Quorum Chronicle – Jabberwocky Audio Theater

February 11, 2023May 7, 2023

Steering the Ship: The Harbor Pilot’s Tale

This article excerpt, part of a series entitled The Quorum Chronicle, appears in full — along with expanded audio content — exclusively for our Patreon backers. See our Patreon page for further details.

When developing the concept for what became The Harbor Pilot’s Tale, I knew it would be a step removed from the tone and storyline of The Gambler’s Tale, though at first I didn’t know exactly what it would entail. But as I fleshed out the “story bible” for the overall series, I started jotting down the critical elements I’d want to include. First, I knew this was a story that would be told in a single episode — like The Messenger’s Tale before it, this would be an “interlude” between two longer Quorum seasons. Second, I wanted to showcase the broader scope of the Quorum’s influence; since both previous seasons of The Gambler’s Tale and The Messenger’s Tale had taken place in the United States, I was eager to move beyond America’s borders. And third, I wanted to introduce a tonal shift to the story; yes, it would still identifiably be a Quorum story, but it would have its own flavor. I wasn’t going to upend the format, but I wanted this to feel different.

Generally speaking, a harbor pilot — also called a maritime pilot or port pilot — is a specialized mariner who steers ships through particularly difficult waters.

Having long since worked out one of the major plot elements in what would become the third season of The Gambler’s Tale, this interlude story had a natural focus: setting that series of events into motion. (And rest assured, I’m not about to spoil anything else here.) In an odd turn of events, because of cast scheduling constraints, I actually had to script all of the Quorum bookend scenes through the end of that third season well in advance (unless I wanted to recast roles partway through the series) — so the fact that I’d mapped out the broad strokes of the overall story worked to my advantage now. While I wasn’t committed to any particular story for this episode, I had a framing template within which to operate: the Quorum was having to make some late changes to their plans, and they would involve European shipping operations.

The first thing I did was study cargo routes throughout Europe (and ultimately, across the globe). Since I knew that the Quorum’s quote-unquote “cargo” originated in Switzerland, it was a question of figuring out what the optimal transit route would be to its final destination. I had initially assumed that route would be via train or truck down to the Mediterranean Sea. But if this cargo was intended for overseas delivery — which this was — it was more likely that it would depart from a port on the North Sea, such as Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. From there, assuming our couriers would want to keep their charge secure, and not risk being stopped en route, I deduced that a plausible (not to mention entertaining) method of transportation would be via cargo ship, along the Rhine river.

Which brought me to Basel. Home to numerous museums, Basel is often considered the cultural center of Switzerland. While not as populous as Geneva or Zürich, it does have significant banking and chemical production industries — and happens to be home to Switzerland’s only cargo port. In effect, all shipments traveling along the Rhine go through Basel. Switzerland actually has a surprisingly robust naval history. The Merchant Marine of Switzerland is the largest merchant navy of any landlocked country on Earth, and the ports of Basel are dependent on the expertise of these sailors.

Be sure to check out the complete article, in both text and enhanced audio formats, along with the rest of The Quorum Chronicle series, at our Patreon page. And thanks so much for your continuing support of Jabberwocky Audio Theater!

— William R. Coughlan, writer/director of Quorum

August 13, 2022August 13, 2022

Going Rogue

I first heard about entertainer Brian Brushwood when he was interviewed for the Skepticality podcast back in 2009. A sort of cross between magician, comedian, and sideshow performer, Brushwood had an ongoing stage show called Bizarre Magic, appearing regularly at college campuses across the country. He also hosted a YouTube show called Scam School, in which he would good-naturedly perform close-up magic or brain teasers at various San Francisco-area bars and restaurants, soliciting drinks in exchange for explaining the mystifying secret behind the trick or puzzle. His bizarre, spiked hairstyle and gregarious personality made for entertaining viewing, and I learned quite a few tricks from him — even teaching my then-nine-year-old daughter some of them so she could amaze the whole family with her magical talents.

In fact, everything Skitch does in “All That Glitters” is completely factually accurate… Jimmy’s shock at how simple — and inexpensive — this process was definitely mirrored my own.

