Scene 1.03 - Outsourcing
EST: I-B-S Studios/INT. Newsroom/Colonel's Office/South-Vietnamese Sweatshop - July 4, 1969
(The reporters speak like perfect subjects of the British Empire and sound like a nature documentary. There is no way we would even guess that they are playing dual roles, so markedly-different these British newscasters are from our boys in camouflage. Also, pertaining to the old woman; you’d never guess that the frail, old geezer was the voice behind the translator. And somehow, you never see the women from the preceding commercial again, yet the actresses who played them will star in this chapter...)
ROBERT HANDEL
Finally, on I-B-S this morning: Today is the anniversary of the signing of the United States Declaration Of Independence against Great Britain. (Smug pause.) To show there are no sore feelings brewing from this side of the pond, we offer a touching story about a few of these Yanks, in a place that normally invokes thoughts of war, misery and chaos. (He looks down from the teleprompter and adjusts his horn-rimmed glasses, since they’ve been tilted-down as not to reflect the studio lights. He reads:) Today's story takes place in the Republic of Viet Nam, scant miles away from an area among the hardest-hit during the Tet Offensive. In a theatre of war that has only seen a history of destruction, poverty and genocide, dawns a ray of hope, wrapped with, of all things, American capitalism. (Looks up:) I-B-S' John Greene has the story.
JOHN GREENE
South Viet Nam. War-torn. Decimated. In this small village of Han-Qi-Taon (honk’-ee-town), all but three of the adult males have been drafted and sent-away to fight against the communist regime of North Viet Nam. The ones left behind didn't have it so lucky. The village's farms were pillaged by the communists and the regional livestock was slaughtered by the North Vietnamese Army just weeks after the Tet Offensive, and the people of Han-Qi-Taon were left to sing their traditional death songs. While men of the village are drafted to fight the Viet Cong, the women of the village lament, and struggle to feed their children. (Cut to JOHN GREENE kneeling, cradling a flimsy vegetable stalk in a garden. He’s got the mutton-chops and the broom-looking mustache and could be mistaken for a singer on the cover of an acid-rock album, so conservatively-dressed in his British-looking jungle fatigues. Zoom-out ENG-style to him standing pockets-to-headroom, holding an ancient microphone.) Coupled with this year's above-average flooding in the area, new crops did not thrive, and it seemed the people of this simple village were doomed to starvation or perhaps, even worse. That was until earlier-this-year when a little ingenuity and some American capitalism gave Han-Qi-Taon some badly-needed economic first-aid.
CUT TO: Old woman with eye patch speaking Vietnamese.
Studio CG: Han-Qi-Taon Village, South Viet Nam
FEMALE TRANSLATOR V.O.
The Americans are wonderful. Just wonderful. They give candy to the children and they frequently visit to check to see if we're okay. Since my daughters and I have worked for the Americans, we have been able to afford three chickens and a rooster. Now we sell eggs to the other workers at the factory and I will be getting a new dress this spring. (The old woman laughs, FEMALE TRANSLATOR V.O. pauses.) It's like a dream come true.
LOSE CG
JOHN GREENE
The dream the woman speaks of is the American Dream. During the spring of last year, pharmaceutical giant Narvis-Segille, headquartered in the United States, facing budgetary cut-backs and their first, quarterly decline in price of stock in nearly four decades, devised a concept that is sure to catch on in American business, and, who knows? It may even reach The House Of Commons one day.
CUT TO: Franklin Taylor Holmes, relaxed and seated behind desk in sky-rise office
FRANKLIN TAYLOR HOLMES
It's technically called out-sourcing. (He chuckles.) No, it's not a new concept, but you don't see much of it in American business; yet. For us, it was simply a matter of dollars and sense. It’s worked for us before, and it’s working for us now.
DISSOLVE ALL EXCEPT CG [See: Immediate Explanation.]
CG: (7 seconds) Franklin Taylor Holmes
CG: (7 seconds) President, Narvis-Segille Pharmaceuticals, USA/Chairman, Narvis United Research, UK
FRANKLIN TAYLOR HOLMES (Cont'd)
Last December, right before the holidays, after a long, arduous meeting with the board of directors, I went home, and poured-over our expense sheets, trying to decide who I was gonna have to lay off. Believe me, any boss will tell you, that isn't an easy or a pretty job to have to do, especially when Santa is about to visit the workers’ families. Then I watched a little story on the television about the war in Viet Nam, and thought, viola! We can help the war effort, give the union workers a promotion and a raise, double our profits for the next thirty projected weeks and ensure our stock would rise steadily over the next year. I called Skyler Johnson, our C-F-O, and asked him if he thought I was certifiably crazy. Initially he wondered the same thing and asked if I was abusing my own product. After checking out my numbers, however, he sang a different tune and said the board of directors would be crazy not to double my salary. (He laughs.) Ha! They tripled it.
