tours for prospective clients.
- This ending feels right to me.

Mike's Splendiferous Lies

Keep in mind that most of these falsehoods should relate to places that are legal/easy to shoot. For the moment, I'm giving each location its own scene -- so presumably he has a whole set of lies about the Congress Avenue Bridge -- although a montage scene of various locations is also possible.

Anyway, the more of these we come up with, the better the end result will be.

The Congress Ave Bridge is actually built over a hellmouth and that's why there are all those bats.
- Can we pick a less Buffy-centric term than 'hellmouth'?
The city was founded in 1752 by Vikings.
'Austin' derives from the local Indian word for 'peyote'.
The Stevie Ray Vaughan statue is a statue of "Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of hikers"
- The guitar is, of course, symbolic.
Downtown buildings are arranged like Stonehenge.
The Frost Bank Tower is designed to direct a beam of light on the Capitol lawn, like in Raiders
All "Weird Al" Yankovic videos were shot in East Austin.
Public garbage bins were designed by Eero Saarinen, who was also a renowned blues guitarist.
Since 1995, feral-monkey attacks have been reduced by almost 20%.
Something about the University of Texas? "Leading institution for research into {impossibly-obscure field}".
- The chupacabra?
- Homeopathic male-potency enhancers?
- Chinese cuisine?
- Zombies?
- Giant-robot construction?
- Elvis sightings?
- Foodstuffs that resemble the Virgin Mary?
It's the only American city ruled by an Emperor.
- And, consequently, the only American city with a significant Jedi population.
Note that we could give Mike involved and spurious answers to very simple questions.
- Such as: "What is the population of Austin?"
This is one of the few American cities where street musicians cannot be hunted for sport.
The Capitol is the only downtown building in which it's legal to ride a horse indoors.
Roads were given multiple names in order to confuse the Germans in WWII.
Note that we could also drag Mike into other situations (e. g. a college lecture) where he has to fallaciously expostulate on topics other than Austin.
Perhaps he has to construct even more lies to counter threats to the earlier lies.
- What if one of the lackeys found an Internet kiosk and started looking stuff up on Wikipedia?
- ... or just wants to talk to one of the locals about these wonderful "facts"?
He could occasionally use "that's classified information, sir" as an out.

Different Possible Tour Guide Games

Yes, Mike's splendiferous lies will let us tread water, humor-wise, but it's important that each of the tour-guide scenes has a 'game' -- some simple effort or conflict of objectives to make it a scene rather than a chat.

Here are a few possible 'games':

Mike answers a very simple question with a wrong answer, and spends three minutes trying to cover?
Mike keeps trying to 'snow' the tour group with long, Stephen-Fry-like speeches?
Mike has to contend with reasonable complaints from an audience member?
Mike tries to keep additional passers-by from joining the tour group?

Mike Scene #1: Mike @ UT

Note that the first scene has to establish the rules of the game:

Mike doesn't know what he's talking about.
Mike desperately wants to appear knowledgable.
Mr. Bradford is high-status and demanding.

I think by this point (early afternoon), it's just Mike and Mr. Bradford. Maybe they had lackeys earlier in the day, and we discover how they disappeared around 1pm.

But what is this scene about?

We start with a good status quo (for Mike): Mr. Bradford is a trusting soul, and Mike has the hang of improvising Austin facts. Something has to send this haywire, and Mike has to wrench things back to the status quo.
Remember, the thing at risk is always that Mike will be exposed as a sham.
I think the threat is the other students. Will the students -- who are actually knowledgable -- reveal Mike's ignorance?
- Problem: this requires more actors (noo!).
- So: easier to generate the conflict within the two characters.
What if Mr. Bradford finds a brochure of (real) UT facts?
- That could be fun, and provides a natural ending (Mike disposes of the brochure).

What lies can Mike tell about UT?

Four out of every five Austin citizens is a UT alum or student.
The largest graduate program in blues-rock guitar, which explains a lot about the local music scene.
Won "America's nicest-smelling campus" award for three years running.
Provides lots of Korean signage b/c of a 'sisterhood' program with a university in Seoul.
Visitors are not allowed to talk to freshmen. Part of the university's hazing process.
Provides a wildly varying answer as to the number of students at UT.
- His explanation: "It varies... seasonally."
The longhorn is technically a variety of gazelle, owing to years of selective cross-breeding.
It was founded because the mayor of San Antone lost a bet to the mayor of Austinville about the outcome of the Battle of San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War.
Owing to the school's biotechnology program, town lake has more fish that are genetically modified to the legal designation of 'freakdom' than any other U. S. body of water.
- It also has the largest martial-arts training facility outside of the Orient.
"Official" university tour guides are usually foreign nationals, who use the presentations to brush up their English skills.
In raw numbers, UT has more on-campus UFO abductions than any other public university.
The steam tunnels that interconnect the UT buildings are home to the largest and most varied urban snake colony in North America.
Every movie produced on the UT campus has to include at least one shot of its bell tower.
UT was the first legal entity to successfully copyright a particular color.
All of the street names on UT campus have pronunciation quirks derived from British English.

Footnotes

1 Actually, the reverse sounds like a better idea: film the first scenes with Mike and Mr. Bradford. Later on, do 'earlier' scenes with those two, plus lackey(s), with an eye towards figuring out how to "disappear" the lackeys into their own storyline.

2 Note that we can leave out an explanation as to why the boss doesn't do the tour himself -- we could enigmatically hint at a 'prior engagement', and then we can explore the 'what did Mike's boss have to do?' question later on.

3 We could stay truer to life and have Mike be just bored and snarky, but that doesn't really work from a story angle: Mike would have nothing at stake.

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