Team Picture presents Andrew Nenninger as the character Kentucker Audley, a name which also happens to be a pseudonym for its director. Kentucker is acting with people who are not his parents but pretend to be. In directing his movie, which is meant to reflect real life, he will need to make arrangements with various locations to use their property: a restaurant will have to agree to quiet everything down for a time, which might mean closing or allowing access after hours. A restaurant which isn't open but pretends to be isn't a real restaurant in the way most people conceive of one. People pretending to eat in such a restaurant automatically become characters. If Kentucker can't use his own house he will have to borrow someone's. Three separate locations might have to be used to represent a single dwelling on film. Java Cabana will have to agree to allow yet another filmmaker to use its premises as a generic-looking artsy coffee house. His real girlfriend might play the girlfriend he breaks up with. She might sit by while he hooks up with another girl, telling herself what he tells her: it's only a movie.

In Team Picture, Kentucker goes to Chicago with the other girl he hooks up with, who in the story lives or is staying next door. Are we to presume that he met this girl while the camera was going, and we happen to watch the blossoming of their real time relationship? Driving on the road, he looks at her sleeping in the passenger seat, studying her figure. We see it from his point of view, which means that the cameraman sat where the driver would and filmed the shot, and Kentucker himself, if not holding the camera, was either in the backseat or, possibly, not even in the car at all. The Director of Photography, also acting, i.e. being himself, in the movie, sometimes has someone else hold the camera. The way a film elides all these things and allows you to watch its story without the interruption of the shoot's circumstances is through control and deceit. The way it creates a convincing, consistent impression of everyday banality is by concealing the real life dramas and interruptions happening off camera, several feet away, or right in front of it, hidden in the director's head, so to talk about truth in filmmaking, let alone reality, is from the outset a very tricky proposition, itself at risk of dishonesty.