JOHN GREENE
Early in January, Narvis-Segille built a factory on this remote, thirteen-acre stretch of jungle, sandwiched between miles of war-ravaged land. They employed ninety-eight percent of the villagers of Han-Qi-Taon and an additional three hundred South Vietnamese villagers living in the surrounding area. Factory employees make fifty times the wages of other villagers in similar occupations, and receive additional benefits not found in other South Vietnamese factories. Schools. Narvis-Segille offers day-care and primary education for its host-nation employees. Roads. Factory employees pick-up the workers from villages as remote as fifty miles away from the factory and ensure they have lorries for shopping on Saturdays -- the one day the factory is closed for maintenance. Health care. As a leading pharmaceutical industry, Narvis-Segille can offer the typical, South-Vietnamese villager safety goggles, cotton gloves, medicine and vaccinations at a fraction of the retail cost. Lastly and most-importantly, the factory's presence provides safety.
CUT TO: Sergeant telling troops to come to attention. Uncanny as it is, the viewer should be oblivious that the reporter and the sergeant are portrayed by the same actor.
(SERGEANT HAMMER is clean-shaven and has darker, more-ruddy skin than when portraying the role of JOHN GREENE. When SERGEANT HAMMER speaks, his accent is provincial and his voice is a bit deeper.)
COLONEL STONE V.O.
It's simply protecting America's interests. Our government has several, long-standing contracts with Narvis-Segille, and if they want to put a factory in the middle of a hot-zone, that's their option. Our duty and orders mandate us to protect American business in this theater; and by God, that's what we're gonna do.
CUT TO: Pockets-to-headroom shot of Colonel in Class B uniform
(COLONEL STONE is gray at the temples and sits at a desk. Through the windows behind him, we see palm trees, a few parked helicopters and perhaps a quansit hut or two.)
CG: (7 seconds) Col. Marcus Stone
CG: (7 Seconds) Commander, Headquarters, 3rd Brigade, Special Operations, U.S. Army
NOTE: The CG just pops on and off, no dissolve. [See: Immediate Explanation, below.]
COLONEL STONE (Cont'd)
People back-home always hear about the terrible things that happen here. I've got a thousand men who spend every minute defending American freedoms by doing good things for the people of Viet Nam. We're educating them, we're teaching them English, showing them how American business operates. Most of these villagers would have been killed or recruited by the V-C if this idea hadn't come-along. Top brass is behind it one hundred percent. The way to give these people a life beyond dirt farming is to give them a good American job with a good American paycheck. We're here to make sure they can cash that paycheck and live the American dream right here, halfway across the globe from apple pie and country music. A thriving capitalist economy kicks communism where it counts the most, and the U-S dollar is kicking some serious tail in this region.
JOHN GREENE
While some soldiers of Colonel Stone's brigade did not share his global perspective, they certainly shared his enthusiasm.
(Immediate Explanation: First, a cutaway over the censored parts showing a cush base-camp in the rear of division headquarters, near the media tent. Obviously, PRIVATE ARES was hanging-out, hoping to get interviewed and did. Face it, it’s 1969. The Summer Of Love is over. Woodstock awaits. Television character generators are one of two kinds: bad, or awful. They cost nearly fifty grand and have graphics worse than you would find on a child’s toy purchased in 1999 at a one-dollar store. These are the days when weathermen stick magnetized, felt clouds, snowflakes and suns on a drawn map of the country to report what they think might happen today on our Earthy terrain. We are about to land on the moon, using computers that will pale next to what will be casually-discarded in some future, twenty-dollar, knock-off, made-in-the-third-world-style cell-phone. United States troop withdrawl from Southeast Asia is commencing, yet the numbers of killed and wounded there still top the headlines. Pot and tobacco use is also tolerated in public places more than an interracial relationship, and like in Easy Rider, most men with hair past their shoulders still receive jeers and occasionally, hostile remarks. Fashion-wise, mini-skirts are in, paisley is drifting-out and wider belts and larger-belled bell-bottoms are on the way. Most people still consider America to be completely open and just -- provided gas prices stay well under fifty cents a gallon. The Baby Boom’s echo resounds, and Lassie has come-home to the Paris production set of The Only Game in Town. Watergate and Kent State are still part of an tumulous and uncertain future and Star Trek airs its last episode amid small protests only a month and a day earlier -- which is, ironically and irrelevant to this tale -- the very Tuesday when I was born into this world. So dawns the end of our American Golden Age while a murky haze of apathy blandly scars the landscape of this montage of vague social commentary and aimless digression.)
