“Tell to Win” by Peter Guber (Part 2)
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: The first target in story telling.
Guber makes one point upfront, often, and throughout “Tell to Win.” Any story worth a damn has got to create an emotional connection with the viewer or listener. Here some variations Guber makes on this same point:
“Miss the audience’s heart as a filmmaker, and the only wallet that gets hit will be your own. That’s because the heart is always the first target in story telling.”
“To succeed, you have to persuade others to support your vision, dream, or cause… you have to deliver a clarion call that will get your listeners’ attention, emotionalize your goal as theirs, and move them to act in your favor.”
“I’d taught for more than thirty years that stories teach, model, unite, and motivate by transporting audiences emotionally.”
“It was Stacey Snider, the former chair of Universal Pictures and now co-chair of DreamWorks Studios, who first said to me, when she was president of my company more than twenty years ago, ‘The best stories lead from the heart, not the mind.’”
“What do I mean by ‘emotional transportation’? I’m talking about the complex system of action and reaction that operates within stories to move listeners. Stories that ‘work’ transport audiences emotionally. They move us to laugh, cry, gasp, sigh, or yell in sympathetic rage, and every listener intuitively demands this emotional propulsion.”
This is one of those big ticket items, something so fundamental to the story-crafting process, we may sometimes forget it. But as screenwriters, TV writers and filmmakers, we do so at our peril. People don’t walk out of a movie theater all aglow and spouting, “Oh my God! That story had such an amazing structure!” No, they emerge into the night going on and on about this scene, that character, a moment that absolutely riveted them. While our mind may be involved in the processing of that experience, it’s our hearts that lead the way.
I’m sure you know this to be true in your own experience. You go to a movie to be entertained, sure. But you also watch a film, whether conscious or not, to be moved. To feel something. If it’s a comedy, you want to laugh. If it’s a thriller, you want to be thrilled. If it’s horror, you want to be scared.
Talk to anybody who works in the acquisition and development side of the movie business, whether it’s the head of a studio like Peter Guber was or Stacy Snider is, or junior creative exec, producer, agent, even professional script readers. I guarantee they will all say when they crack open a screenplay, they want to find some sort of emotional connection to the material, they want the story to make them feel something.
So look at the screenplay, TV pilot, or episode you’re currently writing. What in it can create an emotional connection with a reader? I’m not talking melodrama, I’m talking authentic human emotion.
It’s a critical component of the success of your script. Like Guber says: “The heart is always the first target in story telling.”
For Part One in my series of posts on Guber’s book “Tell to Win,” go here.
UPDATE: The LAT with this article on Guber and his new book.