In 2012, after Discovery Networks purchased Division3, the publisher of Scam School, Brushwood took advantage of the transition to move the show’s base of operations from San Francisco to his home city of Austin, Texas. Once there, Brushwood was more regularly able to bring occasional guests onto the show, frequently other magicians who would demonstrate their close-up magic skills. But in addition to magicians, he brought in experts with skills in other areas — notably picking locks.

Brushwood had discussed lockpicking before, likely a logical outgrowth of the “escape artist” school of magic, during the San Francisco run of Scam School. In fact, I first learned about using the “bump keys” Jimmy makes passing mention of back in a 2010 episode. But it turns out there is an entire community in Austin — the Longhorn Lockpicking Club, led by lockpicking champion JGor — that picks locks competitively. JGor and other members appeared several times on the show, demonstrating how to pick everything from door locks to bicycle locks to padlocks and even handcuffs with simple, everyday items. (One thing that became abundantly clear was just how inaccurately the process of lockpicking is normally depicted in the movies — but for the record, Linda Hamilton gets it pretty close to right in Terminator 2). Brushwood would eventually open an online merchandise shop — called, appropriately enough, Scam Stuff — where he would make available many of the tools of the lockpicking trade, including not just bump keys and lockpick sets, but transparent padlocks and full lockpick-training setups. (I may or may not have availed myself of some of those learning opportunities.)

— William R. Coughlan, writer/director of Quorum

July 7, 2022July 7, 2022

Where Everybody Knows Your Name: The Characters of “All That Glitters”

The primary character-naming convention of “All That Glitters” started as a kind of inside joke. By way of background, the scene where Jimmy impresses a big-time L.A. venture capitalist — initially named “Bob Lawrence” — appeared in the very first draft of The Gambler’s Tale, way back in early 2011. At the time, the story had Jimmy hastily departing Las Vegas for Los Angeles — with Big Mike, no less — immediately following the car bomb that apparently took Will Archer’s life. At the time, I was envisioning the tale as a single story arc, as opposed to subdividing it into separate “seasons.” But once I opted to keep the action in Las Vegas for the inaugural story arc, now called “Outstanding Debts,” this scene quickly ended up on the cutting room floor. But I knew I’d be bringing the character back in season two.

The decision to make Malone a corrupt police detective came fairly late in the process, but served to add another element of menace — not only would he be physically untouchable, but he would also be, to a large degree, immune from legal consequence.

Even before I finished that initial script, I worked up a “story bible” for the series, a sort of master blueprint to make sure I kept the plot and characters consistent. Not a complete script, or even a full outline, but mapping out the major beats for each season and defining the key characters. So now, I started developing this investor character in greater depth, working out his key personality traits. He had to be engaging and personable, but with a ruthless quality — something lurking beneath the surface that would only come to the fore when he was crossed. Not quite so simple as turning a switch on or off, but still a transition that could happen surprisingly quickly. At the risk of going into some vague spoilers, while we see hints of that transformation in “All That Glitters,” it promises to become more evident in our third-season story arc.

For some reason, an old Cheers episode popped into my head, 1989’s “The Two Faces of Norm,” in which barfly Norm Peterson is taken advantage of by his painting-business staff, who see him as a lovable pushover. To whip his team into shape, he invents a fictional “business partner,” Anton Kreitzer, who can be the hard-nosed taskmaster while Norm remains the affable, good-natured buddy. At one point, Norm even has to adopt the Kreitzer persona in an attempt to keep up the ruse — which naturally falls apart in typical sitcom fashion. Amused, I penciled in the name “Anton Kreitzer” for my venture capitalist and didn’t think much more about it. Later, rewriting his introduction to the story, and having already added Eleanor Wallis to the scene, I realized I needed another character in the mix, to provide an additional point of potential conflict. And if I had one character named for Norm, why not name this new character for Norm’s near-constant barstool companion? So Cliff — short for Clifford — became Ford.

From there, throughout the entire writing process, I started sticking in Cheers character names. Malone, Chambers, Boyd, Pantusso — that’s Coach’s last name, by the way — and even a bunch of secondary characters, like Tom, Paul, Drake, and Gittes, who’s actually named for Harry Anderson’s flim-flam character rather than for Jack Nicholson’s Chinatown protagonist. None of the Quorum characters are really anything like their Cheers namesakes, but once I got rolling, it just sort of stuck. I even threw in a reference to a “Screaming Viking,” a fictional drink featured in the show.

