By Charles Peirce
In Adventures in the Screentrade, William Goldman famously opined that “nobody knows anything” in Hollywood, a curious concession for a man with such a marked record of success. The truth, though, is that Hollywood has always known something — its very business centered not just on creating hits but also on predicting future ones.
Originally the Studio System developed a series of principals which, if not always guaranteeing success, at least mitigated against disaster. That legacy persists today, albiet more loosely: in coverage, screenwriting structure, and the identifying of a film with its stars. The rise of the blockbuster didn’t undo the Studio System legacy, but it did change the metrics of success — once the end product becomes less bodies in seats and more associated merchandise, the thinking on what makes a good movie changes significantly. New aims call for new methods, and Hollywood has evolved its strategies with the times.
Christopher Vogler, author of the popular screenwriting book The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, claims to be one of the instigators of these new methods. As a consultant for Disney and then Fox 2000, Vogler championed overlaying three-act-structure with Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey (along with some token nods to Jung). That influence is still felt far and wide and may be why a series of familiar tropes dominate many films to this day.[1]
More recently, Transmedia became a buzzword strategy (even as its definition spawns a debate of comic proportions).[2] First coined by Marsha Kinder, Transmedia’s most significant proponents were media theorist Henry Jenkins and Jeff Gomez of Starlight Runner, instrumental in getting Transmedia Producer its PGA accredidation. Looking at its successes rather than all the things that get lumped with it, Transmedia strategy seems an after-the-fact attempt at replicating (or explaining) the success of The Matrix. Debates aside, it’s not hard to acredit part of Marvel’s box office dominance as the product of such a strategy.
Other strategies have proven equally attractive for companies looking to guarantee success. Disney’s Charles Kennedy helps determine their future slate based on a historical analysis of past ones. If today’s financial and political climate mirrors the Depression, then surely today’s audience will crave a cinema similar to that era’s. Meanwhile, Vinny Bruzzese and his Worldwide Motion Picture Group marry statistical vetting with script analysis to engineer hits.
Of course, the winner for any talk of predictive theory at the moment is Big Data, and in cinema nobody exemplifies that potential more than Netflix and their number-crunching a path to content creation. For now that data seems mainly correlated against itself (if you like a movie enough other people like, you’ll probably like other movies those same people like), but it’s only a matter of time before that evolves. If Data Brokers will sell your personal data so advertiser’s can target rape victims and alcoholics, entertainment won’t be long behind in a similar expansion.
Storytelling as a key mover in society is everybody’s game now, and Hollywood is in no way alone. The Pentagon researches how to quantify storytelling (to create, among other things, “counter-narratives”). And companies such as Microsoft have thinktanks for exploring the future of storytelling, hoping to capitalize on a business that is going to define our future even more than it does our present. Everybody is trying to figure out how to make stories work, and how, in turn, to make an audience love the stories they’re telling. If much of this sounds more the traditional domain of marketing, that’s because it is.
Marketing is often looked down on in film, as though its increasingy large budgets were a misappropriation of funds by devious ad men against a naive public. But for some time, the guiding philosophy for marketing has been not so much the creation of desire as the illumination of unrealized desire. At its more theoretical, marketing concerns itself as much with psychology, sociology, and neuroscience as it does with the nuts and bolts of reach and frequency. Marketers have long used archetype theory, narrative strategies, and data on people’s emotional response to stimulus to plan their campaigns. The average big-budget ad is r&d’d and fine-tuned as exhaustively as any of Pixar’s constructions.[3]
Here is where we see the confluence of two worlds — Hollywood’s obsession with predicitive analysis and marketing’ s attempts to uncover the hidden desires of man so as to better realize them. Here, movies are dreams writ large, an interrogation with the collective unconscious that allows us to experience what we never will and forge new memories within ourselves. Here, success comes in understanding these dreams and helping people find them.
The future of storyelling and the cinema — whether on the epic level of Hollywood franchises or the more personal, intimate level of “independent film” — comes not only in realizing this new vision but in making it the core of any strategy. Filmmakers can obsess all they want about distribution channels, the over-abundance of content, vanishing budgets and declining diversity — there’s no doubt all are important and have their place in the dialog of success — but if you aren’t trying, ultimately, to reach into the heart of your fellow humanity and touch something there, you’re already behind the times: because somebody else already is. And they’re anything but alone.
Notes
1. That both The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises have suspiciously similar endings is indicative of a formula — admittedly a working one — in Hollywood storytelling.
2. For a taste of said debate about the term Transmedia check out the “Talk” page on Wikipedia.
3. Pixar probably deserves a place on this list themselves, creating their films through an elaborate process of animatics that is essentially an iterative approach to content creation. See Pixar’s Secret: Rewrite, Re-edit, Recut.
Next Week: What Makes A Film Good?
Nobody Knows Anything is a speculative journey through the more esoteric theories of popular culture: what that means, what comes next, and what can be done about it.
Charles Peirce is a screenwriter and musician, with an active interest in marketing, behavorial psychology and strategy. He finds it odd to talk about himself in the third person. He can be reached at ctcpeirce@gmail.com or via twitter @ctcpeirce.
