Data Drama

It’s bad enough that American movies today are just noisy, IMAX-sized comic books.  But now the last stand of creativity in that industry, screenwriting (ok, maybe I’m overstating just a little; I am going to be talking about American movies in this post) is in the crosshairs of “data dramatists,” aka, opinion researchers.

The growing phenomenon of market research-tested movie scripts made the front page of the New York Times yesterday, with a jump to the Business section because the entertainment industry is one of the few today that we still dominate worldwide.

Having cut their teeth on political candidates, branding and product positioning assignments, opinion gurus are now crashing their data sets to help producers and studios inoculate their movies from failure by testing unproduced screenplays. The ultimate task?  Create a “sure-thing” box office champ by fine tuning plot; expanding, trimming or eliminating characters; and identifying emotional cues for embellishment into magical little movie moments – the kind that makes billions of dollars in repeat business while becoming hardwired into your brain, taking residence in your personal dataset of experiences forever.

As you might imagine, this development is a tad controversial and arguably a direct assault on creativity in the name of boffo box office.  In the interest of full disclosure:  I love opinion research and I use it in my work nearly every day, but I also love the art of screenwriting and know talented writers who have made important careers at this craft despite the very long odds against success; therefore, my dilemma.

In Hollywood, of course, turnaround is fair play and always has been. I’m not sure that this development is ultimately more threatening than, say, the sophisticated audience research into creating marketing campaigns and final cuts of the movie -- that’s been around for decades courtesy of the studios’ MBA-degreed movie marketers. That said, this new trend doesn’t bode well for thoughtful American film-making – please Harvey Weinstein, just say no! Or even for non-Marvel Comics films starring the likes of Katherine Hegel and Josh Deschanel. 

To understand what’s at stake, consider if you will, how memorable, Oscar nominated movies of 2013 might have been “tweaked” by insights from a Hollywood data “consultant”:

• Argo closes with a Chuck Norris cameo as the hero of the “movie in the movie,” which actually gets made and becomes a sleeper hit in Tehran
• Javert gets ditched and Fantine becomes Jean Valjean’s pursuer through the years – a woman scorned, better singing voice, lots of sexual tension between the leads that moves Les Miserables along
• Silver Lining Playbook closes with the hero and heroine sweeping the finals of “Dancing with the Stars”
• Life of Pi adds a superhero element—say, Poseidon
• Zero Dark Thirty’s brainy CIA heroine falls for the one of the brawny Seal Team Six leaders, who in a casual rewrite of history, dies while storming Obama’s sanctuary, leaving our heroine friendless (because no one really likes her, she’s that intense) and alone with her grief. Hankie, anyone?

(Aside for moviegoers:  This last script change is especially believable because the guy who plays the brawny Seal Six Team leader really is…brawny.  His name is Joel Edgerton and he’s in the new “Gatsby” film as Daisy’s creep of a husband, Tom Buchanan and I'm worried that I'll like him more than Gatsby, which I don't think was Fitzgerald's intention.  By the way, I saw him on stage as Stanley Kowalski opposite Cate Blanchette’s Blanche DuBois at the Kennedy Center a few years ago.  Wow! You don’t need a pollster to tell you this guy’s got the goods!) 

But back to today's dilemma.  I’m afraid the Genie is out of the bottle; Data Drama is here for the long haul, a bit like the Zombie phenomenon —World War Z, anyone? 

While they crunch the numbers, I’ll crunch the popcorn and search for a good British film on NetFlix.