“Saving the Story (the Film Version)”

Didn’t want to let this NY Times article pass by without comment:

The movie world has been fretting for years about the collapse of stardom. Now there are growing fears that another chunk of film architecture is looking wobbly: the story.

In league with a handful of former Hollywood executives, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory plans to do something about that on Tuesday, with the creation of a new Center for Future Storytelling.

The center is envisioned as a “labette,” a little laboratory, that will examine whether the old way of telling stories — particularly those delivered to the millions on screen, with a beginning, a middle and an end — is in serious trouble.

Its mission is not small. “The idea, as we move forward with 21st-century storytelling, is to try to keep meaning alive,” said David Kirkpatrick, a founder of the new venture.

This subject has come up frequently in the last two decades that I’ve been around the entertainment business. With the advent of every new technology — VCR, DVD, digital filmmaking, videogames — there has been a concomitant chorus of doomsdayers about the fate of movies and storytelling. I’ll bet when talkies hit in 1927, there were freaked-out folks, too — perhaps the grandfathers and grandmothers of this M.I.T. crowd!

Call me an old fart, but I don’t think people will ever stray from a desire and interest in stories. Nor do I think technology will somehow ‘murder’ the art of narrative storytelling. Just look at this past summer where two big eye-popping movies — Iron Man and The Dark Knight — had engaging, smart, and structurally sound narratives, along with all the other elements marking any screenplay, i.e., characters, subplots, themes. Combined they did over $1.5 billion in worldwide box office.

Is a storytelling lab at M.I.T. necessary? Perhaps. But if they’re tackling issues from the following vantage point, perhaps not:

A common gripe is that gamelike, open-ended series like “Pirates of the Caribbean” or Spider-Man have eroded filmmakers’ ability to wrap up their movies in the third act. Another is that a preference for proven, outside stories like the Harry Potter books is killing Hollywood’s appetite for original storytelling.

That’s just silly. Every Spider-Man and Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and every Harry Potter book has provided a satisfactory ending. Do they leave the door open to sequels? Of course they do. But that’s just a case of being a smart businessperson, not a bad storyteller. I don’t recall hearing this complaint when The Empire Strikes Back came out over nearly three decades ago, leaving the plight of Han Solo unfinished. That was just one subplot of many, the others of which were resolved in a satisfying manner. The Han Solo frozen in limbo story is a cliffhanger — and how many centuries has that narrative element been around?

I’m not saying ‘story’ doesn’t evolve. For instance, it’s probably safe to say that audiences today do not need as much exposition and set-up as audiences did a generation ago, but that’s not an example of story failing; on the contrary, I’d argue that it’s precisely because story has succeeded — young people so story savvy, they don’t need to be walked by the hand through every beat or piece of information, they are story-intuitive enough to fill in the blanks.

The NY Times article cites a few anecdotes. Well, I’ve got my own. I went to see Rachel Getting Married last night with 8 of the students in the screenwriting class I’ve been teaching at UNC. The young men and women in this class are sharp, literate, and opinionated. They’re also, by all indications, totally dialed into consumer culture and all the contemporary ‘stuff’ that is, by some account, creating a generation of short-attention span people (e.g., cell phones, Twitter, texting, Facebook).

Not last night at Rachel. I sat with my students for the approximate 110 minutes of that movie — no cellphones, no chatter, just rapt attention. And afterwards, we engaged in a cogent and insightful discussion of the movie, breaking down characters, plot elements, camera angles and shots, choices of music, and on and on. What’s more, they liked the movie, clearly they entered into that story world, into the lives of that wildly dysfunctional family, and followed them through all the narrative twists and turns. Could not have asked for a more engaged group of moviegoers.

So if people want to lay down $25 million over the next 7 years to try to “keep meaning alive” in terms of storytelling, let them knock themselves out. But I don’t see stories as we know them going away anytime soon.

If they do, as a friend said today over lunch, “That’s pretty much the end of civilization.” But wouldn’t that be an interesting story to write?!