Green Card Wedding

So my brother and I recently came up with a pretty fun concept for a romantic comedy…

It’s THE PROPOSAL meets NOTTING HILL with Mexican spice.

Logline: An all-American slacker is hired to con a hot Mexican starlet into a sham marriage for a green card she doesn’t even want, but when he finds himself falling for her his plan backfires and he has to risk everything to find out if it’s love.

A screenwriter friend of ours will help shape it into a script.  Interested?  Bidding starts at $2 million.

Movie Metrics: Is it Possible to Quantify the Experience of Film?

How can some number-crunching grad students really think this is possible? Analyzing the potential success of a screenplay with a computer?  Measuring brain reaction to find a winning story formula?

Some professors at Wharton have even proposed a metric for analyzing screenplays to predict the Return on Investment of a film(pdf here).   The method uses such criteria as vocabulary, genre, number of characters and sentence length.

“We compare the performance of our portfolio against two benchmarks. In the first benchmark, 30 movies are randomly chosen to form a portfolio. Each of the 81 movies in the holdout sample has equal probability of being selected in the portfolio. The ROI of this portfolio is recorded, and this procedure is repeated 1000 times. Then, the mean ROI based on random selection is calculated by averaging the ROI that results in 1000 portfolios. We find that the mean ROI in this case is -18.6%. In the second benchmark, we try to replicate more closely the way studios select movies by MPAA ratings.  Studios in general make roughly 60% R-rated movies and 40% non-R (G / PG / PG-13) rated movies
(MPAA 2004). Thus, we replicate this rule of thumb by fixing the number of R-rated movies to be made in the 30-movie portfolio case to be 18 and the number of non-R rated movies to be 12. Then we select 18 R-rated movies randomly from the pool of R-rated movies in the 81 holdout movies, and likewise for non-R rated movies. The mean ROI of a portfolio selected using this “MPAA-based” selection method is -24.4%. Our method outperforms both benchmarks by a significant margin. Indeed, as shown in Figure 6, our approach always produces a significant economic gain no matter how many movies are selected for the portfolio, suggesting that our model is able to capture determinants from the textual information in movie scripts and hence significantly improve the studio’s profitability.”

Their results are surprising, however I would guess that a thoughtful, experienced person could pick the most profitable scripts with more accuracy than this formula.

Analyzing the profitability of scripts based on comparable precedents is one thing – but trying to increase a movie’s impact by scanning the brain’s reaction to scenes is another.  Some well-intentioned brain specialists at MindSign have coined the term neurocinema.  My first reaction was that the whole concept is idiotic and deeply misunderstands the purpose and nature of Story.  In an NPR interview, Philip Carlsen of MindSign said:

Ideally, a director could send dailies out to us and we can scan the dailies. For those of you who don’t know, dailies are all the shots at the end of the day. They’ve got seven shots that look exactly the same, but we can give you the most activating shot of these seven, and you can use those. You can actually make your movie more activating based on subjects’ brains.

First of all, a story contains much, much more than a collection of images and scenarios.  Anyone who presumes to measure the impact of a story by measuring the impact of individual scenes is not a story-teller.  A story digs deep into universal human principles; it opens up the world of things unsaid and unseen – of intimation and connotation – and it affects us on different levels.  I don’t think this technique could even work on a popcorn flick, because the arc of a story is so much more than the sum of its parts.
Because this FMRI reveals individual brain responses to film clips, its most valuable purpose appears to be in determining what kinds of images excite the individual’s brain most.  I still have a problem with this, because an image or scenario is profoundly affected by what precedes it. For example, the image of a man running through a tunnel affects us differently if we sympathize with him or fear him. Is he chasing something or being chased? So this goes back to my previous point; a movie is more than a collection of moving images – it’s a story that is experienced as a whole.

I really hope that Dr. David Hubbard is related to L. Ron.

The Truth will set you free and piss you off

“The truth will set you free. Not: the truth will make you happy. Not: the truth will please you. Not: the truth will confirm your prejudices. The truth will liberate you; set you free; …the truth will set you free and piss you off; you will be freed and angered…for no other reason than that your notion of freedom is so tiny, so limited, so restricted and cramped. Do you think “freedom” is about making choices? Or about “choosing options”? Really?”

