THE INSIDE STORY
[1] I live in the storytelling capital of the world. I tell
stories for a living. You’re probably familiar with many
of my films, from Rain Man and Batman to Midnight
Express to Gorillas in the Mist to this year’s The Kids
[5] Are All Right.
But in four decades in the movie business, I’ve
come to see that stories are not only for the big
screen, Shakespearean plays, and John Grisham
novels. I’ve come to see that they are far more than
[10] entertainment. They are the most effective form of
human communication, more powerful than any other
way of packaging information. And telling purposeful
stories is certainly the most efficient means of
persuasion in everyday life, the most effective
[15] way of translating ideas into action, whether you’re
green-lighting a $90 million film project, motivating
employees to meet an important deadline, or getting
your kids through a crisis.
PowerPoint presentations may be powered by
[20] state-of-the-art technology. But reams of data rarely
engage people to move them to action. Stories, on
the other hand, are state-of-the-heart technology—
they connect us to others. They provide emotional
transportation, moving people to take action on
[25] your cause because they can very quickly come
to psychologically identify with the characters in a
narrative or share an experience—courtesy of the
images evoked in the telling.
Equally important, they turn the audience/
[30] listeners into viral advocates of the proposition,
whether in life or in business, by paying the story—not
just the information—forward.
Stories, unlike straight-up information, can
change our lives because they directly involve us,
[35] bringing us into the inner world of the protagonist. As I
tell the students in one of my UCLA graduate courses,
Navigating a Narrative World, without stories not only
would we not likely have survived as a species, we
couldn’t understand ourselves. They provoke our
[40] memory and give us the framework for much of our
understanding. They also reflect the way the brain
works. While we think of stories as fluff, accessories
to information, something extraneous to real work,
they turn out to be the cornerstone of consciousness.
[45] Much of what I know about narrative and its
power I learned over the course of working in the
entertainment industry. In the early 1980s, I was
chairman of PolyGram Filmed Entertainment as well
as a producer at that studio. I was pitched a movie to
[50] finance and distribute based on a book then titled The
Execution of Charles Horman. It told the true story of
Ed Horman, Charles’s father, a politically conservative
American who goes to South America in search of his
missing journalist son. Ed joins with his daughter-
[55] inlaw Beth, who, like her husband, is politically polarized
from the father, in prying through bureaucracy and
dangerous government intrigue in search of their son
and husband. Gradually, the father comes to realize
his own government is concealing the truth.
[60] Although the project had enlisted a great
filmmaker—Oscar winner Costa Gavras (for the
thriller Z)—I didn’t find it compelling. A Latin American
revolution was a tough sell for a commercial American
film, along with the story of a father who had no
[65] relationship with his son and the fact that you already
knew the ending: the son is dead without the father
ever finding him. This story was dead on arrival as an
investment.
Out of courtesy, I met with the father, who knew
[70] I was not a fan. After a few polite introductions,
he nodded to some pictures of my then-teenage
daughters on my bookcase. “Do you really know your
children?” he asked. “Really know them?” He went on
to tell me a story—that the search for his son was
[75] more a search for who he was than where he was,
because he always suspected he was dead. But the
journey was a revelation, not least about the many
values father and son in fact shared. It was a love
story, not a death story.
[80] His telling engaged me in a unique personal
way, emotionally transporting me into the search for
his child, and it made me wonder whether I really
knew my daughters, their values and beliefs, their
hopes and dreams. If the writer could focus the film
[85] as a love story/thriller and an actor could engage
those emotions and pique those questions, and the
film could be executed to get critical acclaim, it really
might be worth backing.
By Peter Guber
Adapted from Psychology Today – March 15, 2011 http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201103/the-inside-story Retrieved on August 15, 2011.
In paragraph 7, the author gives several reasons for thinking that the film would not be successful. Mark the reason that the author does NOT mention.