— William R. Coughlan, writer/director of Quorum

June 8, 2022June 8, 2022

Building the L.A. of “All That Glitters”: Touring the City of Angels (Virtually)

One critical step in building a story’s environment — at least for those taking place in the real world — is familiarizing yourself with the location as much as possible. The last thing you want is for someone to be taken out of the story because of some obvious detail you’ve overlooked. But for “All That Glitters,” not living in Los Angeles meant that I was left making a fair number of assumptions and relying on more than a little educated guesswork.

All of which led to an unusual source for exploring the City of Angels in detail: video games. Stick with me here.

One big advantage of presenting the city in something like L.A. Noire is that it showcases the city as befits a noir environment… This is L.A. as backdrop for crime and corruption.

I’ve never been a hardcore gamer — honestly, I bought a PlayStation 3 less for its gaming capabilities than because it was the least expensive Blu-Ray player on the market at the time. But one day, I happened to be perusing a Time magazine article on the top 10 video games of 2010, and I was struck by an image for a game called Red Dead Redemption: a lone cowboy astride his horse, framed against a gorgeous desert sunset. Intrigued, I picked up a copy of the game, and was immediately hooked by the stunning western vistas, playing the game through to the end, exploring every nook and cranny of this phenomenally detailed open world in the process. (I’m kind of obsessive that way.)

A short time later — in the spring of 2011 — I was at a local GameStop when the clerk commented that the studio that published Red Dead Redemption had another open-world game due to be released that month: a 1940s-set detective story called L.A. Noire. I preordered it on the spot.

Produced by Australia’s Team Bondi and published by Rockstar Games, L.A. Noire is set in Los Angeles in 1947, one of the deadliest years on record for violent crime at that point (including the infamous “Black Dahlia” murder, which is referenced heavily within the game). Players take on the role of Marine veteran Cole Phelps, now a member of the Los Angeles Police Department, as he works his way through several different desks — from Traffic to Homicide, Vice and Arson — solving a series of cases inspired both by real-world events and classic film noir stories.

— William R. Coughlan, writer/director of Quorum

May 8, 2022May 8, 2022

Building the L.A. of “All That Glitters”: Out of the Past

The film influences that went into crafting the Los Angeles of “All That Glitters” are too numerous to mention. (Or at least too numerous to iterate in a single Chronicle entry.) After all, many of the signature characteristics of the city — at least within the crime genre — are common to nearly the entirety of the noir ouvre. Not that The Gambler’s Tale fits definitively in the noir model: I like to think the world we portray isn’t quite as irredeemable as is the case in true noir, which is why I tend to refer to our story as a hardboiled crime drama — a subtle distinction, but distinct nonetheless. I’ve always thought of it as a sort of hybrid with roots in film noir or hardboiled crime fiction in general. With that in mind, it’s only right to at least attempt to highlight a few memorable standouts.

[What] makes Los Angeles unique as a setting is that the omnipresent sunshine and wide-open spaces serve to make the dark alleys and backroom dealings all the more jarring.

Two of Billy Wilder’s classics immediately come to mind. First, 1944’s Double Indemnity, which presents L.A. as a place where otherwise appealing people are willing to do terrible things, executing an intricate, cold-blooded fraud and murder scheme in the service of all-consuming ambition. Second, 1950’s Sunset Blvd. throws into sharp relief the ultimate futility of ignoring reality in favor of a preferred fantasy, as well as the dissonance between the utter corruption and moral bankruptcy of Hollywood and its irresistible appeal. And both of them highlight the sharp divide between the way things work for the rich and powerful and the less well-connected among us.

That same divide comes through in Howard Hawks’s 1946 classic The Big Sleep, which also deserves credit for explicitly portraying an illicit gambling operation — The Cypress Club — that villain Eddie Mars operates without the slightest fear of legal complications. Of course, we can only hope to recapture a fraction of the chemistry between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in that film — though I do think we manage to resolve our mysteries a bit more cleanly. The Big Sleep also features a memorable scene where the protagonist, Philip Marlowe, attempts to decode a mysterious cipher, a task Jimmy also tackles in “All That Glitters” (and which may be of particular interest to anyone who listens all the way through Quorum’s end credits).

