“Tell to Win” by Peter Guber (Part 1)
I’m enjoying “Tell to Win,” a book that’s just come out from Peter Guber, the former chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures and current head of Mandalay Entertainment Group. The lowdown on the book:
In Tell To Win, executive and entrepreneur Peter Guber shows how to move beyond soulless PowerPoint slides, facts, and figure to create purposeful stories that can motivate, win over, shape, engage, and sell. To validate the power of telling purposeful stories, he includes a remarkably diverse number of “voices” — master tellers with whom he has shared experiences. They include YouTube founder Chad Hurley, NBA champion Pat Riley, film director Steven Spielberg, and physician and author Deepak Chopra.
While pitched to people in the business community, I’m finding there’s a lot here for those of us interested in screenwriting and a career in movies, so I thought it would be worth sharing a few of those insights in some posts over the next week or so.
Today: How a top Hollywood producer and former head of a movie studio understands the concept of story.
You can study Robert McKee, Syd Field, John Truby, or any other screenwriting guru and the multitude of theories about screenwriting and storytelling floating around out there. At the end of the day, whether a screenplay sells or not to a Hollywood studio depends upon what they — studio executives — think about story. Here is how Guber sees it:
Here, then, is how you build a story:
* First… get your listeners’ attention with an unexpected challenge or question.
* Next… give your listeners an emotional experience by narrating the struggle to overcome that challenge or to find the answer to the opening question.
* Finally… galvanize your listeners’ response with an eye-opening resolution that calls them to action.
If that sounds to you like three act structure, you’re right. More from Guber:
Filmmakers and writers often play around with the order in which information is revealed, sometimes to great effect. But I knew from my years in the movie business that they’re skunked if they don’t deliver the three-part story-listening experience that audiences seem instinctively to expect. Listeners are rarely hooked if they don’t sense some compelling challenge in the beginning. They won’t stay engaged if they’re not excited by the struggle of the middle. And they won’t remember or act on the story unless they feel galvanized by its final resolution.
And to drill it down even more, Guber sums up the three parts this way:
Challenge. Struggle. Resolution.
So while we, as screenwriters, can debate all day long the merits of this theory or that — 8 sequences, 12 events, 17 plot points, 22 steps, 40 beats, whatever — it’s almost certain that any Hollywood player (agent, manager, producer, studio exec) will read your script with a bottom line view of story akin to what Guber articulates.
And you know what? That doesn’t give me heartburn at all. I believe what we call three act structure is innate to the human experience of reading, watching or listening to a story. Whether like Aristotle you call it Beginning, Middle and End, or Hegel’s Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis, or Guber ‘s Challenge, Struggle and Resolution, those three movements comprise the very core of a screenplay or any story for that matter. In fact I like Guber’s version because it takes us beyond the mere structure of the External World of a screenplay universe (Beginning, Middle, End) and into the emotional and thematic realm of the story, the Internal World of a character’s psychological journey: Challenge, Struggle, Resolution.
In my next post on Guber’s book, I’ll look at what he suggests is the single biggest key to a successful story.