CG: (7 seconds) Pvt. Timothy Ares
CG: (7 seconds) 1st Platoon, Charlie Company, 3rd Brigade, Special Operations (Field Detachment), U.S. Army
PRIVATE ARES
(Stoned. Very stoned. Audio at 20 percent with nat. sound from B-roll, silence:) -k Yeah! Can I say f-(silence)? (Cut to head shot of ARES, add CG here. Audio up:) Six months ago, this place was seriously crawlin' with Charlie. Now there hasn't been a shot fired at the camp for ten days, though there's this talk of some kinda Operation Yellow Jacket where Charlie's plannin' to surround us, but I sure ain't seen any of it. (Lose CG. Slightly nods, slowly:) Yeah, I would say our presence has definitely had an impact on community life. (Gestures with head, but remains centered in the close up, perfectly aware of the rule-of-thirds in his posturing, he’s a photogenic natural:) I used to have to patrol some thick places up North, now they got me guarding a quiet, little machine shop just four days a week and I get every three-day weekend off with my fiancee, Shoni. It's just like my quiet hometown of Colfax, Iowa, where I slaved over a band-saw and a router all day with a bunch of three-fingered veterans making these weird, serpentine banquet tables- (Pause.) It was all right, except there's better grass in Saigon but still the bugs really eat you alive out here so it's hard to enjoy it too much. (Pause, from off, a faint voice of JOHN GREENE asking about fiancee.) Oh, Shoni? She's a girl I met while back on a little R-and-R in the city. Yeah, life here's pretty good if you can get over that creepy feelin' you get every now and then when the air gets real still. That's when I just hafta blaze one up, ya know? I tell ya man, I hope this war never ends. I live like a (silence) -king king out here. Since they built this factory, I've got it (Shoves his thumbs in his nylon Load-Bearing-Equipment suspenders, splays his hands, lifts chin, smiles broadly:) made in the shade.
STILL FRAME
CUT TO: MS of desk in sky-rise office
CG: (7 seconds) Franklin Taylor Holmes, Narvis-Segille
FRANKLIN TAYLOR HOLMES
What I had discovered is that we'd been asking our unionized, quality control people to do all the wrap-integrity testing -- it's this God-awful, tedious job of taking the cap from the bottle, checking the cap, recounting the pills, replacing the cap, stamping a six-digit number on the bottom of the bottle and then walking it case-by-case to another room where they had to use an antique, manually-loaded labelling machine from the days of Rosie The Riveter or some sort of nonsense. (Finishes exhale by chuckling it out and looking off briefly:) Then they would have to change clothes and resanitize because they left the modern, environmentally-controlled workroom, costing us thousands in time and resources every time they would have to do it. Now it just blew my mind to learn they were forced to spend a third of their time doing something as tedious as wrap-integrity. Why couldn't I just ship the approved product out by the lot instead of by the case and have someone who doesn't have to bathe in sanitizer do the same thing at a thousandth of the cost? Federal regulations don't specify who has to do wrap testing or at what stage of overall production it has to be done; so; after checking with the lawyers, I moved our global distribution center to South Viet Nam at a-sawbuck-an-acre for the total operation. Our independent accounting firm was so impressed with our results, they have since out-sourced their records department to Guatemala. More money saved. I'm telling you, the time to invest in Narvis-Segille stock is now. We're doubling our advertising budget and making record profits while paying impoverished workers a hundred times their national average wage. I'm telling you, if there's a down-side to this, I sure don't see it.
CUT TO: Old woman speaking native tongue. Even she knows how to ham it up for the camera.
FEMALE TRANSLATOR V.O.
The bus comes in the morning, takes the children to school and when they come home, they sing! My, how they sing! They learn songs from American radio and eat chocolate and tell of how American men will live on the moon. (Points upward.) I am old, I've seen much. I remember how French men teased my younger brothers and sisters and made them cry. With the Americans, it is much different. The children laugh. And sometimes when they laugh, they make me laugh, too. I like to laugh, it makes me feel young.
JOHN GREENE
Reporting from the Republic of Viet Nam, For I-B-S, I'm John Greene.
CUT TO: TELEVISION ANCHOR
ROBERT HANDEL
(Happy:) Yes, John I couldn't agree-with her more. I feel younger already. Until the I-B-S evening edition with news anchor Stephen Atkins, and sports with Calvin Runda, I'm Robert Handel, wishing you a jolly-good day. Cheery-o.
DISSOLVE TO: