We Don't Want Story? Of course we do!!

http://www.nbcwashington.com/blogs/popcornbiz/Disney-Exec-Says-Theyand-You--Dont-Care-About-Story-127951908.html

We don’t care about story? … What?
We don’t care about story? … What??
We don’t care about story? … What???

Any way you interpret Disney Exec Andy Hendrickson’s assertion that they and we don’t care about story you can only be left rolling your eyes and tutting like an old English Teacher clutching ‘Pride and Prejudice’ faced with a detention class.

What am I telling you for? The fact you’re interested in this means you’re probably in the business of story-telling or film/TV making and this echoes what you’ve been thinking all along. You are the converted - we do care about story! We all know that story is the heart and soul of anything we do – along with Character. Without those key elements you end up with most of Tom Cruises career.

There is a huge assumption here – the idea that an audience doesn’t want something just because you’ve stopped supplying it. That’s getting away with it – it isn’t a fact in itself. How often do we see movies and think the trailer was better than the film itself? How often does your heart sink in a movie as you pass each sign post… here’s the action opening… here’s the first doorway of no return… here’s the second doorway into the third act…here’s the eleventh hour disaster… yawn yawn sigh sigh… that’s because there’s only a textbook formula.

Hendrickson talks about how Tim Burton’s ‘Alice’ had a poor story but the visuals brought people in in droves. True. But he doesn’t mention how people felt when they left. I am pretty convinced the majority of people left saying ‘It looked amazing but…’ His unspoken point is that getting people in, getting them to pay is what counts – they don’t pay on exit… What he’s missing is the we can see the formula at work, we can feel each beat of the plot, the problem is we don’t get much of an alternative.

We all pitch programmes and movies at a set of boxes that studios are waiting to tick. The boxes are the end result of their quest to quantify and control the magical elements of ‘Story’ and bottle it so they can reproduce it as often as they like. They need to reduce the variables. It’s an understandable attempt at protecting the huge investment film and TV needs these days – but it is a tactic that often ends up with unsatisfactory results – and worse than that – takes everybody’s eyes away from the truly inspiring and captivating stories that really would break through. The fact that we’ve come to tolerate this formulaic approach as the norm doesn’t mean we don’t crave more.

The industry in ‘How to write’ books, from McKee onwards, has resulted in a generation of execs who believe any successful movie can be formulaically created under laboratory conditions and then let loose. But that’s a little like cloning Eric Morecombe and expecting the clone to have the same comic timing, talent for ad-libbing and twinkle in the eye ….

And the model racks itself up – make more happen, blow more things up, raise the stakes – surely that MUST a good story make. Simply having two people stare at each other in an emotionally charged situation is way too scary. Too unpredictable. But I venture more people remember Hannibal Lecter staring at Claris than any of Mr Cruise’s Blast-Ups.

Yet everything has its place – and on many levels the formula works – it makes a film acceptable and gives the effects a solid base colour to shine against – that level of reliability is worth the compromise of quality. We as an audience accept it because we still go… so we can’t really complain.

But isn’t the net result of making things fit a formula best demonstrated by the transition of ‘The Killing’ to the US… it’s the same show… the shots, the music, the colour palette, it’s just lost something, a bit of it’s soul… a little of its magic. All the corners that have been knocked off, all the quirky characters who have been smoothed out and all the elements that didn’t ‘fit’ were exactly what made the original so compelling.