— William R. Coughlan, writer/director of Quorum

April 7, 2022April 7, 2022

Building the L.A. of “All That Glitters”: Obsessing Over the Details

As an author, when crafting any new story, it’s important to make sure your environment is fleshed out as much as possible. For one thing, even if much of that background material is never explicitly referenced in the final result, it helps you avoid inconsistencies — which careful readers, viewers, or listeners will notice, no matter how much you might try to convince yourself otherwise. For another, it gives you a foundation on which to make revisions — and rest assured, no matter how confident you are in your initial outlines, there will be revisions. And finally, it ensures that your world has the same kind of tonal consistency as your story and characters.

The Hall of Records is a genuine location, and one I couldn’t readily fictionalize without breaking the illusion of reality… but for the sake of storytelling, I opted to retain the location while dramatizing its contents.

The first season of The Gambler’s Tale, “Outstanding Debts,” was set in and around Las Vegas, and I took great pains to make sure my representation of the city was as thorough as possible. That’s not to say it was completely, factually accurate, but it was based in reality — which meant that any time I deviated from reality, I did so intentionally, and made sure that within the bounds of my tale, everything remained consistent. The casinos and other locations may have been fictional, but I made sure I knew where each of them was situated geographically, even to the point of checking traffic routes and distances between them. Anyone who’s spent any time in Las Vegas — and, admittedly, my time there has been limited — will know there’s a big difference between the classic casinos on Fremont Street and the Strip-based megaresorts.

This season, The Gambler’s Tale heads to Los Angeles with “All That Glitters.” And once again, I wanted to make sure to present the city in as detailed a manner as possible. Again, that’s not to say it’s exactly accurate in the strictest sense, but any alterations to reality are made with deliberate intent. For example, we feature several real-life locations and landmarks — such as the Griffith Park Observatory, the Roosevelt Hotel, the Exposition Park Rose Garden, the L.A. Civic Center, and the viaducts crossing the Los Angeles River — but just as many fictional ones. As a general rule of thumb, in cases where I’d be depicting these locations as they appear in real life — or where they were too iconic to reimagine as fictional alternatives — I would go ahead and reference them directly. But in instances where the location was purely fictional, even if comparable to some real-life location, I’d take the time to give it its own distinct flavor, while still anchoring it alongside its real-world analogue (or analogues).

— William R. Coughlan, writer/director of Quorum

March 7, 2022

The Most Famous Poker Game in Hollywood

It’s said that California — and Los Angeles in particular — has the most poker playing going on of anywhere outside of Las Vegas. Whether that’s true or not doesn’t really matter; in a town that thrives on storytelling, the truth is at best a passing consideration.

But there certainly are a lot of often high-stakes games going on, whether at the regulated cardrooms or in private settings — which made situating the second season of The Gambler’s Talein the City of Angels a natural fit. And in filling out the environment of this tale, one real-life game served as at least initial inspiration for Margaret Florian’s undertaking in “All That Glitters” — that of Molly Bloom, as related in her memoir, Molly’s Game: From Hollywood’s Elite to Wall Street’s Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker, and its film adaptation, Aaron Sorkin’s more succinctly titled Molly’s Game.

— William R. Coughlan, writer/director of Quorum

February 7, 2022February 7, 2022

Leaving Las Vegas: Gambling in California

The world of gambling as depicted in the second season of The Gambler’s Tale, “All That Glitters,” is decidedly different than that in “Outstanding Debts.” No longer is our story set against the backdrop of high-stakes Las Vegas poker, with its unique set of professional players and power brokers. Moreover, online poker is no longer an ongoing concern. As of the summer of 2012, when our story is set, not much had changed since the conclusion of our first season, at least not as will impact the world of Quorum — online funds remained largely unavailable to players, and the dust was still settling in terms of criminal indictments and civil actions. But most importantly, we’re not in Las Vegas anymore. And gambling in California is decidedly different.

