Like the monster that chewed through the swamps in The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the omnipotent, shiny and terrifying creature known as Big Data has now turned its hungry sights on America’s most beloved industry: the movies.
Or at least, that’s the way The New York Times reports it. And as we all know, once it’s been in the Times, it may as well go straight into the history books. Or . . . wait a minute! Could there be another ending, a different plot? Perhaps! Let’s foreshadow a different story arc . . . but first, let’s paint the villain!
In the Times story by Brooks Barnes, it’s Vinny Bruzzese, dubbed “the reigning mad scientist of Hollywood,” by one source (Wait – mad scientist – wasn’t that another movie?).
For the fee of $20,000, Mr. Bruzzese and his team at Worldwide Motion Picture Group will unleash the ones and zeros of Big Data to create 20-30 page reports detailing, in Barnes’s words, recommendations that “might range from minor tightening to substantial rewrites: more people would relate to this character if she had a sympathetic sidekick for instance.”
As a former statistics professor with ready access to the Internet and other mad math resources, Bruzzese and his team are able to determine what story lines work best, what story arcs are most beloved by audiences, etc., etc.
To the creatives who bring us the summer blockbusters, Academy Award winners (and the flops), this is the end of the world as we know it (Wait! Wasn’t that another film?).
As Barnes quotes Ol Parker, scriptwriter of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and other films, “This is my worst nightmare. It’s the enemy of creativity, nothing more than an attempt to mimic that which has worked before. It can only result in an increasingly bland homogenization, a pell-mell rush for the middle of the road.”
Whoa! Stop the film! I am no fan of the misapplication of Big Data when storytelling works better. And while I don’t believe Mr. Bruzzese is some sort of villain, I do believe that it’s a mistake to expect Big Data to replace storytelling. As I’ve written before, statistics and storytelling have strong scientific grounding – and they work when properly applied.
Yet there is something not right about the way the Hollywood creatives are reacting to this one (more than 330 comments on the Times piece as I write this). After all, isn’t Hollywood the industry that’s the king of milking the same old formula over and over again? Hello?
And while most of us snicker through the summer trailers of Part 4 of our least favorite film dud, there is a very good reason why we as humans keep telling the same stories over and over again. Why does Robin Hood work as a Robin Hood movie and also as Star Wars? Why did George Lucas spend time with story guru Joseph Campbell before developing the arc for his films? It’s because we are hard wired for story, and our collective unconscious, as the psychoanalyst Carl Jung dubbed it, seems to dig the same story lines.
Unfortunately, it seems our 21st century society lurches from one cure-all concept to another with increasing frequency. This year, it’s Big Data. No matter what your ill, someone will claim that Big Data can fix it. And there’s no shortage of seemingly reputable media outlets, including The New York Times, willing to chronicle this latest equivalent of a goofy diet fad.
This whole thing feels to me as if, in ten years, there will be some “Remember the ‘90s” style show on the E! cable network on which a half-dozen B list comedians will make snide jokes about how we all went crazy during this decade over Big Data.
To borrow a filmmaking phrase, let’s not lose sight of the big picture. Great films would never be great without great storytelling. Most of those great stories have been told, in one form or another, over and over again since before any of our ancestors had figured out written language.
I don’t need Big Data, an Internet data mine or a statistics professor to tell me that. I do, however, need skilled storytellers who can share the story lines I love over and over again, making them seem fresh and new every time. If there’s a happy ending in all this silliness, it’s that: Storytelling is an eternal truth of our human nature.
What do you think about Big Data and Story at the movies? Share your thoughts below.
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Paul Furiga is president and CEO of WordWrite Communications. You can find him on Twitter @paulfuriga.