This quote from an unfinished homily by Fr. Philip Neri Powell was brought to my attention by the good folks over at The Guild Review.   I choose not to engage religious themes on this blog, however I was struck by the zeal and eloquence of Fr. Powell and I liked the above passage. I like that it blasts the idea of “choice” as being freedom.  I think that an excellent story reveals how our choices actually lead us to greater or lesser experience of freedom.

I’d like to juxtapose this with another quote that struck me as equally zealous and eloquent in Dave Egger’s new book You Shall Know Your Velocity.

“I wanted synthesis and the plain truth– without the formalities of debate.  There was nothing left to debate, no heated discussion that seemed to progress toward any healing solution. I wanted only truth, as simple as you could serve it, straight down the middle, not the product of dialectic but sui generis: Truth!  We all knew the truth but we insisted on distorting things to make it seem like we were all, with each other, in such profound disagreement about everything– that first and foremost there were two sides to everything, when of course there were not; there was one side only, one side always: Just as this earth is round, the truth is round, not two-sided but round and–”  – Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Your Velocity.

Perhaps this is why the Truth can piss you off – because it is so slippery, multivariate, three-dimensional and subjectively perceived.

In response to comments on recent posts about the shallowing of Hollywood stories, I would claim that it’s better to have a purely entertaining story than a story that tries to communicate “truth.”  I say this because preachy stories ring hollow, which is worse than shallow.  Having no doctrinal religious convictions myself, I can understand how some people are turned off by a story that ultimately communicates “truth” as religious doctrine.  Everybody experiences truth in different ways, with different vocabularies of experience and metaphor.  If your Catholic stories and vocabulary communicate truth very well for you, then that is very well and good.  If your Hindu vocabulary of myth and ceremony communicates truth very well for you, then good. However, to try to teach a new vocabulary of religion and a new belief about the world is too much to communicate in a movie.  For this reason, for a story to communicate to a wider audience, it must speak with the vocabulary of the audience’s common experience.  Universally human stories set within a realm of experience shared by most everyone in our culture have much more impact and truth-revealing power than the vocabulary of a specific religious tradition.

Some people bemoan the lack of “purpose” in Hollywood’s latest stories – and this is indeed a symptom of trying to appeal to the greatest common desire: to feel.  But for the majority of people who have not cultivated an intellectual discipline for investigating philosophical matters, feeling is the primary avenue to understanding what life is all about.   And maybe this is the most human avenue to Truth; Hinduism calls the path of loving devotion bhakti.  Catholic mystics have tried to communicate divine revelation through poetry and allegory.  An unmediated, immediate feeling about truth is perhaps better than trying to express inevitably half truths in black and white syllogisms.  By taking us into the life of a character, we can experience vicariously the confusion, the exhilaration, the catharsis.  Stories have the ability to shake our preconceptions of how the world works.  A good story operates on an intellectual level and an emotional level – it can change our worldview and adjusts how we feel about certain things.  If it is well told (good script and production quality) it enhances the effect,  hitting us with the Aristotelian rhetorical trifecta of logos, ethos and pathos.

There is such a fine line between making a truth-claim while keeping a sense of wonder.  A good story allows us to warm ourselves near the glow of something beautiful without trying to possess it, thus limiting it within our own capacity.  It’s not easy to courageously make a truth claim while still being in Keatsian “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable grasping after fact and reason.”

I’m not so quick to turn my nose up at pop culture.  Perhaps there are a lot of things going on beneath the surface of a pop song or a blockbuster movie – simply dive into the “why” of its popularity.  Things have widespread appeal because they hit at something universal (and yes, sex and violence are universal human experiences as well).   I don’t like to take sides against stories that hit at the sensitive nerve of society and stir controversy.  They are not necesarily more true or untrue.  I believe that they are valuable in that they spur dialogue and thought.  Even Dan Brown.  Any thoughts on Angels and Demons?