Under California law, percentage games are illegal, but because poker falls outside that category, whether or not you want to consider poker “gambling,” that specific prohibition doesn’t apply.

Popular wisdom (at least in the United States) holds that gambling is legal in Nevada (and Atlantic City) but illegal pretty much everywhere else. But that is far from the reality. Still, attempting to apply any kind of consistent logic to the various legal restrictions can quickly become an exercise in futility. For one thing, as we touched on in one of our earlier entries in this series, coming up with a single, coherent definition as to what constitutes “gambling” is problematic at best. For another, most jurisdictions are more than happy to ban gambling — largely on moral pretext — right up until they have a chance to share in the often-substantial profits, or when the beneficiaries are charitable organizations (as if the purported immorality of promoting such an insidious activity as gambling miraculously changes based on who’s running the game). And sometimes, a particular form of gambling is just too ingrained in the public consciousness — or its operators are too powerful — to prohibit outright.

A prime example of this last point is betting on horse races, as is featured in this season of Quorum. The full history is far too complicated to go into here, but in a nutshell, horse racing is so ingrained into the nation’s culture that despite the underlying structure being effectively identical to comparable forms of gambling that are largely illegal, such as sports betting, it would be extraordinarily difficult to prohibit. (With specific regard to California, horse racing was legalized by voter referendum back in 1933.) That said, until 1970, all horse betting had to take place at the actual track. That year, New York became the first state to legalize off-track betting — that is, betting on a race taking place other than where the wager was physically placed. But after actual racetracks complained that they were losing revenue to off-site betting parlors, the federal government stepped in with the Interstate Horseracing Act of 1978. This act certainly didn’t require states to allow off-track betting, but at the very least it allowed them a clear framework within which to do so, as well as establishing that states had the right to regulate the process. (California does allow such off-track betting and has a number of authorized betting outlets.) In a surprising parallel to the world of online poker, regular debates around the applicability of the Interstate Wire Act of 1961 to horse betting often raged. And in an ironic twist, while the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (or UIGEA) referenced in season one of Quorum was intended, at least substantially, to target online poker, that same act carved out an explicit exemption for online horse betting, enshrining its status as a legal form of gambling.

— William R. Coughlan, writer/director of Quorum

January 7, 2022January 7, 2022

La La Land

Real estate speculation has long been a vital part of the American economy — and prompted more than a bit of illicit activity. To quote Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor (to whom we even give a little shout-out in our tale), “Son, stocks may rise and fall, utilities and transportation systems may collapse. People are no damn good. But they will always need land, and they will pay through the nose to get it.” And while Luthor’s plan — destroying half of California to create a new west coast — was appropriately grandiose, befitting an iconic movie supervillain, we’re definitely more grounded in Quorum.

The contentious Kelo v. City of New London Supreme Court case in 2004 affirmed that city governments had the right to seize property and turn it over to private developers, rather than solely for public works projects.

In my first outlines of the script, the specifics were vaguely defined. I was more interested in developing the character conflicts and general motivations than in the details — at least initially. But once I began researching the backdrop of Los Angeles in 2012 (since, just as “Outstanding Debts” was linked to a specific time, so too would our second story arc, “All That Glitters”), I uncovered a wealth of real-life drama that I could incorporate as backdrop, even if substantially modified to work within the scope of our tale.

The most memorable of these, of course, is the demolition and replacement of the Sixth Street Viaduct, which spans the LA river from the city’s downtown Arts District to Boyle Heights. Originally built in 1932, the bridge had long been an iconic fixture of the Los Angeles cityscape, being featured in countless films and television series, including Grease, Terminator 2, Gone in 60 Seconds, Tapeheads, 24, and Lost, just to name a few. It was even declared eligible for inclusion in the National Registry of Historic Places. But engineers discovered that the substandard chemical composition of the bridge’s concrete had resulted in a chemical process known as alkali-silica reaction (colloquially referred to as “concrete cancer”), causing it to deteriorate a mere 20 years following its construction. Various methods had been used over the decades to try and ameliorate the damage, but ultimately, seismic vulnerability studies revealed that the bridge was in danger of collapse in the event of a major earthquake, and the bridge’s inevitable closure and demolition planning began. A design competition was launched for the bridge’s replacement in April of 2012, with the winning submission — from architect Michael Maltzan and the Kansas City-based HNTB infrastructure design firm — being announced that October. The new design, called “The Ribbon of Light,” features sweeping cable-supported arches, and will accommodate not only the original bridge’s four traffic lanes, but also dedicated bicycle lanes and 14-foot-wide sidewalks, as well as multiple sets of stairs allowing pedestrians to descend from the bridge to the planned 12-acre Sixth Street Parc below. This new community space is expected to include basketball courts, soccer fields, fitness areas, a dog park, skate park, amphitheater, and several picnic and garden areas. In other words, a much larger development than simply replacing the existing structure with something comparable. Once I learned more about the project, I knew that — with a little creative embellishment — it would serve as a particularly apt anchor for one of the critical revelations in “All That Glitters.” Closure and demolition began in January of 2016, and after several delays, the bridge is finally scheduled to reopen in the summer of 2022.

— William R. Coughlan, writer/director of Quorum

November 15, 2021November 15, 2021

Speedy Delivery: The Messenger’s Tale

Working in the design field in the days before the ubiquity of PDF documents and digital signatures, I had more than my share of experience with bicycle messengers. Whether sending design edits back-and-forth with a client, or checking proofs from a printer, bicycle messengers — with their trademark neon-spandex outfits and omnipresent single-strap messenger bags — were the go-to-delivery method for items that needed to get across town too quickly for regular delivery services, but which couldn’t be sent as faxes or scans because of their sensitivity or need for accuracy. (To this day, on-screen proofs are no real substitute for verifying printed colors off the press.)

At its height, the bicycle courier industry in Washington, DC, where The Messenger’s Tale takes place, had upwards of 400 riders.

Bicycle couriers have actually been around since the nineteenth century, with bicycles being used to transport mail and other documents, as well as for telegraph message delivery. But what we traditionally think of as the bicycle courier industry was born shortly after the second World War, when Carl Sparks founded a dedicated bicycle delivery service — called, appropriately enough, Sparkies — in San Francisco. Throughout the late twentieth century, the industry gradually developed a distinct counter-culture image, with messengers often viewed as hardcore, punk rock-infused anarchists. But across the 1980s and ’90s, a more collaborative atmosphere began to permeate the industry, and affinity groups for bicycle couriers began springing up, such as the Messenger Courier Association of America, as well as communal events like the Cycle Messenger World Championships, an annual competition composed of both proper cycling races and various stunts and activities meant to replicate the kinds of actions couriers encounter as a part of their daily work routines. And couriers also participate in so-called “alley cat” races — underground, unsanctioned competitions organized in cities around the world.

The technology used by bicycle messengers has changed dramatically over the years, from the early days of paper maps and in-person dispatching to two-way radios, mobile phones and GPS systems. But one area in which technology seems to have reversed — particularly since the mid-2000s — is in the only true requirement for being a bicycle courier: the bicycle itself. While messengers have long made use of a wide range of cycle types, based on everything from local terrain to personal preference, one notable standout among couriers is the fixed-gear cycle, or “fixie.” A kind of throwback to the very first bicycles ever built, a fixie has no freewheel mechanism — the rear wheel sprocket is locked to the wheel hub, meaning that pedal movement and wheel movement are locked in sync. This means the bicycle has no ability to coast — if the wheels are moving, the pedals are moving. But this also means the rider can use reverse pedal motion to brake, or even move in reverse. In point of fact, many bicycles in use have removed dedicated brakes entirely, relying solely on the rider’s own leg power. While all of this may seem odd, even anachronistic, the fixie does have several advantages. For one, not having the extra equipment makes the bike notably lighter than its more fully geared counterparts. For another, the reduced complexity of the design reduces the chance of mechanical failure — a critical concern when your livelihood depends on reliability. Many cyclists believe a fixed-wheel cycle gives them greater control, though this assertion is questioned by just as many others. And ultimately, such a simple, basic bicycle may be less attractive to bicycle thieves, an all-too-common danger in urban environments.

— William R. Coughlan, writer/director of Quorum